Duncan McLaren Interview

Interview with Duncan McLaren

Dear Duncan � many thanks for answering a few questions for Gateway. Here goes:

GM: What was the first Enid Blyton book you read? Do you still have it in your collection?

DM: I must have read or been read the Noddy books.When I re-read them as an adult, something about them resonated. But any Noddy books of my own did not survive parental clear-outs of comics. The first Blyton book I know I read was noted in my diary when I was 10-years old in 1968: Five Go Off To Camp, which was a library book. I remember my fascination with the illustrations. When I submitted the manuscript of LOOKING FOR ENID to Portobello Books, I studded it with a few choice Eileen Soper illustrations and I suspect that this favourably disposed the publisher towards actually reading the manuscript. And to Portobello�s credit, they paid for these colour illustrations to carry through to the published work. The only Enid Blyton books I still have from my childhood are a few Armada paperback Mysteries involving the Find-Outers which my brother claims are actually his!

GM: Was LOOKING FOR ENID a commission or something you wanted to write and wrote on spec? (I think I already know the answer to this but I'd like to hear the background to your decision to write the book and how it evolved into a major study of Enid Blyton and her work).

DM: It was something I chose to write about without a publishing deal. For several years I�ve been writing about the work of contemporary artists, collaborating with them in many cases. I am interested in their creativity, and often still use it to feed my own. Then during an artist�s residency I had the chance to write about a long dead author, John Ruskin. I loved this exercise and the book that came out of it. I realised that what it had done was open up new ways to approach my interest in creativity. I found I was just as interested in authors as I was in artists, and by choosing a writer from the past, both the entire life�s work and the facts of the writer�s life were in the public realm. I became keen to write about Enid Blyton because I could see she had a very unusual kind of creativity, not literary, as such. Indeed, she is routinely dismissed by the literary world. There is not even an entry for her in The Oxford Companion to English Literature, at least not in the 1985 edition that�s on my bookshelves.

GM: I imagine you having a fairly substantial collection of Blytons � are the Five Find-Outers your favourite series? Do you have any other particular favourites?

DM: I think there is a great deal to enjoy about the Mysteries. Fatty�s humour, the rest of the Find-Outers pleasure in exploring Peterswood while being on the case with Fatty, Goon�s upward battle to get on terms with �that toad of a fat boy�, all adds up to something especially invigorating. As I try and explain in LOOKING FOR ENID, Blyton was drawing on important biographical happenings in her life, so was particularly motivated to put a lot of �effort� into that series. I think this applies to the Famous Fives as well. But in a sense it�s the consistently vivid and fresh qualities of the writing right through the various series (Noddy, Malory Towers, the Adventure series, the Faraway Tree books, the Secret Seven etc.) that is most impressive. What I would like to do some time, is to pick a single year � any year from 1943 to 1955 would do the trick, when Enid�s mighty under-mind was firing on all cylinders - and read every one of the 20-30 titles she published in that year, in the order that she wrote them. Though, actually, such precious information about precise date of composition hasn�t survived. So I might just have to read the material in whatever order felt right on the day.

GM: The writer who reviewed LOOKING FOR ENID in the Guardian seemed surprised that Enid Blyton still shifts 10 million copies a year, and, regrettably, refers to "woeful Noddy" and the Famous Five as major contributors to this staggering figure. In one respect it's logical to get someone impartial to review a new book about Blyton, but to get someone so evidently anti-Blyton was quite stupid in my opinion. Would you agree?

DM: I�m not sure she was altogether anti-Blyton, just not a Noddy admirer. At one point she states that Blyton�s work contains �true magic�. She clearly found my book difficult to come to terms with, which I can�t altogether explain. Perhaps it�s something to do with sense of humour. Hers is a very earnest review, yet I�m sure if you asked her she would say that I was the one who was taking Enid Blyton and life in general too seriously. The reviewer in the Daily Mail commented that the book has irony skipping across every page. I would like to think it does, and that the writing is as playful as Blyton�s can be. But to the reviewer in the Guardian this seems to have come across as �wittering�.

GM: You say you're now working on a book about Evelyn Waugh � did he have a similar influence on your reading to Enid Blyton, would you say?

DM: I think the influence of Blyton on myself - and on millions of other readers � must be massive but largely unacknowledged. I�m much more aware of the influence Evelyn Waugh had on me. He struck me straight away as a stylist and his books made me laugh out loud. I was very interested in both of these things and suspected that he would be an influence on my development.

