Windows on the world?

Yesterday morning, while I was being less efficient than I should have been with housework, the children were both totally occupied, for at least 2 hours, by reading. The seven year old is working her way through “Harry Potter” for the second time; the ten year old was reading “Gone with the Wind.” We’d started her on that because we’re going to the Deep South this summer, and when she began asking questions about the American Civil War and plantation living and so on, we felt that was as good a place as any to start (also, I thought that she’s not altogether unlike Scarlett in character, and might gain from reading the book on that level, too ; )) I was slightly surprised, but very pleased, when she became totally gripped by it, finishing it that evening in floods of tears when Rhett walks out, and making some very pertinent comments about how Scarlett’s own actions have led to her eventual fate.
While we were out doing errands that afternoon, she kept asking questions about it, backed up with detailed references to the text, which I found hard to deal with because it must be at least fifteen years since I read it myself. And this led on to me thinking about how the books one reads in childhood, perhaps especially between the ages of, say, 9 and 14, stay with you as no others do. I can quote great chunks of the Narnia books verbatim, for example, page by page if not literally word by word. But they have to be the books that sing to you from the page, and which books do that will differ from person to person. For me, the books that really spoke to me were mostly fantasy. J has read Phillip Pullman and Harry Potter, but on the whole, fantasy isn’t really her thing. The bits of GWTW that seem to have resonated with her are the descriptions of people, both in appearance and actions. For me, I tended to be moved more by physical descriptions of places or situations, or bits of writing that caught my imagination.
If I had to take one series of books to a desert island, it would be the Earthsea books, by Ursula le Guin. I read the original three back when I was about eleven, and loved them. There were bits in them that moved me profoundly, as an adolescent, like the song fragment, “…only in darkness light, bright the hawk’s flight on the empty sky”, or the description of the underground labyrinth, or Ged, scarred and damaged by his own false pride, painfully doing the right thing because he can do no other. The books she wrote years later, from a more feminist perspective, I love now as an adult woman: I don’t know what I’d have made of them if they’d been around when I was younger. But J shows no interest in le Guin, and I don’t know if she ever will: for her, a situation generally has to be realistic, and preferably involve a female protagonist, to grip her. And that’s fine. We are all different, and the last thing I should do is expect her to be me again.
While J prefers realistic books, she is more than happy for them to describe protagonists in situations very different from her own: she’s read the Diary of Anne Frank, for example, and various books about adolescent girls in difficult cultures, such as Afghanistan under the Taliban, or Ancient China in the days of foot-binding. And I think that’s just as it should be. It always surprises me when I discover that apparently lots of people don’t want to read about people different from themselves, as Monica Jackson’s blog often comments. I suppose that the romance genre might be a bit different from everything else, in that presumably the reader is chiefly identifying with the heroine, but surely, if the book is well written, the fact that it might be about characters of a different colour or race or age or sexuality from oneself should only be a good thing? When I was a bit older than J is now, say 15 or so, I read Mary Renault’s “The Persian Boy”, written in the first person viewpoint as if by the eunuch boy partner of Alexander the Great. I think someone would have to be very bigoted not to empathise with the protagonist there, because of the skill with which the author takes us inside his head, and I’m sure that, as a heterosexual female, that book had a very significant part in forming my open attitude towards homosexuality. (If there were a word that meant the opposite of homophobia, I’d have used it there, but I can’t think of one.)
Anyway, Monica, who should know, being a black author of romances about black characters, says that many white readers won’t read books by, or about, black characters, full stop. And I was musing about this while driving, and thinking about the conversation I’d had with J earlier, and I realised something. Ursula le Guin is about as revered and esteemed a writer of science fiction and fantasy as you can get, and the Earthsea series is very famous. She’s written lots of other books set in other universes, including one cycle with hermaphrodite humanoids: she’s very keen on social anthropology in science fiction, which is one of the reasons why I like her books. But how many of the readers of the Earthsea books notice, I wonder, that the central characters are not white? The alien primitive people at the edge of the world are distinguished by their strange pale skins and yellow hair. The Earthsea archipelago is populated by people who, I should think, are more or less Asian in appearance, mostly; brown skin is the norm in that world. And surely this is one great overlooked virtue of fantasy or speculative fiction: that it can alter your perspective so subtly that you barely notice it happening. You find yourself as shocked by the strangeness of the pallid foreigners as the central characters are, however pallid you may be yourself, because you are carried away by the skill of the writing.
Books set in the real world, of course, don’t have this luxury, because they are rooted in actual cultures that we all know, or think we do. I don’t know what Monica Jackson’s attitude would be to “Gone with the Wind”; as I remember, the black characters are rather stereotypical: but any book that can grip a 10 year old for more than a thousand pages and leave her in tears, eighty years after it was written, has got to have something going for it, I’d have thought. Anyway, I’m going to try J with “To Kill a Mockingbird”, when she’s a little older. That should get her thinking, too.