I'm feeling a little
emotional, to be frank. I've spent the past eight years writing three books
about a group of talking animals (The
Last Wild trilogy), whom I've grown very fond of. Last week I sent the
final book off to
the printers. I won't be making the animals in it, or any others for that matter,
talk again for the foreseeable future.
And, pausing before I blunder off into a
whole new imaginative realm, I've been reflecting. Why do we do it? Why do
we take these dignified, self respecting other species we share the planet
with, and imbue them with often wildly mismatched human characteristics, psychology and dialogue? Why
are those characters so perennially popular with younger children? Equally, why are they such a literary turn off for some, and many older readers?
There are many answers to those
questions, and they've changed as continuously as human behaviour. One argument is that in making animals talk and walk
like us, we seek to play out the mysteries of our deeper and more
unknowable feelings. For children, growing slowly cognizant of more complex and
challenging human emotions on the adult horizon, animal characters in books can
be like a literary version of play therapy, safe proxies through which to
navigate those feelings. (Perhaps that equally repels older or adult readers who have no desire for proxies, hungry for the authenticity of real human interaction.)
But that’s the young reader. What’s the
appeal to the adult writer, seeking to put words in the mouths of mice? For me,
I keep coming back to the haunting story of another writer and his far better-known
talking animals.
In 1906, he was nine years old, known
to all as ‘Jack’, and living in East Belfast, enjoying a quintessential
turn of the century middle-class childhood.
 |
| The Lewis family, 1906 |
His father Richard was a successful solicitor, and his mother
Flora was the daughter of an Anglican priest. His elder brother Warren was away
at boarding school in England, but when he was home for the holidays, the boys
enjoyed long walks and cycle rides in the leafy suburbs. The spacious house
might sound boring for children - with
what Jack later described as its “long corridors, empty sunlit rooms, upstairs
indoor silences, attics explored in solitude” - but he and Warren happily
filled it with imaginary worlds and games of their own, inspired by their
father’s substantial library.
But 1906 was the year everything changed for Jack. Quite
suddenly, his beloved mother passed away at an early age, from cancer. The world he knew and loved, the idyll of his
early childhood - had been changed forever.
And Jack’s response was to lose himself in one of the fictional worlds
he and Warren - or Warnie - had created together. A world he called ‘Animal Land’ - full of
delightful characters such as this natty frog.
In 1907, he wrote to Warnie at his school in England,
describing in detail the story of one of Animal Land’s many kingdoms.
My dear Warnie
…I am thinking of
writeing a History of Mouse-land and I have even gon so far as to make up some
of it, this is what I have made up.
Mouse-land had a very long stone-age during which time no great
things tooke place it lasted from 55 BC to1212 and then king Bublich I began to
reign, he was not a good king but he fought against yellow land. Bub II his son
fought indai about the lantern act, died 1377 king Bunny came next.
Your loving
brother Jacks
Animal Land, which soon evolved into a universe known as
“Boxen”, was a complex imagined world created by the two brothers, which
blended animal fantasy with mediaeval romances popular at the time and
contemporary colonial politics.
Crucially, it was conceived as a complete world - with its own rules,
boundaries and belief systems. In one
story, Jack wrote :
"The ancheint [sic] Mice believed that at sun-set the sun
cut a hole in the earth for itself."
Much later in his life, Jack, in his better known identity as C.
S. Lewis - wrote in his partial autobiography, Surprised By Joy:
“With my mother’s death all settled
happiness, all that was tranquil and reliable, disappeared from my life. There
was to be much fun, many pleasures, many stabs of Joy, but no more of the old
security. It was sea and islands now; the great continent had sunk like
Atlantis.”
To a pair of young children dealing with their grief, and
shortly, further displacement as Jack was sent to join his brother away at
school in England - the history, lives and laws of some imaginary mice or frogs
offered the one thing their upturned lives suddenly lacked - security.
It's too simplistic for me to dismiss Narnia, as some do, as a mythical paradise completely driven by Christian allegory. Lewis himself always denied this, famously insisting
“I couldn’t write in that way at all. Everything began with images; a faun carrying an umbrella, a queen on a sledge, a magnificent lion.”
“I couldn’t write in that way at all. Everything began with images; a faun carrying an umbrella, a queen on a sledge, a magnificent lion.”
Whether he protests too much or not, the promise of innocence, happiness and peace in a fictional
land populated by talking animals would be one Lewis returned to again and
again in his Narnia books. Perhaps not just to proselytise. Perhaps also to
journey back in the imagination to the secure childhood happiness he could
never recover in reality.
I didn’t grow up in Belfast in 1906, and nor did I suffer the
tragedy ‘Jack’ did at a young age. I
like to think that I had a happy childhood. But I also believe that when you write
children’s books, especially those with created worlds, you inevitably write
out – directly or indirectly – layers of your own feelings as a child. When you
finish those books, and leave that world, in some small way, you finish a part
of your childhood too.
And perhaps that’s why I’m feeling emotional.
Piers Torday
@PiersTorday
www.pierstorday.co.uk
