The Longest Night of Charlie Noon by Christopher Edge

Cover: Matt Saunders/Joel Holland

‘What might have been and what has been

Point to one end, which is always present.’

T.S.Eliot, Four Quartets 

Albie Bright, Jamie Drake, Maisie Day, and now Charlie Noon

When modern physics reaches for its boundaries, for the unimaginable vastness of astrophysics, and the equally unimaginable minuteness of quantum physics, it seems to encircle a globe of understanding from the two different directions and meet in much the same place. Of course, this place is not unimaginable at all, or else human understanding would never have reached it. Imagination is how it is reached, and the edge of comprehension is where it lies. It is indubitably a place of some of the most complex and challenging thinking in all science. 

Yet, it is this very realm of ideas that Christopher Edge has sought to bring to children - and has done so quite superbly in his set (*1) of recent books. He has done it so well, and so importantly, because he has done it through the medium that children can often understand best, the medium of story. He knows that story can bring subliminal, intuitive assimilation, even where explicit intellectual understanding is beyond reach. He has made himself the thrilling master of such books. And now he has added another mind-bogglingly brilliant novel to this set. 

A Night in the Woods

This time his subject matter is the concept of time itself. Consequently, if this novel feels a little distinct in quality from the earlier three, it is because it is as much about metaphysics as it is about physics. It is as much about the thinking of T.S. Eliot as that of Albert Einstein, as much about the fiction of Penelope Lively or Alan Garner as about the science of Steven Hawking or Carlo Rovelli. Rather, perhaps, it is about the meeting of minds of all of these and more (*2).What Christopher Edge has so skilfully created is science and philosophy, poetry and mysticism - for young minds. It is quite an achievement. I can only say little of the much he has created. You must read it for yourself, and, more importantly, so must our children. 

A great deal happens to Charlie Noon during this longest night, and the story has many layers, many levels. It takes place in the Wild Wood. It is the Wild Wood of Kenneth Graham (*3), the wood of imagination, of story. It is also the Wildwood of Roger Deakin (*4), the ancient woodland of Nature. Perhaps these two woods are ultimately much the same, the wood in which we must lose ourselves in order to find ourselves. They exist in time, and out of time, in past and future, eternally present. 

Time present

Christopher Edge, has consistently made more literary sense than most of narrating in the first person present tense. Here, it is particularly germane in a story about time that is always present. Think of the author , in his crafting of this book, as much akin to a stage magician. He is tricking you with clever sleight of hand. (Perhaps here we should call it ‘sleight of pen’.) As with the magician, it does not matter that you know that he is tricking you, he will fool you anyway. He is immensely clever at misdirection. Once you see what he has done, you will kick yourself for not getting it earlier. You will realise that the clues were there all along - small, subtle, but there. You should have known, but you didn’t. That is how clever he is.  But his meaning is in his trick.  It was never what you thought. You could never see from where you were standing. He had to fool you to get you to see. You had to lose yourself in the Wild Wood in order to find the answer. The way forwards was the way back. Much of the clue to the story is in code, and that is important too. Once again, when you have cracked the code, you will think you knew how to read it all along. But of course you didn’t. And I am certainly not going to tell you now. It must remain an enigma. I will not give away the conjuror’s secrets. Where would the magic be then?

Dawn chorus

However, if you think all of this exploration of abstruse ideas sounds dry and intellectual, then you couldn’t be more wrong. Christopher Edge’s great talent is to be able to explore his challenging themes through dramatic and very human narrative. This story of three children lost overnight in a wood is compelling; by turns, funny, frightening, affecting and shocking. His characters are as vivid and real as their experiences are fantastic and bewildering. Again, sorry, no secrets.  All I will say is that it ends well, or, at least, has the potential to do so. Dawn follows the long night, and the new day is wonderfully in tune with the natural world, quite literally. 

