Who would be a child made famous by a book? A.A. Milne’s son, immortalised as the teddy-trailing Christopher Robin in the ‘Pooh’ books, became a global celebrity and was remorselessly bullied at school for the privilege. Alastair, the spoilt offspring who inspired Kenneth Grahame’s Mr Toad in The Wind in the Willows, felt moved to step in front of a train at university in return. And it is perhaps best for Alice Liddell that she never lived to read contemporary concerns about Lewis Carroll’s true motives for immortalising her in his Wonderland.
This cost to children for enabling, even fuelling, an adult’s artistic ambition, is the starting point for the American YA author Melissa Albert’s first novel for adults, The Children. Guinevere (‘Guin’) and Ennis Sharpe find themselves unwilling celebrities with an obsessive fanbase when their mother Edith, after years of failure, finally has a breakout hit with her bestselling ‘Ninth City’ fantasy series, which features both siblings as named characters exploring a parallel dream world overseen by a mysterious ‘Architect’. It’s a series which readers later tended to recall as ‘darker than I remember. Crueller, stranger, more haunted by longing and loss. All good children’s books are.’ But adventures in the Ninth City were abruptly and notoriously brought to a close when a devastating house fire killed Edith, her husband, her agent and her friends, leaving the two stars of her books suddenly orphaned.
A pacy, modern-day narrative set in a sharply satirised media and art world shows the children grappling with this complex legacy. Guin is trying to take back control through a tell-all memoir (just as Christopher Milne attempted to do), when her guns are spiked by news that her estranged brother Ennis, now a reclusive and controversial conceptual artist, has designed a huge immersive work about their creator, simply entitled ‘Mother’.
This sparks a series of heady, strange and increasingly disturbing flashbacks for Guin of her and Ennis’s childhood spent roaming an isolated farmhouse in the woods of 1990s Vermont. She gradually uncovers the layers between an internalised fantasy memory of her literary childhood and a much bleaker reality.
The novel takes its time to chart a course between the story of a book’s creation and the price paid by the children at its heart; but every step is richly and enjoyably plotted, carefully laying the ground for a payoff that asks clear-eyed and uncomfortable questions about the true nature of artistic inspiration, creation and ownership. Suffice it to say, when it finally comes, the magical yet dark and disturbing reveal is far from suitable for children.
Comments