School
Gate: Why picture books matter
Authors of children’s books can usually be relied on to promote their work
with enthusiasm, but Anthony Browne is more game — some might say reckless —
than most when it comes to getting his message across to young readers. His
best known book is a modern classic, Gorilla, and primates crop up
often in his work.
Years ago, not long after two keepers had been killed by a tigress owned by
the late John Aspinall at Howlett’s Wild Animal Park, a TV producer thought
that it would be a good idea for Browne to talk about his books while
sitting inside a gorilla enclosure. As he entered the cage Aspinall threw in
some rose petals, which gorillas apparently regard as a treat. This seemed
to excite them and one sank its teeth into Browne’s leg. “It was the most
horrendous pain I have ever felt in my life.” The beast was kicked away and
the cameras rolled. “I had jeans on and they were fairly tight and holding
my muscle in place. I didn’t know what to do. I was terrified of the
gorillas and I was terrified of saying to the people ‘I’ve got to get out of
here’. I kept going for 20 minutes and eventually the bottom of my jeans had
gone black from the blood and they took me to hospital.”
Browne is going to be even busier talking about his work over the next years,
but one hopes that he will take fewer risks. As the new Children’s Laureate
he will champion children’s literature in general and picture books in
particular. He believes passionately that picture books are often dismissed
in the scramble to push children ahead with their reading.
He is the winner of numerous international awards, including the Hans
Christian Andersen Medal in 2000, the first time in almost half a century
that a British author had won the highest international honour in children’s
literature. When he was approached about becoming the laureate he was
worried that it might be “a bit of a double-edged sword, to spend two years
talking rather than making picture books. But ultimately it seemed like an
offer that I couldn’t turn down; the opportunity of promoting picture books
appealed to me because I do feel that they are being marginalised and
forgotten about and children are encouraged more and more to read proper
books.
“Although I think the Harry Potter phenomenon has been fantastic, I think that
maybe children are being encouraged to read chapter books, as they sometimes
call them, earlier and earlier.” He believes that children, whatever their
ages, should be encouraged to read both chapter books and picture books, “as
we can all do”. Illustrated books, he says, encourage readers to look at
pictures carefully, a skill that they can apply to observing the world.
He is amazed by the confidence that young children display when they draw.
“They still know how to look and use their eyes. Even in front of other kids
they all want to come up and draw. Adults say to me ‘I can’t draw’. And I
say: ‘You could when you were 5.’ Children lose confidence in their own
drawing in parallel with leaving picture books behind. It is as though
becoming educated or becoming mature is about leaving pictures behind and
moving into words. Both are equally important.”
The work of this softly spoken and easy-going 62-year-old Yorkshireman shows
that picture books cannot be regarded as the sole preserve of young
children. Browne’s books are rarely straightforward or obvious. They are
often unsettling and contain dark moments and surreal images. But they are
also funny and uplifting. There are usually layers of meaning and the
pictures are packed with visual gags and ambiguities that ensure they appeal
not just to children but to the adults who must read them again and again to
their offspring. The first time I read Into The Forest, Browne’s
fabulous take on Red Riding Hood, to my children the tension was electric as
we turned each page. We have read it again and again, finding new things
each time. My daughter, 3, spotted before I did the three bears ghosting
through the forest. Nearby a faceless figure sits in a sinister cage. Or is
it just a misshapen tree in the middle of a copse?
The books are stunning. Browne’s work, with its emphasis on beautifully
detailed paintings in which he strives to capture every hair on a gorilla’s
head, is distinctive. So much so that if I say “let’s have an Anthony
Browne”, my daughter knows exactly which books I mean and goes to the shelf
and chooses one. Browne says that when he was a child “I wasn’t any better
at drawing than any other child, but I didn’t stop drawing”. His father, who
liked to draw and who has been a huge influence, encouraged him.
Browne’s father ran a rough pub in Wyke, Yorkshire. The boy and his older
brother had a bedroom overlooking a field where the drinkers went to fight
after his father had ejected them. “He was the gorilla. A big man. He was in
the Army during the war and had to do the most appalling things; going out
on patrols and killing people in hand to hand fighting, which I can’t
imagine him doing. He was such a gentle man but had been a professional
boxer. I often say gorillas are like that: big and look very fierce and very
strong but actually are quite gentle and sensitive.
“Gorillas are just fascinating to draw in the way that old people’s faces are
more interesting to draw than young people’s faces. And gorillas are so much
like us. Looking into a gorilla’s eyes is like looking into a human being’s
eyes. You sense the intelligence and emotions there. Feel so familiar. It is
the ultimate father figure.”
In Gorilla, Hannah’s father is remote and never has any time for her.
In one stark image she sits in the corner like an advert for the NSPCC. Then
a gorilla toy comes alive and takes her off to explore the city. “The
gorilla isn’t really a gorilla, it’s the father that the girl would love to
have if her father was less repressed, less obsessed with his work.”
Browne has been criticised for giving fathers a hard time. Piggybook
features a male chauvinist father who turns into a pig. Some libraries
decided to keep it under the counter because parents were offended. In Zoo
and The Shape Game, the father is boorish and makes feeble jokes. “I
didn’t see him as the monster that a lot of people saw,” he says, laughing.