‘Another bird starts to sing and another and another and another. Whistles and warbles, chirrups and tweets; flurries of notes falling like rain inside my brain. The sound seems to be coming from all around, every bird singing at once, their melodies twisting and twining until my mind is filled with an ocean of song.’  (p 174-5)

The final message of this story is one of the most crucial for our children. And that makes this a very important book, as well as an entertaining, puzzling, thrilling and challenging one. It is a book for those who want children to think big thoughts, and live big lives. It says to us all, those who are children, or have been, or will be:

‘You can’t stop what’s coming, but you can help to shape it into something better. . . . The actions you take will change the world.’  (p 170/171)

*Notes:

(1) The Many Worlds of Albie Bright, The Jamie Drake Equation and The Infinite Lives of Maisie Day. These books are stand-alone stories, not a sequence, but are linked by their ability to explore  difficult scientific concepts through engaging narrative. 

(2) Christopher Edge helpfully lists many of his sources/inspirations under his ‘Acknowledgments’ at the back of the book.

(3) The Wind in the Willows, 1908

(4) Wildwood, A Journey Through Trees, 2007

In the Shadow of Heroes by Nicholas Bowling

Illustration: Erica Williams

‘Even the heroes wept. They loved, and they lost. Indeed, it was their loving and their losing that made their stories worth the telling.’ (p 371)

Bewitching precedent

Although his first, hugely enjoyable, novel Witchborn had a strong and, in many aspects, authentic historical setting in Elizabethan England, it was essentially an entertaining YA fantasy adventure, often witty, but  with witchcraft bringing in elements of dark magic too.

His second novel for young readers, In the Shadow of Heroes, initially seems even closer to being a historical novel as such. Whilst clearly a fictional story, it is grounded firmly in the locations, events, beliefs and culture of a particular place and time. In fact Nicholas Bowling, a specialist in Greek and Latin himself, seems very much at home in the Roman world that is so integral to his narrative. His depiction comes across as authentic in detail as well as in broad background. He recreates the ethos of the ancient world quite wonderfully, and its atmosphere, by turns chilling and intoxicating,  is endlessly fascinating. In many ways this is very scholarly writing  (even Homer’s ‘wine-dark sea’ gets a notable revival), but the author wears his erudition lightly. His conjuring of a long-past world is highly evocative without ever being didactic, educational in the very best sense, and hugely entertaining with it. This is helped in no small part by language that is richly descriptive, but never heavily cloying. 

History red in tooth and claw

At the heart of this story, as with so many of the best, are its characters - and quite wonderfully rich, vivid creations they are. Intelligent young slave, Cadmus, makes a fine protagonist. Supposedly found abandoned by a benevolent master, he has been educated far beyond his status and makes a sensitive and observant guide to his world, yet with enough flaws and foibles to make him readily empathetic. It is however, Tog, his frequent companion in adventure, who, for me, is the book’s most compelling creation. A runaway slave, her taciturn personality resides within a physical frame of mind-boggling stature and strength, that renders her eventual revelation as the offspring of a Celtic British warrior chief completely credible. In, quite rightly, ensuring that his tale features a strong female protagonist, to equal (or excel) his male ‘hero’, Nicholas Bowling has moved about as far away from the simpering princess as it is possible to get. And good on him. 

Subsidiary characters are wonderfully drawn too, peopling Ancient Rome with the rich mix of the ordinary and the grotesque, the humble and the arrogant, the sympathetic and the downright chilling. They both bring his story to life and give it compelling power. They even include a megalomaniac and delusional Nero, whose portrait here, popular history tells us, may not be too far from the truth. The cruelty and violence of his time live and lurk behind the whole novel, but so too, in the telling of it, do the sensibilities of our own age

The story is not, in fact, confined to Ancient Rome itself, but ranges widely across the ancient map, embracing Athens  and indeed the shores of a Roman Britain as well. Yet the real strength and greatest interest of the book lies in the way that it draws not only upon the actuality of this ancient world, but on its storytelling too. 

 Myth lives on

Deep into the fabric of this narrative are woven the myths of the ancient world, principally those recorded by Apollonius of Rhodes in the Argonautica, tales of Jason and his companions who sailed on the Argo in quest of the Golden Fleece. Particularly pertinent is the character of Medea, Jason’s later abandoned helpmate and wife. 

