Much as I love the current boom in fantasy, I am worried that another important strand in children’s fiction is being overlooked: comedy. Francesca Simon, the best comic children’s writer writing for under-eights, has not received a single prize for her
Horrid Henry series, and Anthony Horowitz’s sublimely funny
Diamond Brothers series was also unrecognised until the
Alex Rider books made him famous.
Yet children respond, above all, to comedy, especially between the ages of six and eight, when the habit of reading is formed. One of the best writers for this age group is Eva Ibbotson, whose eccentric adventures delight countless younger readers. In the Beasts of Clawstone Castle, a brother and sister are sent to stay with elderly relations whose crumbling home and rare, mysterious snow-white cattle are menaced by poverty and a greedy neighbour. The children’s solution is to attract tourists by inviting a number of friendly ghosts to take up residence, including not only a Bloodstained Bride but also a pair of hairy dancing Feet, and a young man with a plague rat gnawing at his heart.
Furious, their evil neighbour kidnaps the cattle, and both ghosts and children need every ounce of courage to prevent a disgusting piece of animal experimentation. From Aunt Emily’s limp chiffon scarf looking “as if it needed feeding up” to the ghosts’ discovery that they actually enjoy their cursed condition, this is an irresistible adventure.
Pete Johnson’s Trust Me, I’m a Troublemaker is an excruciatingly funny comedy about how maturity may not be the best thing a schoolchild can have. Archie is the kind of nerd who reminds his teacher to set the class homework, and thinks his dad is his best mate. Miranda, the class troublemaker, decides to change him, and poor Archie needs her help because his dad has an appalling new girlfriend, plus daughter.
Joshua Doder’s debut, A Dog Called Grk, is just as touching, crazy and smart about the life of lonely latchkey kids. Tim finds the abandoned dog of the former ambassador to Stanislavia, and his innocent wish to reunite them has him breaking into and out of a dangerous East European prison. If your children are too young for Horowitz’s teenaged spy series, this is a good alternative. The best joke of all is that a child who has done nothing but play computer games knows how to fly a helicopter.
If you thought Artemis Fowl, teenaged criminal genius, would really allow himself to lose his memory of fairies, as at the end of The Eternity Code, think again — and it’s just as well since Opal, an evil pixie, is about to break loose from prison and wreak havoc on both mortal and fairy alike in The Opal Deception. Eoin Colfer’s turbocharged invisibility shields, computer links and traditional earth magic remain slick as a rainbow of oil, but Artemis’s anxious, amoral struggles to understand normal friendship are funnier: “I’ve had little experience in this area, so I may have to read up on it,” he tells a fairy policewoman after they have saved each other’s life.
There is more natural magic in The Witch’s Boy. Lump is abandoned in a forest, brought up by a witch, with a bear for a nanny and a genie as servant. His adoptive mother sacrifices her powers in order to help him when they are ejected into the real world, but Lump becomes selfish and cruel, encountering several familiar fairytale characters en route to manhood. The comedy glows like the jewels Lump finds underground: rich and deep, it breaks your heart then mends it. Michael Gruber has written a minor masterpiece, as captivating for adults as for children.
A boy goes out of the house wearing a personal stereo. He slams the door, and consequently, chaos ensues around his innocent figure as drains explode, dragons crash and buildings collapse. Told in dramatic, detailed pictures, Adam Stower’s Slam! is a gift to adults trying to explain cause and effect to under-fives. The best comedy, realistic or fantastical, is always a hair’s-breadth away from horror. These authors are no less skilful, serious or artful than their peers. They deserve no less praise or prizes.
Eva Ibbotson, The Beasts of Clawstone Castle (7+), Macmillan £12.99, offer £10.39, call 0870 1608080; Pete Johnson, Trust Me, I'm a Troublemaker (8+), Corgi £4.99, offer £3.99; Joshua Doder, A Dog Called Grk, Andersen £4.99, offer £3.99; Eoin Colfer, Artemis Fowl: The Opal Deception (8+), Puffin £12.99, offer £10.39; M. A. Gruber, The Witch’s Boy (11+), Simon & Schuster, £12.99, offer £10.39; Adam Stower, Slam! (3+), Templar £9.99; offer £ 8.49
Read on
- Tintin series by Hergé (Methuen, 5+)
- Which Witch? and Not Just a Witch by Eva Ibbotson (Macmillan, 7+)
- Grimbold’s Other World by Nicholas Stuart Grey (Faber, out of print, 8+)
- Five Children & It by E. Nesbit (Puffin, 9+)
Eva Ibbotson: ‘a master baker of words’
At 80, Eva Ibbotson has become a late- blooming star of children’s fiction, one of an elite that includes Philip Pullman and J. K. Rowling. While her magical comedies such as The Secret of Platform 13 prefigured the best elements of the Harry Potter series, it is historical fiction such as Journey to the River Sea that moved her from cult to classic status.
It is a triumph for a Jewish refugee from Nazi Austria who did not speak a word of English until she was eight. The daughter of a brilliant Jewish doctor who pioneered fertility treatment in the 1930s, and a gifted novelist mother, Anna Gmeyner, who divorced when she was three, Ibbotson grew up in sophisticated prewar Vienna, but had to flee to England in 1933.
Ibbotson’s best jokes are about people who, like Hitler, concern themselves with eugenics and “the Blood”. The ghostly parents in Dial a Ghost “weren’t just violent and cruel and fiendish; they were snobbish as well”. Her obsessive baddies, human or magical, are all monstrous towards children and animals.
The refugee Eva was sent to Dartington, then a progressive boarding school “full of Freuds and Huxleys”, and discovered a passion for Frances Hodgson Burnett, with whom her work is now compared. She read physiology at Cambridge, but never considered herself a writer until, happily married to an academic and living in Newcastle with four children, she began to write short stories for The Lady. This developed into a career as a romantic novelist for which she won the Romantic Novelists’ Award in 1983. Yet it is as the author of ten children’s novels, begun in her forties, that she has sold more than a million books, and won even more prizes.
“I’m surprised by the praise and prestige my children’s books have had, because some of the writing I’m proudest of was in my romantic novels,” she says in a precise, thoughtful voice. A stylish grandmother who champions the happiness of marriage and domesticity, she regards herself as “an entertainer, a master baker of words”. Yet Ibbotson’s Viennese love of classical music always seeps in somewhere, as does her intellectual zest and deep feeling for the natural world — something that her naturalist husband Alan helped her to see. The Beasts of Clawstone Castle is full of passionate alarm about the damage man is doing to the environment, and to animals, especially since the advent of genetic engineering.
Oddly, she has “never liked magic. I regard it as an extension of extreme eccentricity, of being an outsider, an endangered species”. Her mysterious white cows are based on a famous herd of rare cattle at Chillingham Castle, in Northumberland, but her witches and ghosts are modelled on her relatives — “who did cut the sides out of slippers to let their bunions out, and were always stirring things”.
It is this streak of lunacy, perhaps, that gives Ibbotson’s novels their comical charm. She has invented any number of fantastic creatures, from dragworms to mistmakers, and is one of those rare writers who both captures the quest for happiness and shows how to recognise it when you find it in an unexpected form.
AC
