William Mayne: greatest writer for children ever who also happens to be almost unknown somehow

(artist's name not correct there, but i can't find it on the web to check)

Over the Horizon
Parcel of Trees
Thirteen O'Clock
Choristers' Cake (1956)
The Blue Boat (1957)
Grass Rope (1957)
Plot Night (1963)
No More School (1965)
Pig in the Middle (1965)
Book of Heroes (1966)
Earthfasts (1966)
The Battlefield (1967)
Over the Hills and Far Away (1968)
The Hill Road (1969)
Ravensgill (1970)
Game of Dark (1971)
Royal Harry (1971)
The Incline (1972)
Skiffy (1972)
The Jersey Shore (1973)
A Year and a Day (1976)
It (1977)
Max's Dream (1977)
The Mouse and the Egg (1980)
Salt River Times (1980)
The Patchwork Cat (1981)
Winter Quarters (1982)
Drift (1985)
Come, Come to My Corner (1986)
Corbie (1986)
Tibber (1986)
Gideon Ahoy! (1987)
A House in Town (1987)
Kelpie (1987)
Lamb Shenkin (1987)
Mousewing (1987)
Antar and the Eagles (1989)
The Men of the House (1990)
Rings on Her Fingers (1991)
Low Tide (1992)
Hob and the Goblins (1993)
Cradlefasts (1995)
Cuddy (1996)
Hob and the Pedlar (1997)
Lady Muck (1997)
Midnight Fair (1997)
A Swarm in May (1997)
In Natalie's Garden (1998)
Captain Ming and the Mermaid (1999)
Imogen and the Ark (1999)
Candlefasts (2000)
The Worm in the Well (2002)
The Animal Garden (2003)

(list definitely incomplete: viz "Sand", mid-60s)

i got stuck in cuddy a year or so back, i'm going to try and restart it

Earthfasts is great; although when I first read it, about the age of 10, I didn't like it at all and couldn't really understand it.

A few years ago, there was a dire Children's BBC adapatation of it with awful rubber-suit special effects. Nothing near as good as the book.

I reread Earthfasts last year, caitlin, and some of it is quite hard to follow, I think: it's very compressed and allusive for a children's book.

(the tv version was indeed totally awful)

I know that list is incomplete because it misses out "Follow The Footprints", which I think was his first book, and which I allude to on the front page of my website ...

also: "The Member For The Marsh" (c. 1956)

I like this, from "Choristers' Cake":

----------------------

"I was looking for a guy, sir", said Sandy.

"For a man?" asked Mr Sutton, suspecting Sandy of talking American.

haha mr sutton is hilarious, he loses his temper like every other second

Can I ask a serious question, and maybe it's just me, or an extension of this collapsing of high-low thing, but what do you people see in children's books? The same things you see in normal books? Or an other? I'm k-curious - why do you read them, yous that do.

Yous could also, validly, ask why I don't read them.

(That isn't a challenge, btw, I'm just genuinely curious, worried that I might be missing 'something'.)

(Sorry, that all sounds really nobby: "why beatmix at all?" "why try get anything at all?")

children's books are what make most readers and many writers

See maybe that's it: I'm not much of a reader: I only started when I was 17 (?) and thus started reading 'my age' books: not children's: so I don't have this Great Schema of Reading inculcated in me: maybe I should read Spufford. ("I'm not much of a reader" = breadth-wise rather than depth-wise: I am a good re-reader.)

most of my song titles, possible album titles, concepts etc etc come from children's literature

the great thing about William Mayne is his *scope*: his work rides the arc of the last half-century in terms of social and cultural backdrop, but it always utterly transcends any possible descent into cliche.

the end of "The Thumbstick" (1959) is peerless:

---------------------

"What's a door here and there?" he said. "She can lock them all, if she likes. We're inside, and here we stay."

----------------------

You couldn't really write that now, and Mayne would never have pretended that you could when it became obvious that you couldn't.

I loved William Mayne. Every time I went on holiday I would always take The Hamish Hamilton Book Of Queens by Eleanor Farjeon and William Mayne out of the local library. I'd love to find a copy now, I think it contains some of the best slightly gothic and fantastical fairy tales I've ever read.

''See maybe that's it: I'm not much of a reader: I only started when I was 17 (?) and thus started reading 'my age' books''

same here. not much of a reader but science fiction got me into it at a late age.

I read kids books not because they "take me back", but because they're generally written with a specific no-tricks aesthetic that I find enjoyable, when done well. (Which is part of my disdain for Philip Pullman - stupid tricks that mislead kids and don't even work for adults).

My latest theory is that "normal" (grown-up) books = mostly lame attempts to recapture the interestingness of kids' books.

>My latest theory is that "normal" (grown-up) books = mostly lame attempts to recapture the interestingness of kids' books.

So what is the children's book equivalent of Crime and Punishment?

haha there's some great books written by pioneer kid-lit educationalists between the 1790s-1820s, to help make children behave: in one, the naughty younguns get taken to see a criminal on a gibbet!!

Finally! A chance to use my Foucault/Time-travel/Kid-lit joke!!!