What makes the book most particularly remarkable, though, is the way that remnants of this myth gradually impinge on ‘reality’, intrude into history and the lives of  Nicholas Bowling’s characters. The self-claimed descendants of the heroes, the Heroidai, make an appearance as, indeed does the Argo itself. Wreck of an ancient relic that  it has become, it is patched back into service, almost taking on a life of its own. 

‘The heroidai were concealed completely in (the Argo’s) shadow, giving the impression that it was being drawn to the sea of its own accord. On either side, trailing back up to the forest, it left a bow-wave of swirling yellow dust.’  (p 249)

This is an Act of Medea played out long after Euripides’ version has ended. I suppose it could be thought of as a history mystery. Not so much  ‘mystery’ in the later  Blytonesque sense of  The Mystery of the Disappearing Cat, but in the far older sense of the York or Wakefield Mysteries, masked actors, perhaps, reinvigorating the myths of belief amidst the daily lives of their times. This adds another rich dimension to the story and gives the title an extra frisson of meaning. It is delicious, original  stuff, and very clever writing to boot; the perfect spell for conjuring an imaginative past from the dust of history. It builds a world whose own stories and beliefs mingle with reality in its fictional present, just as they must have in its actual past. It credits young readers with the  ability to understand the distinction, and the lack of distinction, between them - and rightly so. 

A future for the past

As well as everything else, this is a cracking story that surprises at times, shocks at others, and keeps the reader guessing to the end. The final door to Cadmus’ future is left open. So are we simply to imagine for him a life of further adventures, or is this author going to provide us with them? If a further instalment is to be of the quality of this first, then I sincerely hope it is the latter.

This highly entertaining ancient history adventure has protagonists of around fourteen, and therefore seems aimed at younger teens. I am sure that any who want to escape for a while from the realities of the present will revel in the mysteries of its superbly recreated world. However, I suspect that many avid younger readers, of nine or ten plus, will lap it up too.

Anna at War by Helen Peters

Cover: Daniela Terrazzini

‘I am grateful for . . life every single day, knowing how many people would have loved my opportunities and never had them.’ (p 287)

WWII remembered

The period of our history involving the Second World War has attracted some of our very finest children’s writers, and there are many wonderful novels covering both children’s lives on the home front, and the truly appalling treatment of Jewish children by the Nazis. They are all hugely important books in terms of keeping awareness alive for children born into a world where this dark time is rapidly passing from living memory, even for their oldest relatives. However, the number of evocative and deeply moving examples of such books already available begs the question of whether the children’s canon really needs yet another one covering the same ground. The answer must be a resounding yes when it is as fine as the upcoming Anna at War. 

WWII relived 

This is one of the most accessible novels on this theme that I know, and yet it achieves this in the context of an involving and deeply affecting story. It takes considerable writing skill to say so much through such a relatively simply and straightforward narrative. In this, it harks back to something of the quality of Nina Bawden’s wonderful Carrie’s War. Only Emma Carroll’s and Lucy Strange’s recent books exploring the same period have had much the same qualities. Yet the more direct focus here on the human abomination that was the treatment Jews by the Nazis makes Anna at War even more powerful. Anna’s story is also an exploration of the experience of immigrants and of the consequences of prejudice. As such, it could not be more relevant and important for today’s children. 

For me, only Judith Kerr’s wonderful When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit is more potent, and that comes largely from the fact that it springs from first-hand experience. But, even written over seventy years after the event, Anna at War too has its own very special qualities. Helen Peters draws on the experiences of real children who came to England on the Kindertransport. She has a wonderful ability to put herself inside the mind of Anna, and to take her readers there too. Through the voice of her young protagonist, she continually conjures the details of experience, yet expresses them in ways that seems genuinely that of the child. She vividly places a young girl’s everyday concerns into the context of momentous, and deeply troubling, times. Overall, it is the pure power of this author’s storytelling that makes the book so effective, direct, yet skilfully constructed to engage utterly. This is the past relived, and hence made relivable. Sometimes it is heart-wrenching , but it is also humanising; as uplifting in its resilience and love of life as it is paining in its cruelty and loss. Without ever preaching, it both enlightens and enriches. 

