The Famous Five: Curse of Kirrin Island
2023
In December I previewed for the i newspaper a new BBC film of one of Enid Blyton's Famous Five books - you can find the post and link here.
I thought The Curse of Kirrin Island was enchanting, and would make ideal family watching. The film was shown on TV on New Year's Eve - and some other newspapers were able to find people who didn't like it, which they were then able to describe as 'backlash fury' and say the 'reboot was slammed by viewers.'
So I wrote about this reaction, and the way it had been reported, in this Opinion piece:
(There is a limit to how many articles you can access on the newspaper's website each month.)
My conclusion was that Blyton
didn’t have a “woke” bone in her body, and biographies suggest she was a not-very-nice person. But she loved to encourage children to read, she loved to entertain them, and she succeeded over hundreds of books and many years.
It would be fair to guess that she would be delighted with a new version of The Famous Five, with whatever changes were necessary to make it fun for a new generation – and that if showing the film will make some children pick up her books, then she’d be happy.
More in the earlier post...
What an interesting piece, Moira. You bring up something very important, too, in my opinion. Authors are who they are, all with their own faults, biases, and so on. But if you look at the way Blyton inspired so many children to read (and she's not the only one!), I think you can easily acknowledge her role in literature and admire her for that. Whatever she may have believed socially or politically or..., she turned millions of children on to reading. That's a good thing.
ReplyDeleteThank you Margot - I somehow knew you would feel the same as I do, that anything that encourages reading has to be good.
DeleteWhen I first started work in a public library near Manchester in 1969 the then children’s librarian, a lovely lady, would not have Enid Blyton on her shelves. The reason would be couched in different language from today but the sentiments would be the same. In fact after leaving the profession for many years I was (pleasantly) slightly surprised to find her on the shelves in my local library several years ago.
ReplyDeleteIt's obviously a fair topic for discussion, and I respect other's views - but it always seemed a shame to exclude them. And cognitive dissonance does seem to come into play - 'censorship' and 'banned books' are ideas that horrify many of us. Is this any different?
DeleteOddly, Blyton's Adventure series were published in hardcover in the US and not so hard to find in libraries (plus my mother owned one or two) but we found Malory Towers and St. Clare's in a bookstore in Toronto and my sister and I were obsessed and started playing boarding school all the time. Eventually, kind relatives traveling brought back the Famous Five and other series (commenting disapprovingly to my mother - who said not to worry - and grandmother - who thought we should be reading great literature by then) but they were never as appealing, perhaps because we were getting older.
ReplyDeleteWe lived in the US when my children were young, and I really wanted them to read Enid Blyton so I had some sent out, & asked people to bring them over when they visited! I liked the idea of their reading the books I'd liked, no matter how unreal. I always liked the boarding school ones best, but also the Five Find Outers and Dog - ready for reading detective stories later.
DeleteYes, but I must have been slightly older/more sanctimonious when I read the Five Find Outers and felt bad that Fatty had go to through life with that nickname and did not appreciate their rudeness to the policeman!
DeleteYes, that name was shocking, but he did style it out. And yes, having looked at some as an adult I am quite shocked by how they are rude rule-breakers as far as poor PC Goon is concerned.
DeleteThese books were more transgressive than they seemed.