Frank Cottrell Boyce

I have written before about Frank Cottrell Boyce, a fascinating author and all-round nice guy. (See here and here and here.)

One of his strengths is that he is difficult to pigeonhole: a homeschooling Catholic parent who used to write reviews for Living Marxism; a scriptwriter for Brookside and Coronation Street who has a D.Phil in 17th Century History; a co-creator of the Olympics opening ceremony who writes great children's books.

In this interview with The Guardian he makes all sorts of interesting points. I've picked out just a few:

In Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, the flying car with a mind of its own, he was presented with a readymade vehicle with which to attempt all these things. Compared with the highly personal ideas and experiences that lay behind previous books, the continuation of the Fleming brand looks baldly commercial. But there is charm and humour in Cottrell Boyce's two sequels (the original was published in three instalments: the plan is to copy this formula and call it a day). This is partly drawn from his pleasure in the fact that the original is that rare thing, an adventure story in which the parents are invited along.

"That would certainly never happen in Roald Dahl," he says. "The problem I had with Chitty is that people remember the movie, which is a Dahl movie [Dahl wrote the screenplay] … there's a supercar, a supervillain and lots of sexual perversity." The Fleming original, by contrast, is "very sweet".

and

Meanwhile Cottrell Boyce and his wife, now back in Liverpool, carried on having children. In all they have seven, aged between eight and 27, four boys and three girls. From his account it is a warm and close family, with the youngest children home-schooled mainly because their parents like having everyone together in the house, but also to shield them from the highly commercialised peer pressure Cottrell Boyce describes as "weaponised advertising". His view of celebrity culture magazines such as Closer borders on disgust.

and

"Being read to at school changed my life. I really became aware of that during the Olympics because we were all of us in that room drawing on stuff we'd read as children and none of it was stuff we were examined on, it wasn't anything measurable. It was stuff that people had shared with us that we went on to share. If you look at that ceremony and what was in it, it was a sense of wonderment in storytelling. We found we had this common heritage – Mary Poppins and so on."

and

Although he probably wouldn't say so, Cottrell Boyce is a writer with a clear moral purpose, who believes the whole point of books is to extend our imaginative reach, and give us pleasure in the process. Recently he has been reading stories by George Saunders, recommended by his adult sons, and the children's books of Rumer Godden with his youngest. 

and, finally, 

He says he is slow, prone to distractions, and when asked why he did something often names a person or a favour ("I'm very big on loyalty, very big on friendship maybe").

Good to Read

One website that's good to read is goodtoread.org, a parent's guide to children's books. Here is part of what the site's creator says about his approach:

Why another site about children's books? One answer to this is easy: you can't have too much of a good thing. Why have more than one sweet shop on the High Street? They all sell much the same things at much the same price, but perhaps you find the people in this one easier, or the display in that one more appealing. There are many websites that give information about children's books, and there are many people with different tastes in websites.

On another level, this website offers a slightly different approach from the majority: it doesn't assume that a well-structured book with a good spread of vocabulary and a certain depth of subject matter is unquestionably a book any child should read. At goodtoread.org we believe that children and young people can benefit from some guidance as to their reading. This may mean recommending a book especially or discouraging a certain book or author on account of the poverty of style or unsuitability of the subject matter. Especially when a series is popular or often recommended, it might mean going over the subjects presented in the book with your child to make sure the youngster has benefitted from it and not been harmed.

To read the whole page (and it's a page worth reading), click here.

All this sounds very good but the test is what happens in practice. A useful test case might be what goodtoread.org makes of Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy so here's the link.

That seems to me to be a very fair-minded, balanced and honest appraisal from a thoughtful Catholic so I'd heartily recommend the rest of the website.

The Curse of the Darkling Mill

First published in German as Krabat, then translated into English as The Satanic Mill, Otfried Preussler’s haunting children’s story was later republished in English with the rather bland title The Curse of the Darkling Mill.

Despite the success of the film of the novel, the book is still very difficult to obtain in English, which is a real shame because it is both “an eerie tale of sorcery and nightmares” (as the publishers describe it) and a deeply Catholic work.

The novel is given an explicit Christian context from the very first pages when Krabat and two friends, dressed as the Three Kings, are begging during the Christmas season.

However, it is Krabat’s pride, his rejection of the other magi, which, at least in part, brings about his downfall. By breaking the highly symbolic group of three beggar boys and striking off on his own, he places himself in the power of an evil miller and becomes one of his twelve dark apprentices. Quite what he has let himself in for only becomes apparent later in the novel when he discovers that the mill is grinding not wheat but human bones.

