by Ben Kritikos
A conversation is an interesting thing; it requires not only the ability to communicate, but also to listen, to empathise. There’s nothing worse, more dispiriting, more of a pet peeve for me, than some one who can do the former — and in abundance — but not the latter.
Lots of great books, great as they are, have a bit of the epitaph about them. Great male writers throughout the 19th and 20th centuries have struggled, suffered, written their heart-rending, world-shaking tomes and collapsed, moribund and fame-ready, into the great mausoleum of Literature. Their works stand as stark reminders of their greatness, like 98 theses nailed to the door of a cathedral, or ten commandments engraved in stone by some almighty hand.
Finality. When Ulysses talks, you listen.
I love those kinds of unanswerable books. But not until recently did I realise how much I also love books for kids and young adults. I love them both equally, and I believe they are equal. Literature speaks to me with layer upon layer of the universal, in the language of the specific. Books for young adults (the best ones) do the same thing — but slightly more fun.
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The Secret Garden, by Frances Hodgson Burnett, is one of the best books I’ve ever read. I loved it so much I periodically put it down, ran my fingers through my hair, took a deep breath and said, “Wow”.
Mary Lennox is a 10-year-old girl who is always ill in one way or another. Everybody finds her most disagreeable. She is sickly looking and bad-tempered. When her parents die of cholera on their estate in India, she finds herself abandoned in the house, waiting crossly for some one to take notice. She is discovered and sent to live with her reclusive uncle at Misslethwaite Manor in the Yorkshire moors.
No longer waited on hand and foot by servile natives, Mary’s life changes dramatically. The wild, windy moors present a challenge to the spoiled, unhealthy girl, and she befriends a local boy named Dickon who can talk to animals. Together they nurture a secret that slowly renews Mary’s health, and breathes new life into all at Misslethwaite Manor.
The Secret Garden does what a great book should: it puts you in sympathy with the emotional development of a character; it puts you in sympathy with their discovery of Nature; and it creates a lusciously magical world — partly of your own creation — into which you may step in and out, always taking a piece with you wherever you go.
It also had me considering taking a horticulture course.
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I mentioned last time that Anna and I are reading the whole series of Harry Potter aloud to each other. We are currently approaching the end of the fourth book, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire. Let me state for the record that I am now officially obsessed with the Harry Potter books. J.K. Rowling is my new hero.
It’s funny, but when you tell people that you’re reading Harry Potter lots of them smile ironically, as though you told them Dan Brown was your favourite author. I get the feeling that people have a different impression of the Harry Potter books than they deserve.
The first two books (Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone and Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets) seem tailored primarily for the 8-12 year old market, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t a serious depth and intelligence behind them. The names of characters, imaginary places and incantations that accompany the many charms, hexes and curses all reveal a knowledge of Latin and the classics that testify to Rowling’s calibre as a writer.
Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban and what I’ve read of Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire are as adult, as dark and as challenging as anything else I’ve read in modern fiction. They’re certainly better written — and definitely more intelligent — than The Da Vinci Code. The only thing that distinguishes the Harry Potter books from your average adult fiction is that all the main characters are children; and that while most popular fiction is mediocre, J.K. Rowling’s work is utterly, stupefyingly brilliant.
Books for young people are not, of necessity, sub-standard or second-class. In fact, I’d go so far as to argue that, in many ways, and in many instances, young people are more discerning than us grown-ups — not least us bookish grown-ups. Authors who know this approach their work accordingly.
I’d rather attend Hogwarts than Plato’s Academy.
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I haven’t spent this whole time just reading fiction for young people, nice as that would be. Thanks to my friend Jess, I’ve had the good fortune to read Zadie Smith’s brilliant first novel, White Teeth.
White Teeth is set in London, spanning time from the Second World War to New Year’s Eve of the year 2000. Zadie Smith traces with razor-sharp wit and emotional cop-on the family lives of Archibald Jones, a hapless Joe Shmoe; and Samad Iqbal, a Bangladeshi immigrant struggling to keep his Islamic faith and cultural identity intact, and to keep his throbbing libido (and subsequent sense of guilt) under wraps.
Let me confess straight off the bat: the whole dissection of the immigrant mentality, and the multi-directional pulling of competing cultural identities really resonated with me and I was biased in its favour from the beginning. As a first generation American, the issues Smith touches on are painfully familiar, and I’d never really thought about them in-depth before.
I suppose I’ve been too busy struggling with to-MAY-toes and to-MAH-toes, and learning to say sorry even when I don’t mean it.
But don’t let me give you the wrong impression; White Teeth is, above all else, funny, witty, incisive, and warming like a good cup of tea by the window on a rainy day. Zadie Smith tells a wonderful story full of race-relations, gunpowder, salt fish and ackee, adultery and circumnavigations of the roundabout at Swiss Cottage; all with a vivid deftness that left me feeling acutely aware of myself as a social entity. But in a good way.
Zadie Smith fits on the Ring Lardner end of the Holden Caulfield spectrum: she’s the kind of author I’d like to ring up on the phone for a chat. In my world, where the young are always right in some very subtle and important way, that’s a huge compliment.
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When we first arrived, I was skint and in need of a beer. Hence, I arrived at 
