Childrens Fiction: The New Satire

The surly security trolls at Bournemouth were patrolling the front gate to the Ministry of Magic’s annual Party Conference this week, checking for dungbombs as Ben Liar got to his feet, flanked by Dementors. Ignoring cries of “Shame! What about the goblin war?” his magically modified voice scattered charm on the assembled witches and wizards beneath.
“Fellow-warlocks!” he said. “There is no turning back. Remember, I alone have been voted thirteen times as Most Popular Minister by Witches Weekly. Remember, I alone can bring peace and prosperity to the magical community.”
At a wave of his wand, a shower of coins fell from the ceiling.
“Leprechaun gold,” said Harry Potter disgustedly……

Once upon a time, children’s fiction used to be red in tooth and nail. Gulliver’s Travels, with its descriptions of the Lilliputians’ battles over high heels and eggs, satirised political and religious enmities; rhymes about “Georgie Porgie” (King George lV) and Rock-a Bye-Baby mocked the behaviour and legitimacy of the kinds of the time. Writers understood that they could question and attack their society under the guise of telling a story suitable for young minds. E. Nesbit, the Fabian author of such classics as Five Children & It, teased her readers with implicit and explicit questions about class and gender by imagining what would happen if wishes came true and children suddenly had a quarry full of gold. So did Frank L. Baum, author of The Wizard of Oz, a country ruled by witches. Yet although classic children’s literature is profoundly subversive, as Alison Lurie points out in her study Don’t Tell the Grown-Ups, its strand of social and political satire died away. Either pure fantasy or straight realism has dominated the past century, and authors such as Tolkien explicitly rejected any attempt to link the wars of The Lord of the Rings with real-life events.

Now a stunning new children’s author, Jonathan Stroud, has revived it again in his Bartimaeus Trilogy. The Amulet of Samarkand, published by Doubleday on October 2, has already been bought for £1 million by Talk Miramax. It tells of a thrilling and hilarious relationship between a young apprentice, Nathaniel, and the djinni Bartimeaus who, summoned to serve him, becomes his resentful slave. Yet what is most original about the novel is the fact that Stroud’s imaginary London, identical to our own in many ways, is ruled by magicians. All of them want power, and all of them are prepared to charm, steal, lie and murder to become Prime Minister. Nathaniel’s adventure begins when he seeks revenge for a slight given him by Simon Lovelace, a sneering magician “with slicked-back hair, round glasses and a xylophone-sized array of gleaming white teeth,” who as Junior Minister for Trade seems strikingly suggestive of Peter Mandelson.

“I wanted to do something a bit different from the usual wizardly type thing,” says Stroud, a 33 year-old former publisher whose wife, Gina, supported him for six months while he finished his book. “What I came up with is the idea that magicians would be essentially corrupt rather than good or bad. They’re in a position of power because of their magic – which isn’t inborn, but acquired by hard work and summoning djinnis, who are the ones who can actually do spells. Nathaniel is a young boy who is taken into an elite and groomed to be part of it. He’s morally ambivalent, like the djinni Bartimeaus, because although he’s ambitious he also has courage and a conscience. In the beginning, he thinks that getting into Parliament is a noble ambition, and it’s only gradually that Bartimeaus shows him its bad side. The wizards are all power-hungry, self-seeking characters heading up a greasy pole, so the political satire developed naturally out of that.”

How much of the jokes children of 10+ will pick up and enjoy will depend on their political awareness, but a test audience on this age group shows that children are surprisingly conscious of the concept of spin. A world of trickery and manipulation is, after all, informed by the politics of the playground as well as anything overheard on the ‘Today’ programme. Yet in returning children’s fiction to its satiric roots, Stroud has achieved something of literary note, too. Where adult satirists such as Martin Amis and JG Ballard have tried in vain to skewer the current preoccupations of British readers – focusing, in recent novels on outdated and risible notions about class-war - he, like JK Rowling before him, has conjured a far more effective vision of Britain. Ruled by a self-interested elite skilled at manipulating appearances, and ruthless at suppressing dissent, it amounts to being the first good political satire of the new century.

It was the critic and novelist Philip Hensher who first pointed out that the third Harry Potter book satirised Blair’s Britain, with its incompetent Minister of Magic, Cornelius Fudge, presiding over lethal complacency, raging paranoia about betrayal and seeming egalitarianism undercut by nepotism. Subsequent novels have seen JK Rowling pouring withering scorn on a grotesquely untruthful Press, a politician whose ambition (like Jack Straw’s) causes him to castigate his erring son, and most recently, in The Order of the Phoenix, the horrors of a school inspection. Diana Wynne Jones, whose children’s novels Stroud particularly admires, also imagined the difficulties of living in a city run by magic in The Magicians of Caprona. Eva Ibbotson, like Rowling after her, sent up the neo-Nazi obsession with “pure blood” and family trees in her tales of ghosts and witches; and the best-selling Artemis Fowl series by Irish author Eoin Colfer posits a technologically advanced fairy race that is dangerously close to a paranoid police state. Yet Stroud is the first to specifically use some of the absurdities of the present Government in a children’s fantasy.

“I didn’t intend a direct analogy,” he says. “It arose out of trying to make a logically consistent parallel world. It’s in the nature of politics that presentation and mode should come into it, and once I’d hit on that, I realised there were jokes about spin and ambition I could throw into the magical world I was creating to enhance it. My primary concern is the relationship between Nathaniel and Bartimeaus, which is also about bluff and control, and forcing people to do what you want without getting yourself into trouble. If Bartimeaus had the opportunity of getting free and eating Nathaniel, then he would; but at the same time, as Nathaniel gets older and gains an official post in Parliament the djinni is wiser than his master about the corrupting nature of politics. In my world, every Prime Minister from Gladstone onwards has come to power through coups and even murder. I’m not a political creature, but I observe and get frustrated. The character I expect most readers will identify with is the djinni, Bartimeaus, who doesn’t want to be part of political life but who finds it’s inevitable – like most of us, whether we like it or not.”

Stroud’s self-perpetuating elite does sound very close to their real-life counterparts at times. What they, like New Labour, fear most of all is loss of control, and their watchword is “safe, secret and strong.” Essentially solitary and narcissistic, magicians are hard-working but charmless and grubby individuals who use magic in the company of the underclass and with each other to imbue themselves with glamour. This glamour, civil servants will be pleased to note, is dependent on the potency of the djinni a magician can enslave. The Prime Minister, Rupert Devereaux can summon an especially powerful and suspicious female djinni (suggestive of Anji Hunter) to make him seem more charismatic than he really is. Devereaux’s djinni also picks him up and protects him bodily at the slightest hint of danger, but her powers catastrophically fail during an attempted coup by a trusted Cabinet Minister magician. The Amulet of Samarkand is a sort of ultimate PR weapon in being able to protect its wearer from any curse, particularly when the demons of Chaos break through at a political meeting.

All of this can be enjoyed by the adult reader, but is not made obvious to a younger audience. Stroud’s dark, baroque vision of a London patrolled by searching orbs of fire, with dissenters thrown into the Tower of London, and constant fear of terrorist attack, comes close to the Dickensian in its mixture of the sinister and the comic. Kitty, the heroine who belongs to the non-magical underclass and who briefly appears in The Amulet of Samarkand, is going to be developed in the second novel as resistance to its political elite grows. It’s bound to find a huge audience among children – but whether it will find favour in the real-life corridors of power remains to be seen.

Amanda Craig’s new novel, Love in Idleness, is published by Little,Brown £12.99