These days, Enid Blyton is either treated with fondness or wincing discomfort; you either feel sentimental and nostalgic about her bajillion books or you have stashed them all away, with their golliwogs, xenophobia and sexism. But for all of Blyton’s more troubling attitudes, the Five remain iconic, as symbols of an older Britain. They couldn’t be more British if they bled Marmite.
As a little sprout growing up in Australia, I loved that. More than the simple (but rollicking) plots, I enjoyed the workaday details of Blyton’s Britain: I thought the food, the landscape and the language were positively exotic. I dreamed of a day where, like Julian, Anne, Dick, George and Timmy the dog, I could eat potted meat and hard boiled eggs before harassing travelling folk and sleeping on a bed of bracken.
When it was announced that Quercus would be producing Famous Five parodies, the consensus was: hmm. Every few years, we go through periods of renewed love for Blyton, a phenomenon that has been labelled nostalgia lit. But in 2016, we are now living in a post-Ladybird-spoof world. And like most, if I never see another aren’t-men-hopeless How It Works: The Dad title plonked on bookshop tills at Christmas, I’ll be quite happy.
But now we have the Famous Five parodies coming and while the books aren’t out yet, we have been given the covers and plots. Truly, they are holding up a chilling mirror to our society and not Blyton’s, reinforcing everything awful about the present, rather than everything awful about the past. We’re courgetti-twirling wankers now, dallying with homeopathic healing. I have not had Blyton-inspired nightmares like this since first reading about Moonface.
The announced titles – Five Go Gluten Free, Five Go on a Strategy Away Day, Five Go Parenting and Five Do Dry January – are all slightly tragic reminders of everything great about the Five books. Five Go on a Strategy Away Day is a parable on all that is wrong and David Brentish in modern workplaces: pulling Julian, Anne, Dick, George and Timmy out of their exciting world and into a beige meeting room to eat dry sandwiches with Susan from HR feels rather mean.
Lashings of ginger beer have been swapped for lashings of pinot noir in Five Do Dry January, though if the Five have been boozing for the whole time they have been stuck in adolescent limbo – for 70-odd years – it is probably best they get off the hooch. And thankfully Mansplainer Julian appears to have stayed true to character in Five Go Parenting, wielding a breast pump because breastfeeding is probably another activity he thinks men can do better than girls.
But Famous Five Go Gluten Free is the bleakest reflection of today’s world out of all of them: Anne is the villain, that awful friend we all have that thinks vegetables can replace pasta and puts chia seeds on everything. This volume promises adventures like Julian using Doctor Google to self-diagnose pancreatic cancer and Dick wasting time with a homeopath. There is one gleam of hope: as we all suspected, seen shovelling cake into Timmy’s face, George is the true voice of reason among these toffy upstarts. George would bring the Jaffa Cakes and Irn-Bru to a party; Anne can go choke on a goji berry.
When these books were announced in May, they were sold as “gentle parody”. I’d rather brand them as a “reminder of my tendency towards nihilistic despair”. This exercise has reinforced everything that is great about the Blyton books: simple, airy adventure, products of their time that should be read – and preserved – as such. If I want to cheer up, I will crack open one of the original Five escapades, and imagine myself in Blyton’s glorious Britain: a fantasy world filled with boundless British pride and an irrational fear of foreigners – oh, wait.
