The Child that Books Built
Faber £12.99 Apri

This is the kind of book I dread reviewing. Reading Francis Spufford's The Child That Books Built I found myself nodding and beaming and thinking of him pretty much as a twin soul. Someone else who loves the illustrator Errol le Cain! Someone else who is in love with Dido Twite! Yet all compulsive readers, particularly those of the same generation, probably share these tastes. The chances are, if you read this magazine, that you, too, are a child that books built. If so, you will love this splendid book as much as I do.

Why are we like this? Why does one feel this immediate sense of kinship with someone who loves, say, A Wizard of Earthsea that one does not with someone who loves Anna Karenina? Why is it that the Narnia books, the Lord of the Rings, The Little House on the Prairie and other childhood classics address our deepest selves, and indeed forge them? Why is it that we, like Roald Dahl, tend to find the adult fiction that comes after a deep disappointment? Is it just that children's novels fall upon the virgin territory of our comprehension and impress us by their sheer novelty? Is it that we tend to be morally simplistic, addicted to narrative and unable to accept adult subtleties? Or is it that it is the great children's authors, not poets, are the unacknowledged legislators of the world? These are all important questions to ask, but until JK Rowling's phenomenal success, and the acceptance of Philip Pullman into the literary canon, they were pooh-poohed by the literary establishment.

Spufford's obsession began as a way of coping with his little sister's kidney failure, the story of which adds a particular resonance to his internal adventures. He became addicted at six, after long illness, and describes in one particularly striking passage, the process of reading The Hobbit - when text no longer needs decoding but "liquefies" into a drama beyond words. Spufford learnt to go into the "airlock" of concentration, in which the sounds of the external world vanished.

It is fiction, rather than non-fiction which he feels to be the true stuff, seeing a bookshop as "a chemist's dispensing an almost universal range of mood-altering substances." For those of us accustomed to being sneered at as liars, egoists, fantasists and lunatics it is good to have this obvious truth stated. People read (and write) fiction precisely for this reason, and also, as Spufford says because books "can point us in directions that we value." It is this act of transformation that is most fascinating, and most desirable to both reader and writer. To be an author capable of effecting it is to be a kind of magician or shaman, (which is perhaps why so many immature readers are drawn to books about magic.) In one of many marvellous metaphors Spufford describes this process as analogous to "a seed crystal, dropped into our minds when they were exactly ready for it, like a supersaturated solution, and suddenly we changed. Suddenly a thousand crystals of perception of our own formed, the original insight of the story ordering whole arrays of discoveries inside us, into winking accuracy."

Fiction, even at a very young age, makes us more human, and this is a life-long lesson that cannot begin too soon. Anyone who grew up in the 1960s will have made similar discoveries, one hopes, of the great children's authors who emerged then: Peter Dickinson, Alan Garner, Joan Aiken, Diana Wynne Jones, Leon Garfield and Rosemary Sutcliffe. We bounced into literacy with The Cat in the Hat and sailed off onto the wilder shores of adventure. Not all of it was fantasy, but perhaps, as Alan Garner has suggested in The Voice That Thunders, our generation of bookworms was given a literature uniquely certain of moral absolutes because of the Second World War.

Spufford, like others before him, finds the metaphor of the wildwood as most apposite to that of early childhood literature. The wood where Mole is hunted in The Wind in the Willows, which grows up around Max in Where the Wild Things Are and in which the Wart finds Merlin in The Sword in the Stone is a vast, confusing place in which, without story, we would be lost. Interleaved with his own memories of reading, Spufford briskly outlines Piaget's work on the child's conception of the world, Bettelheim's Freudian interpetation of fairy tales, and Chomsky's and Pinker's theories on linguistic instinct and enlarges on each by adding the observations that cognitive psychologists often fail to make.

Individual authors such as CS Lewis, Laura Ingalls Wilder and Ursula le Guin get more written about them. These sections are slightly less illuminating, possibly because devotees will know much of what is described, but Spufford is building up to an examination of our addiction to narrative. He boldly goes where many men have gone before, into the SF worlds of Heinlen and Ray Bradbury, rightly pinpointing the rarity of "true wonder" of the Narnia kind evoked by it. Some of his reading in this field appears patchy, and too influenced by TV adaptations: for instance, John Christopher, one of the greatest SF writers for children, wrote more interesting stuff than his Tripods trilogy. The incidental effect of Spufford's teenaged reading was to convince him he was an anarchist, at least until the thrill of Le Guin's stories wore off and he began to realise that "the intensity she got was not completely earned." So, too, was that evoked by thrillers and pornography, concerning which he is exceptionally honest, wise and funny. Most comical is his rage at adult literature - finding Updike's The Centaur did not contain a centaur but a "bloody metaphor." I made exactly the same mistake, aged sixteen.

By ceasing his account at the time when his sister dies, and he leaves for university, Spufford risks being misunderstood as an immature reader, one to whom Narnia will always win over Tolstoy or Dickens. This is not the case, but one admires his courage for pin-pointing the frustrations presented by many adult authors' lack of moral guidance and narrative. (In fact, the best ones do give this, it just takes more intelligence to work it out.) Nor is it the case (as might appear to a sophisticated reader) that, as he claims, "sadness and happiness are just the materials authors use in arrangements." Would that it were so! But all who have turned repeatedly to book shops during periods of inconsolable distress will find pleasure and relief in seeing our addiction described with such intelligence, insight, style and feeling.

This is a book that should be read not only by those who love reading children's fiction, either to their own children or to themselves, but also by teachers, librarians, educational psychologists and politicians. It should especially be prescribed for professional reviewers - to remind them why it was that they first loved reading, and why fiction for both children and adults, really matters.