We writers are jealous creatures, and I would normally look with a jaundiced eye on any author who’s sold 600m books, even if they did have the decency to die a few decades ago. But in the case of Enid Blyton (1897-1968) I make an exception, and I was pleased to read that StudioCanal, makers of the Paddington films, will team up with Sam Mendes’s Neal Street Productions to make a live action feature of Blyton’s Faraway Tree stories. The Paddington films are enjoyed by children and adults. I assume this will be the true of this new project, and that Blyton will finally be brought in from the cold as far as tastemakers are concerned. (She’s never been in the cold with children, who have always loved her books.)
The Faraway Tree stories involve a sort of village in the top of a tree, visited by three children. Above this habitation, a series of dreamlike universes appear, and are tethered for a while, like fantastical airships, before another one takes their place. One of these is called The Land of Birthdays, which might almost be the title of a Jimi Hendrix track – and if Enid Blyton were known to have taken a lot of psychedelic drugs, her books might have been praised for their creativity rather than banned from many public libraries for being undemanding.
I also contend that if the Noddy books had been written by their first illustrator, Eelco Martinus ten Harmsen van der Beek, rather than Blyton, there might have been a Karl Ove Knausgaard effect – interesting name generates awesome mystique – because the ingredients are certainly there. The first in the series, Noddy Goes to Toyland, culminates in a trial to determine whether the central character is a toy or not, which is impressively weird; and the fantasy is supported, rather than undermined, by elegant, terse dialogue. Take Big Ears’ forensic interrogation of Noddy on the first page: “Why do you nod your head when you say no?”
For a writer so often dismissed as insipid, this note of asperity is present remarkably often, and while Blyton wrote a great many books – so many that she was wrongly charged with using ghost writers – she was not prolix within them. Take this, from The Enchanted Wood (first in the Faraway Tree series): “Soon they met a tall man singing loudly from a book. Joe stopped him, but he went on singing. It was annoying.”
I’ve long felt that Blyton was unfairly maligned. I remember, aged 10 or so (circa 1972), proposing to take half a dozen Famous Fives and a couple of Secret Sevens out of the local public library. “You’re one over your limit,” the librarian flatly remarked, so I began agonising about which title to relinquish. “Which do you think he should put back?” my mother asked the librarian. “I haven’t the faintest idea,” came the steely reply. On the way home, my mother explained that the librarian was annoyed because the Blytons took up so much of her shelf space.
But there was more to it than that. In the 60s and 70s Blyton was regarded as racist, sexist and snobbish. Whether the presence of the golliwogs in the original Noddy stories indicates a writer of greater than average prejudice for a woman of her place and time, I doubt. And the golliwogs have now gone, just as the “gypsies” in Five Go to Mystery Moor are now ‘“travellers”.
Yes, the youngest of the Famous Five, Anne, is regularly patronised by the boys as “a proper little housewife” and similar – especially by Julian, the oldest – but the characterisation is subtler than usually acknowledged. Julian is sometimes depicted as pompous, and he is annoyed, in Five Have Plenty of Fun, when his plan goes awry, and his brother, Dick, asks: “And now what do you propose to do, Ju?”
There’s another typically nuanced moment in Five on a Treasure Island. George/Georgina, who has gender issues (so Blyton was ahead of the curve here, at least), insists that she never cries because “I like to be like a boy” – to which Anne replies: “Boys do cry sometimes, you know.” And she is looking at Dick, “who had been a bit of a cry baby three or four years back”.
Anne is far braver than the average nine-year-old, and the adventures are compelling because the Five come up against genuinely sinister characters. Take Mr Barling in Five Go to Smuggler’s Top, who is so contemptuous of the law that he carries on a smuggling business in a place actually called Smuggler’s Top – where, by the way, “the twilight hung like a soft purple curtain …”.
The Five live outdoor lives, well described. Here is a valuable corrective to the screen-bound life of the modern child, and another reason to give Enid Blyton some of the respect accorded so freely to Roald Dahl or JK Rowling.
• Andrew Martin is an author. His latest novel is Soot