GM: I made a (to me) logical progression from Enid Blyton through Leslie Charteris, Dennis Wheatley, John Creasey, Agatha Christie, Stephen King and now Bernard Cornwell, James Twining, Conn Iggulden and Philippa Gregory. How did your own reading habits evolve after Blyton?

DM: I think my reading habits have evolved through three phases. First there were adventure stories (eg Alistair MacLean, Dick Francis), crime novels (Agatha Christie) and science fiction books (Asimov etc). My more literary literary reading began when I was 15 with Steinbeck, then Waugh, Gormenghast, Beckett, Kafka, Auto da Fe, Hamsun, V.S. Naipaul, Martin Amis, Irvine Welsh, Magnus Mills. Almost all British, European or American men, I have to say. I�m still adding to those books and authors, if only now and again, but I do a lot of re-reading. These days, anything goes. I pick books up at random, or from recommendations from artists. Typically, as I read now I�m trying to think �out of the box�, rather than being led by the nose by the author. So when I picked up a Noddy book in a charity shop a few years back I found it interesting in all sorts of ways, some that Enid Blyton would have foreseen and some that she wouldn�t.

GM: I can, like you, still pick up an Enid Blyton and enjoy it for what it was intended, escapism for children; it might have been the world Enid and her children actually inhabited, but for the child-in-the-street it was how we wished we lived, and a natural extension of that other famous five of Greyfriars school. Is it simply that you and I have never really grown up, and, like Enid herself to a certain extent, we think like children?

DM: The 10-year-old Duncan McLaren is still alive and well and co-habiting the body of a frisky 50 year-old. Otherwise I wouldn�t have been able to write those Find-Outers pastiches at the end of each chapter in LOOKING FOR ENID.

GM: Why do you think some people find Blyton hard to accept as a classic children's author?

DM: Partly because of what I said before, that Blyton is not thought to be literary enough when judged on depth of characterisation and complexity of vocabulary. I think she is THE classic children�s author on the basis of her popularity with child readers over several generations. No, I think that she is THE classic children�s author on the basis that she wrote so many books that remain vivid and fresh when re-read as an adult. Maybe it would have been better for her reputation if she�d written �The Adventures of Binkle and Flip�, �The Enchanted Wood�, �The Adventures of the Wishing Chair� and �The Secret Island�, and left it at that. Then critics could have coped with her achievement and the four could be part of the Everyman Classics series. She just got carried away and wrote far too many classic books!

GM: Would you agree that even though she only wrote a dozen or so school stories per se, she managed to breathe life into the genre by virtue of the fact that many of her main characters, though on holiday, are boarding school pupils and therefore, in a way, aspirational for grammar and secondary school pupils of the time?

DM: When I read the Famous Five books in my last year at primary school, it did in a roundabout way to get me thinking about what kind of school the Five went to and how those schools compared to the one I attended. Though I didn�t think in terms of boarding or not boarding, public or state. The books made me realise that relationships between children could be more trusting and open and friendly than I was experiencing. And that sharing and pulling together could lead to a positive engagement with the natural and social world, leading to life becoming more of an adventure.

Similarly, a year or two later, when David Bowie appeared on �Top of the Pops�, with sky-high self-esteem, and sang the chorus to �Starman��

�Let the children lose it

Let the children use it

Let all the children boogie.�

�that too made me feel that there could be more to life than I was experiencing in the tedious classroom and tense playground of Hamilton Academy. (Coincidentally, Bowie was brought up in Bromley, south London, which is adjacent to Beckenham where Blyton enjoyed a happy childhood.)

GM: The same Guardian reviewer describes George of the Famous Five as "proto-dyke" � I find such remarks not only na�ve, but also crass and ignorant. Whilst Enid would certainly have been aware of various sexual typographies, it is utterly ridiculous to think of George as anything other than a tomboy, in my opinion. Why do you think such people have to plumb the depths of their own neuroses and psychoses when trying to come to terms with Enid's success? Could it be jealousy, do you think?

