I wasn't going to write about this at all. I was going to write a post about sailing reproduction Viking ships on the sunny waters of Roskilde fjord one happy midsummer a couple of years back.
But then, reading the Guardian newspaper for Saturday 20th August, I came across a review of an audio book, and changed my mind: so the viking ships post will have to wait till next time.
The column is headed 'Sue Arnold's Choice'. As you probably know, Sue Arnold regularly reviews audio books for the Guardian, and I often read and enjoy her recommendations, but I guess Jove nods, we all have off days, and this one stopped me in my tracks. You can find it online here, but I'm going to quote from it anyway.
'Pirates!' by Roy McMillan is an audio book for children which Sue Arnold describes as 'an entertaining and extremely bloodthirsty history of pirates, privateers and corsairs from ancient Rome to modern Somalia'. So far, so good: and I was particularly interested to see that the book follows its subject matter right into modern times. I used to work for Lloyd's Register of Shipping and know full well that pirates have never gone away, and certainly no longer present themselves in 18th century costumes complete with tricorn hats, parrots, cutlasses and seaboots. (A costume which has a lot to answer for: take away the parrot and add a black mask and a horse and you have a highwayman, another stereotype of the imaginary long-lost romantic past.)
Real pirates are not and never were romantic, and neither were highwaymen, in spite of the myth of the handsome beribboned rascal who kisses the lady's hand before demanding her diamonds. There's room in fiction, I guess, for romantic rascals: but that's because it's fiction. With another hat on, I spoke recently at the Mervyn Peake Centenary Conference at the University of Chichester on Peake's classic picture book about pirates: 'Captain Slaughterboard Drops Anchor'. Here is Captain Slaughterboard in all his sleazy glory: a comically terrifying character in the tradition of Long John Silver and Captain Hook. Pirates in children's fiction are almost pure fantasy: as mythical as unicorns.
History, however, presents the naked facts. And the naked facts are often extremely unpleasant. Don't get me wrong, I don't have a problem with telling children about the nasty things which have been done in the world: but I do have a problem with nastiness which is presented as entertainment.
Time for that quote: Sue Arnold writes:
"Punctuating the biographies [of famous pirates] are ... graphic descriptions of favourite piratical tortures, headed 'Gruesome Alert', which PC parents will probably veto. Don't be wet. Kids are tough. They'll enjoy hearing how, for example, one pirate dealt with a hostage who hadn't come up with the ransom money. The unfortunate man was forced to squat in a bamboo cage squashed down with a heavy lid for 14 years, which made him so deformed that when released he could only walk on all fours. Hence his nickname, the Dog Man. Not for the squeamish."
I'm sorry? Kids will ENJOY hearing this?
You know, some of them actually may. The ones without much imagination, and the ones who haven't noticed or bothered to think about the fact that the book follows pirates right up to the present day, and that perhaps torture isn't some quaint old-worlde custom after all. But I thought books were supposed to broaden our imaginations so that we are more capable of empathy, and I thought history might be a way of making us think more wisely about the present - rather than a lurid chamber-of-horrors freak-show.
My quarrel is not with Roy McMillan's book, which I haven't listened to - it may be well and sensitively written, and the subtitle which the author apparently employs, 'Gruesome Alert', may be genuinely intended to warn rather than to amplify. My quarrel is with the careless tone of the reviewer.
"Kids are tough" says Sue Arnold. Well, some of them are and some of them aren't, and parents know pretty well what their own offspring can stand; and what is likely to produce the tap on the bedroom door at midnight and the shivering cry of 'I can't get to sleep - I can't stop thinking about [insert horror of choice]' - so it's a bit silly to name-call those parents who do decide this is all a bit too strong, as 'PC'.
The world is full of horrors and always has been, we know. I don't in the least mind children hearing about them - at the appropriate age - as long as the adults who convey this information don't present it as fun stuff. (Those jolly old pirates, eh? What they got up to!)
My elder daughter studied GCSE history about five years ago, and one of the topics was 'Victorian Crime and Punishment'. Part of the course involved a close study of the Jack the Ripper murders - including photographs of the victims - for no good reason that I could see (since the Ripper was never caught and therefore never punished) other than its sensation value: educators clearly thought the subject would liven up potentially dull lessons. My daughter and a good portion of her classmates found it very disturbing, especially as her (female) history teacher appeared to enjoy the topic in a way which was quite out of sympathy with her class. Indeed, this woman told them with regret she was unable to show them more graphic photos, since when she had done so with the previous year's class, a girl had fainted.
Unlike their teacher, my sixteen year old daughter and her friends understood they were looking at pictures of real people - real women and girls, some maybe not much older than themselves - who had lived hard lives and known terror and pain and early death. They had been real, not some stop on an East End Jack-the-Ripper tourist trail.
"Kids are tough". Let's be sure this doesn't mean, "Kids are insensitive, unimaginative and callous. They need strong meat, even carrion: they won't appreciate anything better." Let's be sure we don't apply lower standards to children's history books, sensationalising them because we think children won't read them otherwise (and people say "it doesn't matter what they read so long as they're reading" - a statement quite as idiotic as "it doesn't matter what they eat so long as they're eating").
And let's agree that just because something happened in the past, doesn't make it entertainment.