“It’s true, I did give dads a hard time, didn’t I?” He suggests that this is
not unconnected with watching his father die from a heart attack when he was
17. Many years later, after the negative images of dads he created, he found
his father’s old dressing gown and used it in My Dad, a hymn to
fathers as superheroes. “Finding it kind of freed me up to do a positive
book about a father because up untll then people used to say ‘Why do you
give fathers such a hard time?’ I started to think, maybe it’s something to
do with part of me hasn’t forgiven my dad for leaving.”
He has a son and a daughter, now in their 20s, by his wife, Jane, a violinist
from whom he is now amicably separated. When his son Joseph, who is a
saxophonist and works in children’s bookshops, was about ten, he worked with
his father on Zoo, because Browne wanted to tell the tale from a
boy’s point of view. “It was he who created the ratty father who makes jokes
all the time, so read into that whatever you will.”
To be fair, some of his female characters are not terribly prepossessing,
either. The stepmother in Hansel and Gretel is the worst, a
dark-haired Myra Hindley. “I don’t think it’s a bad thing for parents to
share books with their children where the parents are not necessarily
behaving at their best. But a child reading Gorilla realises that the
father in that book isn’t their own father. Children know just as well as we
do these are characters in a story. And maybe, I like to think, they feel
sympathy for children who do have difficult lives.”
While some of the images, such as the evil stepmother at a window and children
in cages, seem frightening, they haven’t caused any nightmares for my
daughter and five-year-old son. My daughter asks for Hansel and Gretel
often. “Sometimes adults get more worried about the scariness of
books, the darkness of books, than children do,” says Browne.
All the books have optimistic endings. “I’d hate to create books that left
children feeling depressed,” says Browne. His next book is a reworking of
Goldilocks and The Three Bears set amid modern urban deprivation.
“Originally the girl went out into the dark, cold, miserable streets and
went off on to the gloom and then I thought ‘Why would any child want to
read that book again?’ So there’s a suggestion of hope in that book too.”
Although the books have plenty to occupy adults, he doesn’t create books with
them in mind. “It’s not something that I’m conscious of, but I suppose I’m
pleasing myself. I’m trying to put as much in to the book as possible, so
that it can be read again and again, and you see things or understand things
each time you read it. If you make a book boring for the parent and he or
she has to read it over and over again, the parent is going to communicate
that boredom.”
If his father was a gorilla, Browne the boy was Willy, the chimp who stars in
several books exploring the subjects that worry young children, such as
friends and bullies. Buster Nose, the bruiser who intimidates Willy until
Willy accidentally roughs him up in Willy the Champ [my son’s
favourite], is based on the thugs in his dad’s boozer. “I come from a line
of worriers. My mother was the biggest worrier I have ever known.”
Browne was quite small but good at sports, so he wasn’t bullied at school. He
trained as a graphic artist at art school in Leeds while really wanting to
be a fine artist. He worked as a medical illustrator, which he loved. “I was
17. My dad had died. I was a bit obsessed with death. I was interested in
the body as just a body — looking at Francis Bacon and all that dark stuff.
For two years it was incredibly stimulating and I felt useful and thought I
was good at this for the first time.” He mastered the precise brush work
evident in his painting today and also began to develop a love of visual
tricks. “A little shape painted into the fat would remind me of a figure so
I would make it look more like a figure climbing out of the operation. As
far as I know no one noticed.”
He loves surrealism. A human being grows a tail or the legs of an alligator. A
boy, worrying about his father’s comment that things are going to change at
home, sees the kettle turning into a cat while his bicycle transforms into
an apple. He was sued by the Magritte estate after including what he
regarded as an homage to the Belgian surrealist in one of his books.
Browne lives in a pretty cottage close to the centre of Canterbury. Many
originals of his gorillas line the walls and he works in a compact but light
studio off his kitchen at the back of the house, overlooking a small garden
busy with feeding birds. Dressed in white jeans and a black T-shirt, Browne
is a small, tidy man, with a thick shock of hair only slightly streaked with
grey. Perhaps all the time he spends thinking about and talking to children
keeps him youthful, for he looks ten years younger than his age.
He works office hours, with a photograph of a child staring through glass at a
gorilla and a Willy the Chimp doll made by a Colombian peasant woman next to
his drawing board. He produces a book a year. Once he has worked out the
storyboard, the painting with water colours and some gouache takes six to
nine months. “I’m lucky because I’m getting paid to do what I used to love
to do as a child, which is make up stories.”
The Children’s Laureate is not obliged to produce any work for the £15,000 a
year he is paid. The role is more ambassadorial, participating in events to
promote children’s literature. Browne says he is not an education expert so
will not comment as widely as his predecessor, the poet Michael Rosen. And
while the exposure is sure to sell more of his books, it is understandable,
given the modest fee, that he wants to continue producing books during his
time in the job.
His mission is to persuade people to take time to stop and look at picture
books. The best of these, he says, have “a gap between pictures and words.
That’s the exciting bit — where the gap is filled by the imagination of the
reader.”
