Plain Talk

By Mursi Saad El-Din

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Britain is celebrating the centennial of the birth of the children's writer Enid Blyton. Forty other nations, into whose languages Blyton's books were translated, are joining in the celebrations. It is estimated that 8 million of Blyton's books are sold every year worldwide. She's as widely read in India as in china.

I personally watched two generations of children grow up with her books. My own son, who was born in London in 1946, began his life listening to Noddy read by his mother, then later on he consumed The Famous Five saga. At that time Enid Blyton was the top children writer and I shall always remember children queuing up at Hamley's toy shop to have their copies signed by her. I must admit that I was one of the queuers, with my son of course. The second generation was that of my granddaughter, who is now 25. She too was brought up on Enid Blyton's books. With the current celebrations, many questions are asked about the reason behind the success and survival of her books.

Enid Blyton has been subjected to severe and, at times, vicious attacks. Some public libraries have even taken her books off their shelves. One critic of children's books described them as "terrible and a waste of time and good paper". Her language was described as impoverished and her plots as repetitive. And yet she still outsells 5,000 or so children's books published in Britain every year.

Her supporters believe, and I must agree with them, that she is a wonderful storyteller. You can recount to a child the silliest story which he will listen to eagerly if you tell it nicely. Children do not question the language of their writers or the literary value of what they are reading. They want an interesting story, and this Enid Blyton supplies. She might be flawed in the literary sense, but she knew how to entertain children. The trouble with many children's writers is that, for them, entertainment takes second place. They believe that children's books should have a message. For children such books are boring. According to Rumer Godden, the author of some prize- winning children's classics, children "want a story that lifts them out of everyday life. They do not care if the prose is sometimes shoddy. They keep on turning pages."

Enid Blyton's world was free of "parental constraints and the challenge of paedophiles, poverty and pedestrian crossings; many of the young pretenders to her crown embrace the sort of gritty social realism displayed in the recent winner of the Carnegie Medal for children's literature, Junk, a tale of sex and drugs for teenagers," writes Peter Standford in the Sunday Times Culture supplement.

Different opinions are expressed of Blyton's popularity. Kim Reynolds, director of the National Centre for Research in Children's Literature, believes that the prevalence of message- carrying children's books is one reason for this popularity. "Blyton had the advantage of writing in what were liberated times," he writes. "There were no pressures on her to stress safety hazards as her heroes wander to the Downs... Blyton offered a world of freedom that most children can only dream of. That was an enormous appeal, especially when she makes hard things seem easy."

Comparing Blyton to writers of the 1960s and 1970s, Reynolds goes on to sat that many of the most acclaimed writers of that period "have never become household names. They have failed to equal the impact of Blyton." They moved away from Blyton's moralising tones "where the naughty people deserved their punishment while the good received their reward". Those writers avoided condemnation and tried to explain why a child might misbehave. Yet children do not want moral ambiguities or complex messages: they prefer black and white truths. It is here that Enid Blyton "seems more with her readers than her grownup critics".