See Katherine Langrish at the Cheltenham Festival, Sunday October 16th at 5.00pm, talking with Kevin Crossley-Holland about her book West of the Moon.
But then, reading the Guardian newspaper for Saturday 20th August, I came across a review of an audio book, and changed my mind: so the viking ships post will have to wait till next time.
The column is headed 'Sue Arnold's Choice'. As you probably know, Sue Arnold regularly reviews audio books for the Guardian, and I often read and enjoy her recommendations, but I guess Jove nods, we all have off days, and this one stopped me in my tracks. You can find it online here, but I'm going to quote from it anyway.
'Pirates!' by Roy McMillan is an audio book for children which Sue Arnold describes as 'an entertaining and extremely bloodthirsty history of pirates, privateers and corsairs from ancient Rome to modern Somalia'. So far, so good: and I was particularly interested to see that the book follows its subject matter right into modern times. I used to work for Lloyd's Register of Shipping and know full well that pirates have never gone away, and certainly no longer present themselves in 18th century costumes complete with tricorn hats, parrots, cutlasses and seaboots. (A costume which has a lot to answer for: take away the parrot and add a black mask and a horse and you have a highwayman, another stereotype of the imaginary long-lost romantic past.)
Real pirates are not and never were romantic, and neither were highwaymen, in spite of the myth of the handsome beribboned rascal who kisses the lady's hand before demanding her diamonds. There's room in fiction, I guess, for romantic rascals: but that's because it's fiction. With another hat on, I spoke recently at the Mervyn Peake Centenary Conference at the University of Chichester on Peake's classic picture book about pirates: 'Captain Slaughterboard Drops Anchor'. Here is Captain Slaughterboard in all his sleazy glory: a comically terrifying character in the tradition of Long John Silver and Captain Hook. Pirates in children's fiction are almost pure fantasy: as mythical as unicorns.
History, however, presents the naked facts. And the naked facts are often extremely unpleasant. Don't get me wrong, I don't have a problem with telling children about the nasty things which have been done in the world: but I do have a problem with nastiness which is presented as entertainment.
Time for that quote: Sue Arnold writes:
"Punctuating the biographies [of famous pirates] are ... graphic descriptions of favourite piratical tortures, headed 'Gruesome Alert', which PC parents will probably veto. Don't be wet. Kids are tough. They'll enjoy hearing how, for example, one pirate dealt with a hostage who hadn't come up with the ransom money. The unfortunate man was forced to squat in a bamboo cage squashed down with a heavy lid for 14 years, which made him so deformed that when released he could only walk on all fours. Hence his nickname, the Dog Man. Not for the squeamish."
I'm sorry? Kids will ENJOY hearing this?
You know, some of them actually may. The ones without much imagination, and the ones who haven't noticed or bothered to think about the fact that the book follows pirates right up to the present day, and that perhaps torture isn't some quaint old-worlde custom after all. But I thought books were supposed to broaden our imaginations so that we are more capable of empathy, and I thought history might be a way of making us think more wisely about the present - rather than a lurid chamber-of-horrors freak-show.
My quarrel is not with Roy McMillan's book, which I haven't listened to - it may be well and sensitively written, and the subtitle which the author apparently employs, 'Gruesome Alert', may be genuinely intended to warn rather than to amplify. My quarrel is with the careless tone of the reviewer.
"Kids are tough" says Sue Arnold. Well, some of them are and some of them aren't, and parents know pretty well what their own offspring can stand; and what is likely to produce the tap on the bedroom door at midnight and the shivering cry of 'I can't get to sleep - I can't stop thinking about [insert horror of choice]' - so it's a bit silly to name-call those parents who do decide this is all a bit too strong, as 'PC'.
The world is full of horrors and always has been, we know. I don't in the least mind children hearing about them - at the appropriate age - as long as the adults who convey this information don't present it as fun stuff. (Those jolly old pirates, eh? What they got up to!)
My elder daughter studied GCSE history about five years ago, and one of the topics was 'Victorian Crime and Punishment'. Part of the course involved a close study of the Jack the Ripper murders - including photographs of the victims - for no good reason that I could see (since the Ripper was never caught and therefore never punished) other than its sensation value: educators clearly thought the subject would liven up potentially dull lessons. My daughter and a good portion of her classmates found it very disturbing, especially as her (female) history teacher appeared to enjoy the topic in a way which was quite out of sympathy with her class. Indeed, this woman told them with regret she was unable to show them more graphic photos, since when she had done so with the previous year's class, a girl had fainted.
Unlike their teacher, my sixteen year old daughter and her friends understood they were looking at pictures of real people - real women and girls, some maybe not much older than themselves - who had lived hard lives and known terror and pain and early death. They had been real, not some stop on an East End Jack-the-Ripper tourist trail.
"Kids are tough". Let's be sure this doesn't mean, "Kids are insensitive, unimaginative and callous. They need strong meat, even carrion: they won't appreciate anything better." Let's be sure we don't apply lower standards to children's history books, sensationalising them because we think children won't read them otherwise (and people say "it doesn't matter what they read so long as they're reading" - a statement quite as idiotic as "it doesn't matter what they eat so long as they're eating").
And let's agree that just because something happened in the past, doesn't make it entertainment.
See Katherine Langrish at the Cheltenham Festival, Sunday October 16th at 5.00pm, talking with Kevin Crossley-Holland about her book West of the Moon.
