Robert Dunbaron Irish novels and other offerings
This year has proved to be a strong year for Irish children's fiction. Variety and versatility have been the hallmark of novels by - among others - Jon Berkeley, Eoin Colfer, Roddy Doyle, Oisín McGann, Siobhán Parkinson, Michael Scott and Kate Thompson and now, as the year ends, come two books which add very considerably to this list of achievements. The next Bisto Book Awards should see some very keen competition!
Deirdre Madden's first children's novel, the award-winning Snakes' Elbows, struck an entertainingly quirky note, quickly establishing an individual authorial voice. Now, in Thanks for Telling Me, Emily (Orchard Books, £9.99), that voice is still very much in evidence in a gentle story which has at its centre the heart-warming relationship between a little girl called Keira and her aunt Emily, the owner of a pet shop "in the little town of Gillnacurry". When Keira comes to help out in the shop over her summer holiday, she is soon involved not merely with the talking (and talkative) pets but with some of the little town's more eccentric inhabitants, including the magnificently imperious Mrs Henrietta Fysshe-Pye and Finbarr, the "tall, skinny fellow" who, as his lorry proudly proclaims, delivers "feeds for your animal's needs". Written throughout in a simple, unassuming style, this pleasantly offbeat and witty story is a perfect starting point for the younger reader just beginning to tackle a full-length novel.
With an epigraph from TS Eliot's Four Quartets - "And the end of all our exploring/ Will be to arrive where we started/And know the place for the first time" - and with several allusions to fairy tale and children's literature, Enda Wyley's The Silver Notebook (O'Brien, €7.95) soon makes clear its literary framework. And appropriately so, given that Tim, the novel's 10-year-old hero, is introduced as someone with a fascination for words and as someone who may himself become a writer. Meanwhile, however, he and a young friend have to assume the role of detectives in piecing together the story of his missing father. These two strands are linked quite magically, in a poetic narrative which demonstrates the manner in which the power of the creative imagination can act as a bulwark against the hardships which life inflicts.
The hardships which we first witness in Sharon Creech's The Castle Corona (Bloomsbury, £12.99) are those being experienced by sister and brother Pia and Enzio, orphans who attempt to relieve their servant status by telling stories and by voicing "If only" aspirations to move beyond their present existence. Their discovery of a pouch owned by their country's king will transform this existence, but it will also, in introducing them to lives apparently very different from their own, bring them (and us) a fuller understanding of the nature of unhappiness and of how it is not necessarily the prerogative of the poor and downtrodden. Set in a quasi-medieval world strongly redolent of the oldest and most timeless of fairy tales, complete with an engaging cast of princes, princesses, hermits and soothsayers, this is a novel where simplicity of style and complexity of message are cleverly matched.
Style, both in the narrative and in David Roberts's spooky black-and-white illustrations, counts for a great deal in Chris Priestley's chilling Uncle Montague's Tales of Terror (Bloomsbury, £9.99), a book which should make an ideal fireside companion for a dark wintry evening. Imagine a meeting between M(ontague) R. James and Edgar Allan Poe and you will have some sense of the atmosphere conjured up by Priestley as he spins a series of tales allegedly told to the young boy called Edgar by his reclusive and decidedly peculiar uncle. Living in a suitably gothic house, Montague is surrounded by an assortment of strange objects, each "possessed of a curious energy" and each with its own story; but, wonders Edgar as these stories gradually unfold, could they possibly be true? A delightfully scary book.
Hannah Goslar Remembers (Bloomsbury, £5.99) is a welcome reissue for Alison Leslie Gold's 1997 retelling, in the third person, of Goslar's memories of an upbringing shared with the young girl whom the world would come to know as Anne Frank: it constitutes a fascinating addition to Anne's own diary and a sobering juxtaposition of the innocence and ordinariness of childhood with the degradation of extraordinary adult evil.
Robert Dunbar is a commentator on children's books and reading Fiction: 9-14-year-olds