A few years ago, I was lucky enough to be thoroughly alarmed by the late Diana Wynne Jones.
I went to see her at the Cheltenham Literature Festival. In response to the inevitable question about her next book, she said that it would be published in February and was about a child who goes to visit relatives in Ireland only to find that strange things connected with Celtic mythology begin to happen.
"Eeek!" I thought; and at the end of the session I approached her with a 
question of my own.
"How do I tell my publisher," I asked her, "that my next book, about a child who goes to visit a relative in Ireland only to find that strange events connected with Celtic mythology begin to happen, is going to bomb because Diana Wynne Jones's book about the same thing comes out a month earlier?"
Well, she was absolutely lovely. She told me that this sort of thing was always happening, and that she was sure my book would be completely different from hers. Which, as it turned out, was completely accurate: I read and thoroughly enjoyed The Game, and my Bansi O'Hara and the Bloodline Prophecy was - thankfully! - nothing like it.
I'm thinking about this now because I've just read a terrific book about a boy who accidentally
summons an ancient deity. The deity accepts as a prayer something which wasn't intended to be a prayer at all, manifests before the boy, and asks for worship and sacrifices. In the story that follows, the gods are shown to be capricious, self-centred and arrogant, with little regard for the rights and
feelings of mere mortals.
If you're familiar with my work, you might think I'm describing my first
Zeus book,
Zeus on the Loose. But many of you may guess that I'm talking about
Wishful Thinking by Ali Sparkes - and if you haven't read it, I can thoroughly recommend it. It's very different from Zeus - much more of an adventure and less of a comedy, though it does have some genuinely funny moments - and is clearly aimed at an older readership. It's also beautifully structured, and includ
I was charmed and delighted when the Bookwitch reviewed How Ali Ferguson Saved Houdini. She compared it to Enid Blyton, but much better written. I loved the review, but this comment has stayed with me. Is Enid really that bad?
I am sure that we all watched Enid, the BBC4 dramatisation of her life. I watched in shock as a Helena Bonham Carter turned a childhood hero into a monster. Apparently, she was self-absorbed, manipulative and borderline abusive towards her own children.
But the critical-rot for Blyton set in much earlier than this drama. For years, she has been dismissed as a writer; not simply for her archaic attitudes (it is always the 'swarthy' character that has to be watched in the Famous Five), but also because of her carbon copy plots, her 2D characters, her wilful use of adverbs.
Even in the 1980s, when I was a child, some of my friends weren't allowed to read her. These same friends were also subjected to such outlandish things as soya milk and yoga, so in my eight-year-old eyes they were already to be pitied. But to be deprived of Enid Blyton seemed especially cruel, because for me, Enid Blyton was so much more than a writer. She was a haven. There were days when I desperately needed to hide and I hid inside my collection of Blytons.
Don't worry, this post isn't the opening of a misery memoir. Rather, I'd like to consider what it was about these critically trashed books that made them so powerful.
I knew that the Famous Five and the Five Find-Outers and the Secret Seven and the 'of Adventure' lot were all the same characters but with different names. I knew that. But I didn't care. In fact, the very opposite. I was glad to see them again in their different incarnations.
And I knew that Malory Towers and St Claire's weren't real (although that didn't stop me demanding a detour when, on a family holiday in South Wales, I misread a signpost). But despite the fact that I knew it was fiction, I had such a yearning to be part of the stable, unchanging world of lacrosse and midnight feasts and the upper fourth. It didn't matter that I couldn't tell a lacrosse stick from a liquorice stick. These girls were my friends. I loved that their characters didn't change, that there wasn't an emotional journey in sight.
I guess I'm saying that Enid Blyton's faults were the things that I loved - the unchanging, predictable world of a middle-class country I had never known.
It is telling, I think, that in the 9-12 section of my local Waterstones, Enid Blyton still takes up the most shelf space - yes, Michael Morpurgo has a fair spread and Jacqueline Wilson does even better. But Blyton is still Queen. Kids still need stories they can rely on.
Recentl
y I read Ali Sparkes' Frozen in Time. It is a deliberate and well-observed homage to the Famous Five. I enjoyed reading it very much. I was so pleased to
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I went to see her at the Cheltenham Literature Festival. In response to the inevitable question about her next book, she said that it would be published in February and was about a child who goes to visit relatives in Ireland only to find that strange things connected with Celtic mythology begin to happen.
question of my own.
summons an ancient deity. The deity accepts as a prayer something which wasn't intended to be a prayer at all, manifests before the boy, and asks for worship and sacrifices. In the story that follows, the gods are shown to be capricious, self-centred and arrogant, with little regard for the rights and 
feelings of mere mortals.
