Everyone who loves reading probably has their own favourite fictional characters, of which a disproportionate number are likely to come from children’s books. One may fall in love with Elizabeth Bennet in Pride & Prejudice or Vronsky in Anna Karenina, but for most of us the characters we encounter some three to five years after we have learnt to read remain lasting presences in our imagination for the rest of our lives. Peter Rabbit, Tintin, Harry Potter, Aslan, Sherlock Holmes – the list is immense.

This month, Orion publish Eva Rice’s guide to Who’s Who in Enid Blyton, in which hundreds of characters from Blytopn’s hundreds of books are named and described. Those who had Blyton banned as racist, sexist or just badly-written may throw up their hands in horror, but the fact is her books and characters have endured.

“Blyton’s characters are often criticised for being one dimensional,” Eva Rice admits, “but anyone who’s read her school stories sees that isn’t true. Darrell Rivers in the Malory Towers series changes as she progresses from an 11 year old to Head Girl. The stories still stand up incredibly well, from Noddy to the Famous Five series, because her characters aren’t sickly sweet. Her children get into scrapes, are arrogant, bossy and feisty. That’s why I find them so totally believeable.”

Why are we so haunted by particular characters in children’s fiction? Long after we might be expected to have left Gandalf & Co behind, they continue to loom large in our inner lives. Is it, as Alison Lurie suggests in her new book, Boys & Girls Forever (Chatto & Windus), that “in Britain and America more people never quite grow up”? We certainly do seem to prefer, as she observes, stories in which “children are guided by Wise and Good Grown-ups”. Yet that begs the question as to whether you remember stories because of their heroes or their villains. Without Miss Slighcarp, the villainous governess of Joan Aiken’s classic The Wolves of Willoughby Chase, the courage of her heroines would fail to impress; ditto the White Witch in The Lion The Witch & The Wardrobe, and the equally beautiful but sinister Mrs. Coulter, in Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy.

Children’s characters that speak to your deepest self, and in a sense help to form it are something very special. Rachel Campbell-Johnson once wrote in this paper about how when she was afraid she would summon up her mental picture of Aslan from CS Lewis’s Narnia books. Even when you’re grown-up and know it’s “just a story” these creations still seem to matter. I suspect that a great many of Tolkien’s adult fans (of which I am one) love him because The Lord of the Rings enacts a journey in which ordinary people discover their own potential for heroism against seemingly hopeless odds in a vast and terrifying world. Children and adults alike share this perception, which is why, perhaps, Bilbo and Frodo Baggins remain such enduring creations.

Yet we also love tricksters. Francesca Simon’s series about her anti-hero, Horrid Henry, whose subversive love of junk food, computers games, TV and indolence is in stark contrast to that of Perfect Peter, his younger brother, have now sold over 1 million copies and are a cult among under-9s. Written before Simon, an American living in London, had ever heard of the Just William books, they represent the modern child as Harry Potter does not.

“My own favourites are Mary in The Secret Garden, Tom in Tom’s Midnight Garden and Jo March in Little Women,” says Simon. “I love a certain vitality, fearlessness, a disdain for convention even if outwardly conventional. Memorable characters tap into everybody’s feelings of not-belonging. They are defiantly themselves.”

Everybody has his or her own cast, and it can change with age and era. The generation which thrilled to Jim Hawkins and Long John Silver in Treasure Island, or to Lewis Carroll’s ‘Alice’ is different to that which adored Oswald Bastable in E. Nesbit’s The Treasure Seekers or the tiresomely pious Katy in What Katy Did. Where my generation, growing up in the 1960s, was indelibly marked by Alan Garner, John Christopher and Rosemary Sutcliffe the new has Louis Sachar, JK Rowling and Philip Pullman.