DM: I also think of George as a Tom-boy, in fact I think of her as a young Enid. However certain readers of LOOKING FOR ENID are certainly going to think that I am �plumbing the depths of my own neuroses� when they read what I�ve said about how Enid�s relationship to her own body feeds into the Famous Five books. Enid may have been childlike, she was also a sexually active adult and it seems to me that her �under-mind� transformed certain personal experiences into everyday stories and images. I�m thinking in particular about all the sensual exploration of tunnels and caves that is such an ever present aspect of the Fives. Enid grew up at a time when there was much sexual repression. And we are living in a time when sex is given a great deal of attention. So it makes sense, I think, to at least bear certain possibilities in mind while reading some of the work. That issue is a particularly tough one for those adults who want simply to rediscover the innocence of childhood when reading Blyton books. I like to do that myself, but at the same time, the 50-year-old McLaren needs to speculate about where certain imagery and repeated motifs may be coming from. However, what I don�t like is the gratuitous sexuality that saturates so much of today�s media. In a paragraph that I read recently written by another journalist, George is again described as a proto-dyke, Dick as dickless and Enid�s use of the word �queer� is referenced in a way that was not intended.

GM: Many people are forecasting a surge in popularity for Enid Blyton now that the Harry Potter saga has run its course. Do you think this will happen?

DM: Something will have to fill the vacuum. I believe there is much good stuff being published for children these days, though I don�t have my finger on that particular pulse. But Blyton was an especially gifted writer and I�m sure her work will continue to find an audience. Perhaps she could do with getting some of the positive publicity that J.K. Rowling received, so that when the name Enid Blyton comes up the quality press doesn�t simply trot out the usual mistaken clich�s about political incorrectness and repetitive plots and inadequate personal life.

GM: An expert on Enid Blyton the other side of the Atlantic has expressed the opinion that the new wave Enid Blyton covers showing grotesque cartoons of her characters tends to put children off. I have to say I agree with him. There is plenty of talent out there to come up with modern versions of classic covers. One publisher actually puts out two different versions of the Famous Five mysteries � a modern and a classic. What's your view on the modern covers?

DM: I suppose all covers are trying to create a bridge between the reader and book. The original images tend to work for me, not least because the various publishers invested a lot of money in promoting their own Enid Blyton titles. Too often modern covers are appealing to things that are just not there in me, because I�m not the kind of child they�re marketing to. On my desk, I�ve got a 2003 Egmont paperback of �The Mystery of The Disappearing Cat�. It�s got a lively, cartoon feel to it, full of colour and action. Which I like. But Fatty�s not there, nor Goon, and their relationship is the driving force behind that series of books. In the original Methuen edition from 1944, the dust-jacket shows Goon looking puzzled, with his backside in the air all set for a good metaphorical kicking from Fatty. I prefer that.

GM: The current vogue for nostalgia publishing would seem to provide an ideal opportunity for reprints of some of the more obscure Enid Blyton titles. Would you welcome this or do you prefer hunting down the originals?

DM: Hunting down originals is thrilling and Abebooks makes it easy to do. However, when books get scarce they get expensive and at that stage it�s nice to see books being republished. The cheapest copy of Enid�s autobiography �The Story of My Life� on Abebooks when I last looked was about �40.

GM: Now for the easy question: can you please name your five favourite books, the titles you couldn't be without � series count in this question, so you could have all the Mysteries as one choice, for example.

DM: Actually, my favourite books are the ones I probably could do without because I�ve already taken on board much of what they�ve got to give. �Decline and Fall� by Evelyn Waugh. That book was written by a suddenly very happy man. The first two books of the Gormenghast Trilogy by Mervyn Peake. I don�t think I ever identified with a character as much as I identified with Steerpike when I was 17. Even though I couldn�t abide the fact that he went about hurting and killing people. If only his brilliant ego had been able to empathise with others he�d have been so much better off. Auto Da F� by Elias Canetti. Though come to think of it, that�s pushing the same buttons as Gormenghast. I might as well say about the dwarf Fischerle, the most selfish creature in the world, that if only he had been able to empathise with other people then he�d have had everything! (Funny how a list of favourite books can turn out to be so revealing.) The Mysteries by Enid Blyton. Joy runs through the first 14 of these books like the river that runs through their Peterswood setting, as I try and show in LOOKING FOR ENID. I�m feeling very loyal to that series and to its creator just now. So I�ll leave it at that.

GM: Duncan, thanks for sharing your thoughts with Gateway's readers. Good luck with Evelyn Waugh, and please come back to Gateway to read about Enid and all the new books from time to time!

DM: Will do. And thanks for showing interest in my writing, Paul.