Britain’s librarians must have been frowning last summer when results of a nationwide poll of favourite writers were announced in the press. In top place, beating out Shakespeare, Austen and Dickens, was a children’s author their ilk has gleefully detested for 40 years now, the implausibly prolific and popular Enid Blyton. The author of an astonishing 700-odd books—which still translate to eight million copies a year in sales—Blyton is perhaps the most popular author you’ve never heard of. Her name may mean little to North American readers, but in France, in Germany, in countries as far-flung as Australia, Portugal, Singapore and India, Blyton, who wrote mostly in the 1940s, ’50s, and ’60s, remains not merely the beloved author of such series as Noddy, The Famous Five, The Magic Faraway Tree, and Malory Towers, but a rite of passage, an icon conjuring the magic of childhood.
In the U.K., she’s also a lightning rod for controversy, and after the poll results were announced, there was carping. Anthony Horowitz, writer of the TV drama Foyle’s War, complained in the Daily Telegraph that Britons were “being asked to genuflect in front of a fossil.” The children’s author Philip Pullman compared her stories to “mechanically recovered meat.” They’re only Blyton’s most recent detractors. The aforementioned librarians viewed her as a hack and simpleton who kept kids from serious reading. Progressives got her books banned from libraries on charges of racism, sexism, middle-class-ism; one writer called her work neo-fascist. And she didn’t find much truck with the other side either. The conservative British journalist Colin Welch famously excoriated Noddy, a little wooden fellow who lives with his friend Big Ears in Toyland, as an imbecile, “an unnaturally priggish, sanctimonious . . . witless, spiritless, snivelling, sneaking doll.”
Blyton died in 1968, but the debates over her work survive, and may soon be reignited: that witless, spiritless doll celebrates his 60th anniversary this year. A new Noddy book is out in November, his first adventure in 35 years—Noddy and Magic Farm, written by Sophie Smallwood, Blyton’s granddaughter, and illustrated by Robert Tyndall, who worked on the original series in the 1950s. Other festivities are under way: a museum exhibit of Noddy art in London late last year, a stage show, a 3D CGI-animated show called Noddy in Toyland, debuting in April, and a new Enid Blyton story centre in Dorset, set up by Vivienne Endecott, a member of the tireless Enid Blyton Society. The Noddy books are headed next to China, where it’s hoped they’ll win over some 95 million tots. And tapping into the Noddy moment, the actress Sienna Miller and her fashion designer sister, Savannah, who own the label Twenty8Twelve, are unveiling Noddy-themed styles at London Fashion Week this month. Savannah trilled in the Times of London about Big Ears’ stylish “blue swing jacket” and “cropped cream trousers with the green stripe.”
All of which ought to push along a Blyton revival already in full swing. The past year has seen the launch of a Disney cartoon, Famous 5: On the Case, and spin-off books: The Famous Five’s Survival Guide, The Enchanted World. In May, her publisher, Chorion, is releasing new versions of the Wishing Chair and Malory Towers series—part of an ambitious plan to supersize the Blyton brand, already worth more than $300 million a year in sales. “A lot of children don’t know Enid Blyton isn’t a living author,” explains Jeff Norton, senior VP of brand development. “And frankly, they don’t care. She’s the author of the books they love.”
The charm of Blyton is at once simple to explain and totally elusive. In a sense she was the original Rowling—an easy storyteller, masterful with plot, naturally tuned in to a child’s-eye view of the world. Adults rarely intervene in her books. Boarding-school settings give kids time away from the grown-up world. Children are always taking off solving mysteries on their own. The Faraway Tree tales encompass the secret lives of pixies, gnomes, fairies and strange, topsy-turvy lands; the Five Find-Outers and the like are a realm of ventriloquism and disguise: magic for older kids.
On the other hand, Blyton lacks the inventiveness of an A.A. Milne or the whimsy of a Beatrix Potter. Her writing is not literary, or particularly clever. Her characters are broad types, rather than developed, rounded figures. But Blyton never saw herself as a writer, argues David Rudd, a professor at the University of Bolton and author of the compelling Enid Blyton and the Mystery of Children’s Literature; she identified more with oral storytellers in the Mother Goose mould. “If you look at the Milne characters,” he says, “they represent one quality—Piglet always being scared, Pooh always being concerned about his tummy, Rabbit being bossy.” Blyton’s archetypes—wise Big Ears, tomboyish George—seem no broader.
The real difference may be that unlike Harry Potter—or indeed much successful entertainment produced for children in recent decades, from Warner Brothers cartoons to Pixar movies—Blyton doesn’t work for grown-ups. She doesn’t follow the prevailing model: one layer of meaning for kids, another for adults. Noddy is “made of wood,” as his illustrator Tyndall says, “but he eats cakes and jellies and drinks ginger beer and does all sorts of things he shouldn’t be able to do.” But there isn’t much more—no explorations of dream logic or chess as life, nothing to inspire a “Tao of Toyland.” Other writers have occasionally seen profundity in Blyton’s universe: the critic A.N. Wilson explored Noddy as a metaphor for British history—Noddy, with his car-centred life and “House for One,” is a proto-Thatcherite, and Big Ears a classic anti-Keynesian. But there’s no evidence Blyton had such ideas about her work. She didn’t write for The New Yorker like E.B. White; she wasn’t a mathematician like Lewis Carroll. Biographers have said she was like a child herself. She wasn’t trying to talk to adults.
Children seem to take something unique from Blyton. Rudd says adult fans are amazed to find that some adventures they recall from the Faraway Tree never happened in the books: they’d made them up. “To my mind that gets at the essence of what Blyton was doing,” Rudd says. “And why she worked so cross-culturally. Although it’s obviously set in a mythical middle-class England, it’s so skeletal and schematic. It’s like fairy tales—there are just the bare outlines, and people imported their own local colouring and filled it out.” In France, where Noddy is Oui-Oui—a French yes-man; what else?—and the Famous Five tromp around Brittany, kids think the stories are French; in Germany, they think they’re German.
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