Strong Winds - Ransome Revisited
Psychologists have a word for the lure of Arthur Ransome and the world he created; it is properly described as a paracosm. Wild Cat Island can be found in the same universe as Narnia and Middle Earth – imaginary places with their own rules of existence. Ransome’s is in many respects the more startling because it intersects so gracefully with reality. I am thinking here of the world described in Swallows and Amazons, Swallowdale, Winter Holiday and Pigeon Post. Perhaps one could add books in which, late on, he attempts to recover that world in The Picts and the Martyrs and Great Northern? I don’t like scare quotes, but “reality” up there really deserves them. There was a debate in the 1940s stirred up by a reviewer as to whether the children were perhaps too middle class, too divorced from real people with their war-time concerns. Which is about as daft as complaining that there are no motorcycles in The Hobbit.
On August 22 1933, Ransome wrote to Wren Howard (his publisher, already fretting over the need to get the next book out for Christmas). He was working on Winter Holiday: “I have been most horribly bothered by this book, or rather by the end of it. I am absolutely blessed if I know what is wrong with it, but I jolly well know that something is wrong … there is a sort of horrid breathlessness at the end …”
I think I know what the problem was. It can be summed up in a word – adults. There are, of course, adults in the Swallow books, in particular Mother and Captain Flint. But it doesn’t do to let too much critical analysis bear down on them – they very definitely belong to the paracosm, in that their behaviour is completely defined in terms of how they relate to the magical children. Unfortunately for us all, they are like no adults we will ever encounter. They are part of the magic. Winter Holiday is touching in many ways and Ransome always had a soft spot for it, but the adults in it get in the way. They come in from outside. They are actors, doing things, as distinct from simply being observed; they have to be propitiated in various ways. And, of course, it is adults who engineer the denouement – that, I believe, is the source of Arthur’s dissatisfaction. In brief, the adults he placed in Winter Holiday risked breaking the dream: and indeed, they did break it in many significant ways.
There is another problem with that book. Even as the book was about to go to press, to the despair of his publishers, Ransome was still mithering about the illustrations. In particular, the charming semaphore image that he entitled “Nancy’s Question”. He wrote, “John is my trouble. In two of my best drawings he has turned into a clumsy lout of seventeen or eighteen. I can’t keep him young.” A month later he wrote to his mother, still complaining, “But my hat the pictures are just awful.” He adds a consoling note: “I finished the endpaper map, very chaste in black and white, with tracks to the Pole in red and the shores of the lake and islands in blue.” You recall my essay about Ransome and sex? That word “chaste” is surely significant. You have to agree it’s a curious choice, reflecting all kinds of anxieties. It was proving impossible for him to bottle up these children.
The Swallow paracosm, like those of C S Lewis and J R R Tolkein, cried out for imaginative extension. It is called, in the modern idiom, fan-lit and is simultaneously encouraged and litigated over, depending on the whim of rich authors. Arthur was inundated with letters asking for more on the doings of his children. Many letters described things the children should do. Katherine Hull and Pamela Whitlock went further, writing a full blown novel. Ransome even pressed Cape to publish The Far Flung Oxus and wrote enthusiastically to the two schoolgirls about their illustrations – “PICTURES I do hope you have done a really good lot … they must be cram full of larkiness.” It must be said it’s not a bad effort for a couple of girls still at school themselves – lots of adventures, with horses, rafts and blazing beacons. But the book ultimately fails because it stands outside the dream. The same goes for Elinor Lyon (books like Run Away Home). Rather disingenuously, she claims her work was triggered by, “My dislike of the characters in Swallows and Amazons who are so good at things like sailing. I thought I’d have children who got things wrong but somehow survived.” Sadly, her books are Ransome with the spirit removed – a little like non-alcoholic gin.
Let me plead my own cause. When I had a shot at a book in the Ransome tradition I had a ready-made paracosm of my own, in the shape of the imaginary life I led with my brothers a lifetime ago. I tackled the problem of characters growing up by compressing adolescence into six or seven weeks. But I can’t say I solved it, because en route, another problem crawled out of the creative swamp and bit me. The magical fictional world of the Swallows had served well enough as a stimulus, an impetus, but it didn’t take long for my fiction to want a say in its own voice. Being saddled with Arthur became all a bit embarrassing – like marrying the wrong person or setting out on a round-the-world trip with somebody who turned out to be a crashing bore.