Why children's books:

After graduating from college three years ago I was thoroughly sick of highbrow literature*. When done well it can be marvelous - there's any number of books and authors I still adore - but I didn't like the world it appeared to point towards; one that seemed increasingly insular, defensive, and too rigidly narrow and academic in its interests. Not to mention that when it's done badly it seems 10x worse than genre or juvenile lit. I'm not sure why this is (and obviously it's just my subjective impression), but there's something so desperate in its pretentions, in its authors' desires to be TAKEN SO SERIOUSLY - even the most playful adult serious-lit authors are more concerned with pointing out JUST HOW PLAYFUL THEY ARE rather than actually giving themselves up to fantasies and enthusiasms that might cause embarassment**. Which I guess is the standard I'm holding authors to here: if I wouldn't be embarassed to geek out over a book and rave about it (or against it) to literary-minded friends my age or older who would then give me strange sidelong glances, where's the fun in reading it? This is a highly idiosyncratic standard, obviously, but I just got. So. Tired. Of. Talking. About. David. Fucking. Foster. Sodding. Wallace. (And those like him). I had to find something else to spark my enthusiasm or admit to myself that I'd wasted four years of my life and a big chunk of money.

The first job I got as a post-grad was working with 10-12 year olds, teaching them extracurricular reading and writing activities, so obviously I immersed myself in the stuff for awhile (though never got to Mayne - I'll have to check him out now; I suspect he's more well-known in Britain?). And I did discover what Justyn and Mark mentioned: the joy in following a narrative, rather than feeling anxious about Narrative, or bearing witness to the author's anxiety. It was absurdly simple the way so many of the problems I'd felt so keenly in college slipped away and were replaced by other things, simple images and scenerios and tones which were unexpectedly bizarre and funny and frightening and sad. A lot of this was me, I think - I was looking to find those emotions, those simple discoveries in there, but I also think casting aside the sort of problems that a lot of grown-up authors are trying to deal with allowed me the space to find them. Which I guess is the kinda the point, and which contradicts Justyn a bit: a lot (not all) of "normal" books are reaching for a whole other sphere of discussion, where the social/aesthetic concerns of Don Delillo or whoever take on great importance. Children's lit is a way of sidestepping that, of looking for another, more hidden, more individual range of tropes with which to think and talk about things. (Though the "enthusiasm" part is spot on: I've always wondered why people are prepared to throw superlatives at books they read as children but then just leave them be, as if they couldn't or don't deserve to stand up to criticism.)

haha WATCH OUT or I'll threaten you with FOOTNOTES and then not deliver!

I've no idea what the * and ** were supposed to be.

also i decided i want to write a children's classic and be beloved for all time by ppl not old enough to think "wait a minute!" — this ploti is ripped off from ________________

I think that William Mayne is not widely known as a children's author because some of his books with child protagonists seem very adult. Not necessarily in terms of content but in style or in allusions or something. I loved the choir boy books even as a kid (and the illustrations are great too), but it took me a while to come round to the others (not that I have read them all) and some of them still seem too fey.

Cozen read CUDDY now: run don't walk (kids books = v.cheap)

It's old Mayne ideas visited — children finding things adults have overlooked with their adult minds (cf a swarm in may) + unsettling timeslip stuff (cf earthfasts) — but a near-perfect realisation: plus there's a very funny subplot with a teddybear constantly arguing with the bones of a nun which happen to be inside it

i know of NO adult writer who writes remotely like this — his major subject is the way children think and see and speak, so "writing for children" is a pretext, really, to get published at all: CUDDY is NOT EASY TO FOLLOW, and wd totally have defeated me aged 12-ish, i'm convinced

his secondary subject is "how bizarre and endlessly inventive and astonishing quotidian family life can be"
his third subject is childhood bereavement

I'm on it mark. (Thanks.)

(To buy list: A Kiss in the Dreamhouse + Cuddy)

That secondary subject is one I always love in books. I must try Mayne.

"midnight fair" is also fkn terrific (i am finishing it rather than updating blog/working on tolk piece/posting to kuhn thread)

(i read one out of the library when i wz about 14, set in australia: the only thing i can remember is that one of the kids makes a pie or something w.sausage meat he doesn't realise has gone bad and then ? except i forget what then...)

(it's borderline possible that this forgotten book was by paul berna, but either way, if any ilxor recognises the bad sausage meat passage and knows the title, i'd like to revisit that book)

while i was out book shopping on thrusday i thought i had forgotten something and that something was to look this up.

Just read Earthfasts - thanks Mark - yes he's excellent on the way children think and feel taken on their own terms not ours (the excellent scene where David is getting angry with Keith treating Nellie Jack as first experiment and then sentimental object is a sort-of allegory for that) and it is very tightly plotted and marvellously internally consistent too (except what is the invisible car-crushing blob thing?). Thumbs up!

Candlefasts is a bit of a disappointment.

oh god no:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk_news/story/0,3604,1177253,00.html

this makes me very sad and will doubtless make some of you even sadder.

In hope it's not true. And I hope this doesn't lead to men stopping writing children's books the way they've stopped applying to be primary school teachers. I tried a couple of Mayne books and couldn't get into them.

this certainly doesn't help my perception of males who seek to work in areas that bring them into contact with children. it's a prejudice i can neither strongly justify nor shake.

Crikey. I read through this thread from the top, was getting excited, as Mayne sounds like exactly the sort of writer I love, and then got down to the end. Yeesh. But, as the lady says, abuse of power comes as no surprise.

Ok, it comes as no surprise. But what proportion of men do abuse their power over children?

When little kids say hello to me in the street I don't answer, because I don't want them to get the notion that strange men are friendly. But I think it's a real horrible shame that it has got to this.

from today's Guardian (also on Radio 4 news last night, very very sad):

http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk_news/story/0,3604,1209495,00.html

/:

yeah i know

I'm still looking!

i so knew this was a mark s thread!

Very sad for the six girls, who are now women and who were betrayed and abused by him. It 's also tragic that someone with such talent should misuse his power in this way. Sadly, his attitudes do come through in his books. I wonder what his literary frineds make of it all really as it is also something of a betrayal of the writing profession.

"his attitudes do come through in his books"..?