I once got into conversation with a man on the Mallaig to Fort William train, who seemed affable enough until he asked me if I ever dressed up as an animal.

No amount of polite lack of interest on my part could stem the flow of increasingly queasy questions — if I did dress up as an animal, what animal would I dress up as? On what occasions might I consider dressing up as an animal? How much would it take to get me to dress up as one?

Whenever I come across adults who enthuse about Enid Blyton I feel just as bewildered as I did that day. It's not Blyton's fault but the fact is that her books share an iconography with the more bracing kinds of erotica — leggy tomboys getting into scrapes, girls in school uniform left bound and gagged in underground chambers and so on. If you think I'm exaggerating the sexual element, look at this passage from Duncan McLaren's frisky sort-of biography of Blyton, Looking for Enid. He's describing his partner, Kate:

“Some mornings she wakes up with just her jim-jam bottoms on, wanting to be a dog. She moves about the double-bed on her hands and knees, shaking her platinum-blonde head, growling and wagging her tail, like Timmy or Buster. ‘Woof! Woof!' Translation: ‘I can't find my pyjama top.'”

Jim-jams?

Looking for Enid is a romp around various Blytonian sites. It's cheerful and inventive — packed with pastiche, imaginary encounters and literary criticism (an insightful chapter about Blyton's debt to George Macdonald's The Princess and Curdie). Imagine Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas with lashings of ginger beer instead of hallucinogenics.

The book aims at the nostalgia market opened up by The Dangerous Book for Boys. The cover offers “lapsed devotees” the chance to get back in touch with the jim-jam-clad child within themselves. But is there any reason for real children — as opposed to infantile adults — to read Blyton now?

As a child I disliked her stories because they made me feel that someone else was having all the fun. In Five Go Off in a Caravan, for instance, the children ask if they can go caravanning on their own and their parents say, yes, in fact it fits in rather nicely with our plans as we are going away on business for a couple of weeks.

Ha! It was all I could do to get permission to go to the corner shop. That children in other books had even greater adventures without making me want to kill them is perhaps something to do with the framing of the stories.

The Pevensies ended up kings and queens of Narnia — but they went through a wardrobe to get there. We had a wardrobe. We didn't have a gaily painted caravan and a spare pair of horses. Other writers explained the enviable freedom of their child protagonists as a stroke of luck or misfortune — their parents died or they caught measles and were sent to the enchanted house to recuperate. In Blytonland, mums and dads just say, “Oh all right then”. Maybe I was just a chippy kid. A hundred million sales says that not everyone felt like me and lots of girl readers must have been encouraged by Blyton's vigorous heroines.

It's certainly impossible not to be impressed by Blyton's output — some 600 titles — and her grip on narrative is amazing. There's a point when you are writing a story when it has really got hold of you, and everything you see and hear seems to belong in the story. It's an intense, almost trippy feeling that lasts a couple of days at the beginning and, if you're lucky, a couple more towards the end. Blyton seems to have had that feeling every waking minute. She talks about how her stories came when she “let her mind go”. At her best — in The Magic Faraway Tree, or Adventures of the Wishing Chair — her writing has the hectic, improvised quality of a child fantasising as she runs around the garden.

One reason that she wrote so much is that she just didn't bother with the things that make writing stories difficult — believablity, for instance, or emotional truth. Emotional truth didn't interest her life, let alone books. She was a career liar. Most writers develop a rich inner life as a way to cope with boring or difficult reality.

When Blyton's father left home, ber mother simply pretended that he hadn't. Blyton seems to have picked up the trick. Photographs of her with her second husband and her children suggest that he was their father, when he wasn't. In a forerunner of the Blue Peter “Socks” scandal, she carried on writing a column in her dog's name long after the animal was dead.

Does it matter? After all, what we really want from popular culture is more of the same. Wouldn't an emotionally truthful Enid Blyton novel be like a Kylie Minogue symphony — an unneccessary vanity project?

Maybe judging her against other books is harsh. If you go to enidblyton.com you are diverted to a website run by “an entertainment content provider”. That seems fair enough. Blyton set herself up as a brand when such things barely existed. Her signature is a logo. I was amazed to discover that some of her earliest books were entitled “Enid Blyton's Book of...” this or that. She was above the title from the first.

It is very telling that McLaren picks up a Toyland story at one point and finds himself familiar with it, even though he doesn't remember reading it. Blyton is “product” in the modern sense. Like Big Brother or Paris Hilton you don't have the option of not knowing about it. It's ambient — and that's why it works as such a good carrier of nostalgia.

If you're looking to reconnect with the big baby inside yourself, that's fine. But if you want something to share with your children, do what Blyton did — read The Princess and Curdie. Reading them Blyton is the equivalent of feeding them Spangles.

Looking for Enid: The Mysterious and Inventive Life of Enid Blyton by Duncan McLaren

Portobello, £15.99; 352pp

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