These thoughts were in my mind when I started reading the books by Julia Jones forming her Strong Winds trilogy. Undoubtedly, these are canonical “Ransome” books, with all the key ingredients: honourable children looking on an imperfect adult world; ecstatic experience of the natural environment; sailing; and yet more sailing. In The Salt-Stained Book, Jones also addresses the problems identified above; and solves them. In particular, some of her characters mature to a remarkable degree, albeit the real time covered in the course of three long novels is only a few months. But she also achieves something far more distinctive - a kind of extended literary allusion. A device used many times before, but rarely so effectively and (so far as I am aware) used hardly at all in books ostensibly for children. In some respects this makes for a complicated experience. If you know Ransome’s work you will find many allusions, some flagged up, some hinted at, some dropped in just for devilment. Characters have, or at least temporarily adopt, Ransome’s names; familiar landmarks from the books are in pretty well every chapter. But the books are in no way a Ransome pastiche. Their external content and motivation is relentlessly modern - a gritty story concerned with corrupt policemen and social workers; people trafficking; physical and emotional abuse; the sexual exploitation of children; modern slavery; and so on. Not the quaint skulduggery of The Big Six – this is all for real. The reader inhabits an entirely believable and rather nasty world in which adults lie and manipulate children. And the children are left to wonder at the obsessions of vengeful policemen, faithless vicars, and uncaring carers. A world in which a fake concern for the environment stifles any possible pleasure to be gained from living and acting in it as human beings.
Questions: do these multiple parallel worlds work? Can you make a novel out of allusion? Can Jones keep it up over three books? I think the answers are yes; yes; and yes maybe. But even the maybe is not as barbed as it sounds – read on. I think The Salt-Stained Book is an extraordinary achievement. Notwithstanding an imperfect ending (echoes of Arthur’s breathlessness problem with Winter Holiday) it is completely engaging and, once started, extremely hard to put down. Ransomesque themes, in particular from Swallows and Amazons, Secret Water and Missee Lee, decorate, even justify, much of the action. Nancy, who was certainly not a black teenager in 1929, is a great success (you will have to read the book to discover her new name); her sister less so, but if you’ve read my essay called “Killing Jennifer” you’ll have one hypothesis as to why. The emotional denouement is moving without being wet (something Ransome only barely avoided in We Didn’t Mean to go to Sea.)
In the second book, A Ravelled Flag, themes morph into the more exclusive concerns of an adult world (albeit they impact on the children). Misfortunes that initially appeared accidental begin to look more calculated. This is convincingly done, but for this reader the spell carried over from the first book falters a little. How could it be otherwise, as deeply ambiguous (or barely understood) mythic themes are replaced with relatively mundane acts of revenge? The hero Donny is a great creation, we spend a lot of time close to his thoughts and dreams and he is capable of facing both titanic and banal challenges – I just prefer him battling the former. But it is only as you finish the second book that you realise where this minor discontent comes from: Jones is, in the nicest possible way, letting go of Ransome. Not completely, but enough to be unsettling. She has complete mastery of the themes of this second book – the glacial frustrations of the child care business; the helplessness of children caught in a bureaucratic process; the scary precipice walked by many in the “care” system. They are obviously close to her heart and she is impressively informed. As in Book I, there is redemption in the descriptions of the river landscape – they are excellently done.
Scenes from Missee Lee (in particular the famous descent of the gorge) and Secret Water emerge in Ghosting Home and serve to bind strands of the story together, but otherwise Ransome doesn’t get much of a look in. This is a rich and complex treatment of friendship, death, dreams, sex, loss, family ties, race and culture. A complicated story, well told, and a satisfying read. Apart from the sailing (and Jones knows a lot about sailing!), the book treats the mechanics of people-smuggling and the web of corruption surrounding the activity. There are other filamentary Ransome threads, but they are less central. The book could exist without them – one could even imagine the author wanting it that way.
It was nice to get a chance to talk about Arthur again. And nice to talk about a completely novel way of cracking the Ransome problem. Not by producing a pastiche; but equally not by attempting to force those remote ghosts to live on in the wrong century – something they would certainly resent. Instead, we have a way of illuminating a contemporary fiction through the process of allusion. Common enough in poetry (one thinks of The Waste Land as virtually nothing but allusion), but more difficult and more risky in prose. Jones pulls the trick off with great assurance.
I’ll end by posing an obvious question. What if you’ve never read a word by Ransome? What would you make of this complicated trilogy? Could it work at all? I can offer an answer by means of a personal confession. I have studied Ransome for many years. I even have some of his flimsy self-published fairy stories (believe me, they are bad enough to encourage any novice writer to keep trying). But until quite recently I had never read Peter Duck. For the simple reason I felt sure I would hate it (and I did). Now, the character of Peter Duck pops up all over the place in his books. Ransome won’t leave him alone. Indeed, in Swallowdale young Titty appears almost unhinged on his account. So what did I make of all those allusions to a book I had never read? I must say, it mattered little to me, even aged eight years. Because allusion, well done, is simply another invitation to create a fiction and children are effortlessly good at that. My guess is that they would sort it out here as well. But perhaps his haunting presence in these books might induce new readers to take on the mysteries of Ransome’s utterly absorbing “inconsequential” prose. Jones is doing the world a great favour pointing new generations of readers to an author not ashamed to draw you into a chapter in which virtually nothing happens and entitle it “Island Life”. Then follow it with another, much the same, entitled “More Island Life”. O felix culpa.
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