WWII honoured

To bring this period of history into the easy access of today’s 9-12 year olds, to make it an engrossing read, with elements of exciting adventure, without in any way exploiting history for cheap entertainment, is a fine achievement. Helen Peters also helps contemporary readers to relate this period to their own by a framing narrative that brings Ann’s experiences closer to the generation of her grandchildren. It all makes Anna at War highly recommendable, and the book could well, I hope, lead young readers into exploration of some of the many other exceedingly fine works of children’s literature that deal with the same period and its issues.  (See my post from January of this year.) 

Many have hoped that all the sacrifices of those years in the mid twentieth century would achieve the final demise of the despicable actions and attitudes on which the monster of warfare feeds. Subsequent events have shown that, tragically, this has not been the case. However, books such as this could well help a new generation of children grow up to build the better world for which so many gave so much. 

The Wizards of Once: Knock Three Times by Cressida Cowell

‘Let me live my life doing Impossible Things!’ (p 129)

Open up (again)

Open sez me.

Rat.Tat.Tat.

Bang. Bang. Bang. 

Thump. Thump. Thump.

Hey. No need to get agitated. Once you get hold of a copy of Knock Three Times, you’re in - in for a real reading treat.

Once was wizard, twice was pure magic, but number three is an absolute knockout. It knocks most younger children’s fantasy out of the park. When it hits the shops in September, it will knock everything off the top of the children’s bestseller charts for sure, and rarely has anything deserved to do so more. Cressida Cowell’s books are where huge popularity and real writing quality meet. I know of few contemporary children’s writers who are doing more to put the pleasure into ‘reading for pleasure’.

Yet this third book of her Wizards of Once series, like its predecessors, is no patronising, simplistic read, written down to its young audience. Rather it takes just about every ingredient children love and, without diminishing their enjoyment one jot, elevates them to  richly stimulating fest of language, ideas and  imagination. It is quite a feat. Underneath Cressida Cowell’s anarchic littering of untidy text and apparently scrawled drawings, which carry so much instant appeal to children, she is quite a writer - and a very skilled artist to boot.

Thee times special

For starters her use of language is very special. Unobtrusively, she seeds her writing with interesting and challenging vocabulary, and builds her apt word choices into prose that has its own most pleasing rhythm and cadence. It falls comfortably, yet excitingly on the reader’s ‘internal ear’. In fact this will be wonderful prose to read aloud. For example, the description on pages 43-45 of the witches swooping down to attack, ‘like a couple of infinitely evil peregrine falcons,’ is quite superbly evocative, thrillingly terrifying, without letting up for an instant on delicious entertainment. 

Whereas many (too many?) currently popular children’s reads employ  a simple, single viewpoint, Cressida Cowell tells her tale through multiple, shifting perspectives, manipulated by her intriguingly mysterious, anonymous narrator. It makes for a rich, complex tale, that, nevertheless avoids being in any way confusing or disconcerting. Rather its shifting viewpoints only add to intrigue and excitement, driving the reader compulsively forward through a sequence of thrilling events and encounters between her vivid characters. Whilst her story plays on the classic fantasy opposition of good and evil, darkness and light, it is here threaded with interesting ambivalences too. The protagonist children are gutsy and brave, but inexperienced and vulnerable, not without their foibles, whilst opposing  ‘villains’ can show a glimpse of a human face at times.

Then and now

Like the best children’s fantasies, the narrative draws deep on tales long told and so pulls with it the resonant archetypes of dark forest, magical races, riddling with a monster and apocalyptic conflict. But the tale delves too into our lost lore of landscape, and images like those of a chalk mound with carved horse, a great hall inside a hill, opened by a magical word, and mistletoe-clad oaks, root it into the power of ancient nature magic. In fact the links reach back long and far, and shake hands with humankind’s origins.

