Enid Blyton and Co.
There’s a huge resurgence in popularity for Enid Blyton’s books, apparently, fuelled by a general sense of nostalgia among parents, who are now reading her stories to their children at bedtimes. I’m part of that trend, for sure. I started my children off on Noddy, moved onto Mr Twiddle, and am currently in the middle of Island of Adventure. They love Kiki the Parrot, and they each empathise with a different human character.
Enid Blyton worked a real goldmine of a formula with her different adventure/mystery series. They all have a multitude of likeable characters, one of whom nearly all children are bound to like. In the Adventurous Four series, I always liked Philip (or Tufty, as Jack calls him), for his ability to tame all animals, and sense of fun. But as an adult now I find myself sympathising more with Philip’s long suffering sister Dinah, who in turn is similar to George of the Famous Five. I never really took to George, but preferred her by any amount to the irritatingly superior Julian. The Secret Seven, the Barney Mysteries and the Faraway Tree series all have characters who are different enough that theeader is bound to empathise with one of them.
In my (longish) short story Life In Shadows, the main character theorises that the type of books we read as children influence us more than we realise as adults. I’m not sure about that in general, but I would argue that it definitely affects how and what writers write.
Modern children’s writers still follow Enid Blyton’s formula. If Harry Potter isn’t completely to your liking, there’s always Ron Weasley or Hermione Granger. In any number of Steampunk/Fantasy/SciFi novels, there are main male and female characters. World Shaker by Richard Harland ( a great book, by the way) follows this routeas do the second and third books in Phillip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy.
Tolkien had a series of different characters (and a good job too - 1000 pages of Sam and Frodo would have been 999 too many for me), and all the epic fantasy series of the 1970s and 80s had bands of companions.
I’m not saying for one minute that this trend for harnessing different characters originated with Enid Blyton, but I think she popularised it, and in doing so influenced many more writers.
Of course, Enid Blyton always had her security character. After all, you might not have liked any of the humans in the Famous Five, but I bet you loved Timmy the dog.
Tags: Characters, Children's Books
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