My daughter Leonora, (10) is currently enraptured by Saffy in Saffy’s Angel, Corinna the mermaid in The Folk Keeper and any number of Anne Fine heroines. My son William (8) adores Horrid Henry, Eric Pringle’s giant green alien, Big George, and all Eva Ibbotson’s ghosts and witches. Yet children’s novels from previous eras still delight. They named Maria from Elizabeth Goudge’s The Little White Horse, E. Nesbit’s Oswald Bastable, Gandalf and Mowgli’s three teachers Baloo, Bagheera and Kaa as some of their all-time favourites. My husband and I have a particular passion for Umslopagaas the black warrior-hero in Rider Haggard’s Alan Quatermain stories, and for Tintin. What is also striking is that you can love novels without really loving their characters: nobody in my family particularly cares for any of CS Lewis’s boys and girls, apart from Shasta in The Horse & His Boy, who is attractively flawed. Yet modern children are bothered by aspects of stories that my own generation never even noticed: my daughter thinks the dark-skinned Aravis in The Horse & His Boy is a racist portrayal, whereas I think it’s the opposite. Modern children, conversely, don’t understand the moral arguments as to why Frodo shouldn’t kill Gollum in The Lord of the Rings. Mercy has become much harder to grasp as a concept when our culture shows children that instant gratification and self-expression are virtues, not vices.

One of the most startling creations in modern children’s literature is Philip Pullman’s Lyra, heroine of the His Dark Materials trilogy (Scholastic). Like Aiken’s Dido Twite, she is resourceful, brave, loyal and almost feral. Whether child or adult, you fall passionately in love with her, and with her friend Will, wielder of the “subtle knife”.

“It has to do with an intensity of presence,” Pullman says. “Just as some people are so much there that you can sense when they come into the house, so some characters in fiction have the same authority or charisma. Some personal quality makes them more alive than their fellow characters. It has nothing to do with how good or friendly a characters is. They can be horrible, and you can still not lift your eyes from the page when they appear.”

Pullman thinks of fictional characters we internalise, that “I don’t think we want to BE that character, so much as remain ourselves but be in that story and be that character’s friend.”

He rejects the notion that a child-hero is a kind of wish-fulfilment for the adult author. Eva Ibbotson, whose prize-winning Journey to the River Sea (Macmillan) is often cited as the new Secret Garden says of her unforgettable Maia that she gave her the hair and talent for music she felt herself to lack as a child. “I do seem to need to give adventure to the shy, the sensitive, the vulnerable,” she says.

The cleverness of the Harry Potter books is not just that you are immediately on the side of someone who is a Cinderella figure, orphaned and bullied by his vile relations. It is that while Harry himself can be, as JK Rowling says, “a little too perfect”, his two best friends Ron and Hermione have flaws to make them more endearing. Ron is an ordinary wizard, whose only talent is chess; Hermione is a swot and know-it-all who irritates her peers enormously until the boys save her from a troll in the school lavatory. Interestingly, the two who inspire deep passion are the Headmaster, Dumbledore, and the gigantic and incompetent gamekeeper, Hagrid. I’ve found the same in the children’s novel I’m currently writing, The Witchking. The characters children I’ve read a chapter to care most about are not the child-heroes so much as the talking wolf and the tame dragon, because one is wise and the other mischievous.

It isn’t only novels, of course, that contain these archetypes. Pictures books such as Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are, whose hero Max tames the Wild Things “by staring into all their yellow eyes and not blinking”, Herge’s Tintin, and reams of comic books from The Beano to Marvel also inform our inner sense of who we are. Ridiculous, rebellious, brave, bumbling or simple, they are the quintessence of who and what we feel most comforted by. When I re-visit any of my all-time heroes and heroines, I always feel I reach down not only into my own childhood and its ferocious energies, but into what Proust called “le moi profonde”, or the profound self. Perhaps this is why so many adults continue to revisit children’s fiction: because in its dark depths we see in it the reflection of all we once were; and still, perhaps, aspire to become.

Ends.
The Times, August 2003

AMANDA’S TOP FIVE CHARACTERS

1. Ged, the brilliant but fatally proud wizard in Ursula le Guin’s A Wizard of Earthsea.
2. Mowgli, fearless, funny and ferocious in Kipling’s The Jungle Book.
3. Bilbo Baggins, the reluctant burglar and hero in Tolkien’s The Hobbit.
4. Mary Lennox, sallow and sulky gardener in Frances Hodgson Burnett’s The Secret Garden.
5. Lyra Bellacqua loyal, feral and brave in Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials.

The Times August 2003