Ten of the Best


Utopias in Children’s Literature Imogen Russell-Williams dreams of better worlds.


10


Assembling this list brought home to me that the search for utopia usually entails a voyage into the past. Contemporary children’s books, even the most joyous or fantastic, tend to have a brisk draught of reality blowing through them; qualities of enraptured place and pure escapism belong more to classic territory than to the down-to-earth, diversely woven work of today. But utopian fiction retains its relevance – especially when daily life, even for children, is pressurised and anxiety-prone. Here are ten books in which enchanted places shimmer beyond the reach of news, homework, bullying and the disheartening day-to-day.


The Secret Island


Enid Blyton, Hodder Children’s Books, 978-1-4449-2110-6, £6.99 pbk


Many of Blyton’s landscapes are


utopian, but this is arguably her most idyllic. Four neglected children repair to a small nearby island; contriving to import a cow and chickens, they grow lettuce, beans, and raspberries, weave a house from willow,


and


conceal themselves from bumbling adult attempts at detection. The fear of discovery lends a gentle frisson, but the minutiae of their lives – cleaning rabbit skins for rugs,


Stig of the Dump


Clive King, Puffin, 978-0141354859, £6.99 pbk


A disused Kentish chalk-pit is an unlikely idyll, and the first line of Clive King’s classic imparts a dangerous frisson: ‘If you went too near the edge of the chalk-pit, the edge would give way.’ Yet plummeting into the depths of the earth lets a bruised, shaken Barney into a haven of absorbing joy – the home of Stig, the cave-boy, who creates


plumbing out


his weaponry, of


furniture and rubbish. Whether


fighting off bullies, constructing tin- can chimneys or being swept into a midsummer vision of the past, Stig and Barney inhabit an intent, dreamy world, in the softened boundary between then and now.


Journey to the River Sea


Eva Ibbotson, Macmillan Children’s Books,


978-1-4472-6568-9, £6.99 pbk lake-bathing,


collecting eggs – is the scattered focus of the book. Simultaneously absorbing and reassuring, it remains a perennial comfort.


The Wind in the Willows


Kenneth Grahame, Oxford Children’s Classics, 978-0-1927-3830-1, £5.99 pbk


‘Beyond the Wild Wood comes the Wide World’,


says the Water Rat


repressively to an enquiring Mole; ‘I’ve never been there, and I’m never going, nor you either, if you’ve got any sense at all.’ But into Mole’s cosy hole, Badger’s maze of tunnels, or the desirable gent’s res of Toad Hall, the Wide World cannot intrude – and invading Wild Wooders will ultimately be put to flight. Whether picnicking substantially by a sparkling river, transported into numinous visions by the Piper at the Gates of Dawn, or even imprisoned for impertinence and furious driving, Grahame’s dandified Edwardian gentleman- animals exist, explicitly, in a land outside the world, and outside time.


Ibbotson is unparalleled in evoking the richness of place, and this odyssey to the wild green heart of the Amazon is one of her masterpieces. When orphaned Maia travels with new governess Miss Minton to Brazil, she finds her distant family dismayingly insular and spiteful, at war with the ‘Green Hell’ surrounding them. But, in Ibbotson’s words, ‘whether a place is a hell or a heaven rests in yourself, and those who go with courage and an open mind may find themselves in Paradise’; for brave and open-hearted Maia, the ‘River Sea’ is the source of refuge and delight. Redolent with damp green life, it leaves the reader reeling with heady sweetness.


Tom’s Midnight Garden


Philippa Pearce, Oxford Children’s Classics, 978-0-1927-3450-1, £6.99 pbk


When Tom is sent away to stay in his aunt and uncle’s drab flat, his surroundings at first seem deeply unpropitious. But the grandfather clock in the hall downstairs opens a doorway into the past – a country- house garden where Tom encounters Hatty, the orphaned girl he will meet at many ages, from tiny child to almost-adult. Climbing yew-trees into ‘an openness of blue and fiery gold’, making bows and arrows, and skating on a frozen river, Tom escapes his


10 Books for Keeps No.223 March 2017


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