The Book Project: capsule reviews part XX

106. Emily of New Moon (LM Montgomery, 1923)
Genre: mawkish tales for children
Rating: 2.5

It exemplifies a certain nauseating children’s-book style—cloyingly quaint and dainty, simplistic and sentimental, laced with words like “must” and “mustn’t”, “little” and “big”, “lovely” and “quite”. It presents a world of cotton and sap, of neatly delineated emotions and quaint caricatures. Bad things happen in the story, but it coyly evades them, easily rectifies them, or smothers them in twee romanticism. And passages like this make me bilious:

“Thank you,” said Emily shyly, looking up at him with great grey eyes that looked blue under her long lashes. It was a very effective look which lost nothing of effectiveness from being wholly unconscious. Nobody had as yet told Emily how very winsome that shy, sudden, up-glance of hers was.
“Isn’t he a rip-snorter?” said the boy easily. He thrust his hands into his ragged pockets and stared at Emily so fixedly that she dropped her eyes in confusion—thereby doing further damage with those demure lids and silken fringes.

These two characters are children…Gah. Boo to quaintness. Boo to twee-toned visions of childhood. “Boo!” I says.

 

107. A High Wind in Jamaica (Richard Hughes, 1929)
Genre: attacks on twee-toned visions of childhood
Rating: 7.5

Like Lord of the Flies, the tale tells of a group of children removed from social structures and thence doing grave wrongs. In this case, they take up with a group of pirates; larks and murders ensue. But while Golding’s novel grimly explores the notion that there is no innocence, that there is an underlying savagery in humanity, in its religious and social foundations, a savagery that exists in all of us down to the level of the youngest children, Hughes’ instead dismisses the notion of innocence altogether. His children wildly misconstrue the meaning of events. They do wrong without knowing what they’re doing. With a lively style, the book mocks the myth of a childhood Eden: innocence isn’t morality, but amorality born of ignorance; one cannot be moral without eating of the apple.

Bonus points for the cover, taken from Henry Darger’s epic tale of heroic hermaphroditic children, The Story of the Vivian Girls, in What is known as the Realms of the Unreal, of the Glandeco-Angelinnian War Storm, Caused by the Child Slave Rebellion.

Quote:
In short, babies have minds which work in terms and categories of their own which cannot be translated into the terms and categories of the human mind.
It is true they look human–but not so human, to be quite fair, as many monkeys.