Krabat is an assertion of the importance of the Wendish culture and language in modern day Germany as well as a Christian fable, but it is also a meditation on Hitler’s rise to power and the horrors of the holocaust. Krabat becomes, if not one of Hitler’s willing executioners, then at least an accomplice as he is seduced by the mill’s material comforts into ignoring the evidence of evil around him.

After a while the evidence becomes too hard to ignore completely: each New Year one of the apprentices is murdered and replaced but by then Krabat is in too deeply to be able to escape. When his friend, Tonda, is murdered Krabat tries to say the Lord’s Prayer over his grave, “but somehow it had slipped his memory; he began it again and again, but he could never get to the end of it”.

Drawn deeper and deeper into the mill’s satanic rites, Krabat’s only link with the outside world comes each Easter when he hears the voice of a young girl singing as part of the village’s Easter procession. Ultimately, it is this young girl and the power of love which overcomes the darkness but to write more would be to spoil the plot even more than I have done already.

This is a book which packs a punch: Preussler, one of Germany’s best-loved children’s authors, writes about both the banality and the lure of evil. However, in a world where few topics now seem to be off-limits for children’s fiction, we should not be concerned about a book which deals with such topics from a Christian perspective and without preaching. The Curse of the Darkling Mill deserves to be more widely read.

Preparing for Advent: Frank McCourt

Another good book for younger students in the run up to Christmas is Angela and the Baby Jesus by the Pulitzer Prize-winning author, Frank McCourt. McCourt's relationship with the Church was sometimes turbulent (as this interview makes clear) but Angela and the Baby Jesus is a delightful, true story straight from his good Irish Catholic mother. You can read a full review from the New York Times here and you can hear McCourt talking about the inspiration for the book in the following recording, though the sound quality, I'm afraid, is not great.

Preparing for Advent: Michael Morpurgo and Quentin Blake

Michael Morpurgo and Quentin Blake are among Britain's most best-loved children's authors, so On Angel Wings, a retelling of the Christmas story by Morpurgo with illustrations by Blake, is a pretty surefire winner.

This short book tells the story of the shepherd boy who is left behind to watch over the sheep while the rest of the shepherds travel to Bethlehem to visit the infant Jesus. However, when Gabriel returns for him he becomes the first visitor at the stable and the first to give a gift. It's a charming and thought-provoking take on the original and one that I think I'll be reading to my Year 7s (11-year olds) in the last lesson before the Christmas holiday.

Blake's pictures, which will be familiar to anyone who has read Roald Dahl's books even if they haven't come across Blake's own wonderful books, complement the text as well as you would imagine and there's even a dramatised version coming up at the National Theatre on 21st December.

My only quibble, as with so many modern books that deal with angels, is that familiarity too easily replaces awe: "I'm sorry to drop in on you unexpectedly like this," are Gabriel's first words to the shepherds. But I'll try not to quibble too much. On Angel Wings is a welcome book for anyone looking for a good book for their children or their students for Christmas.

Manga Hero

OK, time for a change of tone: Catholic Manga! 

Manga Hero is producing a book about the pope for World Youth Day 2011. The company also has some other intriguing books available now and more in the pipeline.

Susanna Tamaro - Il Grande Albero

The award-winning, best-selling, Italian Catholic author, Susanna Tamaro, (whose official website, in Italian, can be found here) recently published what looks like a charming fable about a great tree, Il Grande Albero, in which Pope John Paul II has a cameo role.

To hear a news report about the book click here and to hear Susanna Tamaro discussing it in Italian (but with English subtitles) click here.

It's available as an App but it's not yet available in English translation. Any translators out there? Any English language publishers?

What if they find us?

This book was recommended by one of my Year 7 (11 year old) students and it's quite a find: a powerful story from a mainstream publisher which shows Catholics in a very good light.

What if They Find Us, first published as Guardian Angel House in Canada, is based upon the experiences of Kathy Clark's Hungarian Jewish mother and aunt who were saved from the Nazis by the Sisters of Charity in Budapest. The book is part of the 'My True Story' series but it is actually an imaginative reconstruction of the time in fictional form. The book is very well researched and could easily be taught alongside other war literature for children. For all those reading The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas, for example, it would be a great companion piece.

There is a great deal of suspense in this book: Kathy Clark has created real narrative drive, introducing new characters at suitable intervals and leaving us with some well-judged cliffhangers. We really want to know how the children's life in the convent will develop.

As you might expect, there are some terribly sad and moving moments too but it is the faith and heroism of the nuns and children that really shines through. It can be difficult to find good books for our Catholic children. Here's one I'd heartily recommend.

Kathy's website can be found here. As you can see, her British publishers spelt her surname wrongly on the cover of her book. You can order a study guide to What if They Find Us? here.