‘The cave was decorated with drawings of animals, bears and wolves and Snowcats just like their own, and deeper in the cave still, with the bright red handprints of the ancestors . . . helping them along in their quest with a handshake from the past.’ (p 369)

There is also more than a hint of Fairy Tale romance. Yet Cressida Cowell’s story is no simple regurgitation of either older tales or current fantasies. It crackles with the electricity of originality and imagination. 

‘Even for the Wizarding world, this is weird.’ (p 104)

Her themes too spring directly from her fantasy context, yet emerge as deeply relevant to the world in which her young readers are growing up. Crucial is the idea of a mechanistic, and often bellicose, society driving out the values  of imagination and ‘magic’. Feminism gets a look in, as indeed it should.  She evokes, too, a sympathy with the natural world worthy of Robert Macfarlane, not least through the amazing character of her ‘philosopher giant’, as well as continually challenging prejudice in a way that provides such a wonderful model for her young readers. 

‘There are people who think that just because trees have no mouths, they cannot talk. Those people are wrong, and they are often the kind of people who think that other people have to be exactly like themselves to count as people at all.’ (p 36)

For those able to pick them up (chortling with self-congratulatory mirth) a few literary allusions even fly as thin as driving rain through this Writer’s Tale: ‘Faster than fairies, faster than witches’ and ‘Exit, rescued by a bear’ to quote but a couple. 

Craftily careless 

I have written in reviews of her earlier books how the child-pleasing, apparent carelessness of her illustrations bely considerable artistic skill in conveying character, emotion and movement. Such depictions are also, from time to time, supplemented by drawing that moves into somewhat more representational territory and conveys a different type of empathy. In fact, I suspect that Cressida Cowell harbours a great fondness for animals , because it is in depicting wild creatures that she often brings out her most sensitive style. One of the more effective (and effecting)  combinations of these diverse approaches is to be seen in the illustration of Wish riding the great bear, during her escape through the forest fire. 

Lucky again, again?

The original characters and scenarios for the Wizards of Once, were inspired, imaginative variants on conventional fantasy protagonists, zany yet hugely engaging. However, even sparkling creations can begin to get tired and their adventures repetitive when an author starts to extend original concepts into an ongoing series.  Not so here. Cressida Cowell keeps her young heroes and their fantastic world vividly alive, and most certainly kicking too. Long may they remain so. Children’s reading will be invaluably the richer. 

This story will stimulate the imagination gloriously, as well as exposing children to rich language, wrought into skilful  prose. It will subtly but powerfully make children think about our own world and some of its most pertinent issues, not least those of the importance of inclusion and tolerance, the acceptance of those who are different, and the worth of all individuals, regardless of, well, regardless of anything. 

‘“My sister isn’t as prejudiced as everyone else,” said Caliburn. “There are kind people in the world. You just have to find them.”’ (p 19)

It is warmly human. It will help sensitise children to both the natural world, and to our heritage of story and literature. And it will do all of this in the context of highly amusing, joyful, exciting, engrossing entertainment. The many who will read it will indeed be third time lucky.

And the luckiest thing of all? The story of The Wizards of Once is not quite finished yet. Part Three ends with a wish.  Could one wish more?

Reading Allowed

My article on encouraging children to read for pleasure is now published in the Summer 2019 edition of ‘Primary Matters: The Primary Magazine for the National Association for the Teaching of English’ (NATE).

Have you met much-loved teacher, Ms. Bixby, yet?

‘Ms.Bixby regularly reads aloud to her class. She serialises whole books, books she loves, and she reads them in a way that enchants her children into loving them too.’

In the same issue is an essential article by the wonderful Professor Teresa Cremin. Worth the small price of NATE membership for this alone. There are also fine contributions from James Clements and Anne Glennie, amongst others. Unmissable for Primary teachers, or anyone concerned with developing reading with young children.

Below is a link to my article about children’s fantasy fiction in an earlier edition the same publication. 

https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B27fRDp8iJrZVTNnbkNQN2ROWEU