So true. I love this post.
Cathy MacPhail and I met last week as we were both short-listed for the Catalyst book award. Her book Grass is about a boy who witnesses a crime but doesn't tell the police, mine, When I Was Joe is about a boy who witnesses a crime and does tell the police. Originally she'd planned that her character would tell..was I glad that she changed her mind!
I read When I Was Joe recently, Keren, and loved it - one of those books you keep sneaking back to for "just one more chapter" when you really should be doing something else. Will put Grass on the to-read list too!
Really beautifully put, John. I am glad it turned out well for you.
But the anxiety about defensible originality can be crippling. It feels as if the JKRs and the DWJs almost 'sanitize' vast tracts of fantasy space. Who can write about a school for wizards ever again? Schoolchildren on trains are a bit dodgy now. Owls are out. Far too many people think that JKR invented all her her mythical creatures and therefore owns them, whereas in fact she just incorporated her research well, like many a good writer.
I am writing on a vaguely St George and dragonish theme at the moment, and had a fit of the shivers when I read a synopsis of The Hunger Games. Reading the actual book reassured me.
But you always feel there is another such threat around the corner, and that it will be published three weeks before your own book on the same subject.
Michelle Lovric (as anonymous because Blogger doesnt like me today)
I remember meeting Mary Hoffman at a Bloomsbury drinks years ago and being v disappointed to discover that we'd both written fantasy novels set in an alternate Renaissance Italy. They were so different I don't think the publisher even realised.
DWJ's Witch Week, the Worst Witch stories and - most famously - Harry Potter all involve magical boarding schools, but they are completely different in feel, plot and character.
There's very little that's truly original. My book Jessica Haggerthwaite: Witch Dispatcher concerns a scientific daughter with a mum who's a New Age witch. Jessica had alreaady been published when I opened a Sunday magazine to find an interview with a New Age Witch and her extremely non-witchy daughter - although I think the daughter wanted to be a solicitor rather than a scientist.
Truth is as strange as fiction.
Aw, thanks John!
What a fab post - you are so right, this must happen all the time but it's a real panic moment when you realise that someone else 'thought of it first'. A similar thing happened to me recently over the title of my forthcoming book 'Buttercup Magic' and my discovery that a book had just come out called 'Buttercup Mash'! Thankfully, these are two very different books, and unlike me, the publisher didn't going into panic mode!
I remember DWJ telling me (though I think she said the idea was T. Pratchett's) that these coincidences were the result of subatomic particles called "ideons" that stream through the universe, striking writers in quick succession.
Yes, she mentioned the ideons at our meeting as well, and attributed the notion to TP.
I wasn't sure I'd remembered the word correctly, or I might have mentioned it in the post.
Also, very often things just seem to be floating around in the air...a few years back, there were about four novels about Noah and his ark from various bods. All quite different from one another. Very interesting post!
Ooh, Nicky, which Nicky are you? I was going to say that my City of Masks came out about a week after Cornelia Funke's The Thief Lord, also set in Venice and then there was a whole slew of them.
And Marcus Sedgwick told nme he delayed writing his Kiss of Death because of City of Mask, so it cuts both ways.
I have always firmly believed in TP's ideons = inspiration particles notion.
There is no other possible explanation. But I think it might be worth letting the gods in our world idea rest for a bit. What with Neil Gaiman's Americon Gods, DWJ's Eight Days of Luke and Douglas Adams' Thor I think we should all leave it a while!
Great post, John. I firmly believe in TP's ideons too. I've noticed that there are books on a similar theme every year, but thankfully, and luckily, they have mainly had a very different take on the theme.
Ideons definitely exist, and for more than book ideas. I'm also a believer in what might be called word-ions. That's when you come across a word entirely new to you, and then hear it or read it three times in the next week! Great post, John - and I'm incredibly envious that you actually met the great Diana herself.
My son definitely enjoyed Percy Jackson all the more for having read Zeus on the Loose first! I'm sure the ideons thing is exactly what Jung identified as the collective unconscious evidenced by the similarity of myths and legends from around the world.