'I wanna be in your gang...' 2 - by Sue Purkiss

This is a post from a few years ago - but I thought it was worth another airing. It's about the importance of creating a 'gang' of characters - which is of particular significance in series fiction or drama. These examples are from adult books - but of course a 'gang' is also important in many children's books. The Famous Five is a very long-standing example, but you won't have to look far on your shelves to find many others. (Incidentally, for other fans of Call My Agent, I'm sure I read the other day that they're making a film of it...) Interestingly, the other day, at a book group meeting, someone said she really dislikes series fiction. I was taken aback - will ask her next time to expand and explain. Anyone else feel the same? In the meantime, I hope those of you who do like series fiction will enjoy this.

  A week or two ago, I came across an author who was new to me: Philip Gwynne Jones. He writes books set in Venice, where he lives. He's written four or five so far, and I read them all quite quickly. Like other writers whose books are set in La Serenissima, he obviously adores the city, and it's almost a character in itself. He describes the food particularly lovingly - rather like Donna Leon, who's written a long series set there. But he's funnier than Donna Leon; he has a lighter touch. His hero, Nathan Sutherland, is an Honorary Consul, which sounds very Graham Greene. An Honorary Consul, apparently - who knew? - is a voluntary official who helps British citizens when their passports or purses are stolen, or when they get into minor scrapes with the police. In the process of his consular duties, Nathan gets to know an interesting network of people, and finds himself becoming involved in crimes which are much more interesting than his everyday fare. The stories are good, the setting is great - but when I finished the last one, I realised that the regret I felt was for the characters: Nathan himself, hapless but surprisingly good to have around when the going gets tough: Dario, his motorbiking friend, loyal to a fault, who shares with him a passion for Hawkwind and others of that ilk; Vanni, the policeman, a little world weary but very much on the side of the angels, even when they're a little grubby; Federica, Nathan's art restorer girlfriend, straight-talking, funny, sharp, and ridiculously brave; Zio Giacomo, superlative cook and uncle to Fede. It's obviously going to be some time before the next book comes out, and, well - I'm going to miss these guys.

The cast of Call My Agent

The other group of friends I've recently had to wave a fond farewell to was the cast of a TV programme: a French series on Netflix, Call My Agent. It's about an acting agency in Paris. There's Mathias, initially smooth and a tad snake-like (but he grows, he changes!); Andrea, passionate, driven, funny; Gabriel, kind, warm, a bit desperate; Arlette, who's been around for ever and dearly loves her dog, Jean Gabin; Camille, thoughtful, ambitious, caring; Noemie, mad as a box of frogs; wonderful, funny Herve, whose emotions are so close to the surface; beautiful Sophie, who so desperately wants to be an actress that she almost loses sight of what's really important; and Hicham, the handsome and apparently ruthless new boss. There are four series, and I wanted to race through them, but as we drew closer to the end, I had to put off seeing the last episode, because I didn't want to say goodbye.

The first time I remember having this bereft feeling was after reading The Lord of the Rings as a teenager. I hadn't heard of it - I'm not sure where I would have in those days - but came across the middle volume, The Two Towers, in Ilkeston Library. It looked interesting; I borrowed it and was hooked. Then I reserved the first and third volumes and read those. I asked for the whole set for Christmas, and for quite a few years, I re-read them every year.

You know how you can quite clearly remember certain moments? I remember walking along the street - couldn't tell you which one, probably on the way home from school - after finishing the triliogy the first time round, and feeling very sad as it struck me that I no longer had the hobbits for company. I liked the hobbits. They were funny and brave and loved food and had hairy feet, and there was no-one at all like them in my world. I liked the other characters too, but the hobbits were my pals and I felt so sad that I no longer had their company. (You may deduce from this that I was an odd teenager, and you would be quite correct.) 

Remembering this, I thought about two recent favourite series: Elly Griffiths' Ruth Galloway novels, set in North Norfolk, and Colin Cotterill's Dr Siri novels, set in Laos. I don't often re-read books, but I have re-read these, several times. Both series are funny, and that's one big draw; but the main thing about them is that each has a gang of friends: eccentric, loyal, funny, off-beat. (If you'd like to know more about these two series, see here for Ellie Griffith and here for Colin Cotterill.) I'm not the only one who wants to be part of Ruth Galloway's gang, incidentally; there are lots of us over on Twitter, who avidly discuss how we'd cast a TV series ( Ruth Jones for Ruth Galloway, Richard Armitage for Nelson, David Tennant for Cathbad?) and speculate about whether Ruth will ever, finally get together with Nelson.

As you can see, the characters become very real.

Of course, there are lots of other factors that go into deciding whether a book is a favourite or not. But for me, when it comes to choosing the books I want to return to, certainly one of the most important things is that there needs to be a gang. And it has to be one I really, really want to belong to.

How about you? 

Other worlds - Sue Purkiss

When children ask at events why I like reading - and writing - so much, my stock response is that a book can take you into a different world: and why wouldn't you like to be able to immerse yourself in other worlds, wherever you are and whatever your circumstances?

Recently I've been thinking a bit about that. I've been sifting through my memories of childhood reading in particular, and thinking about which books created a world which really drew me in.

The most obvious one is The Lord of the Rings. I used to go to the town library every week - I was a voracious reader. One day I came across a book called The Two Towers, by J R R Tolkien. I was about 13, I suppose. Or maybe I was a bit older, because it was in the adult library, and I can't remember what age you had to be to move on from the children's - though I did use to borrow my older sister's ticket sometimes. I'd never heard of Tolkien, and I didn't realise when I took the book out that it was the middle one of a trilogy.

Hobbiton

No matter - I raced through it, and then had to wait impatiently till I could borrow the first and third volumes. I was completely enchanted. I'm sure I'd read the Narnia books by then, and one of my favourite books from the children's library was Mr Whisper, by Brenda Macrow, which is a blend of real life and a fantasy world - but I hadn't come across any other books set completely in a fantasy world, and with such a blend of adventure, mythology, high epic purpose - and hobbits. I remember feeling utterly bereft when I emerged from the third book and realised that I had to return to a world without hobbits. I could just about manage without the elves and the wizards and the dwarves - but hobbits? No, too much to ask!

But it doesn't have to be a fantasy world. Heidi - that was a different world. I loved the Alm, and the goats, and the Alm Uncle, and the sweet-smelling straw bed in the loft, and the toasted cheese for supper. I loved the way the sunset turned the mountains rose and amber and gold, and I loved the tall houses of the city too.

Then there was Anne of Green Gables, with the big cherry tree outside Anne's window, with kind Matthew and crotchetty Marilla - and with Anne herself, passionate and brave. And earlier, there was a book whose name I don't remember, about a family who lived in a pretty white house with a stream running in front of it, which you crossed by a little bridge. There was just an ordinary family there, who did things like paddling in the stream - nothing at all exciting. But I loved the idea of that little house - perhaps because I lived on a council estate in an ex-mining town; we had a lovely garden, but you couldn't have called the estate pretty, and there was no stream, no surrounding countryside.

I don't really know where I'm going with this. I suppose every book has to create a world which convinces you while you're inside it, while you're reading it. Often, of course, they are worlds where you really wouldn't want to stay, and that certainly doesn't prevent you from enjoying the book.

But those books that invite you into their world and make you want to stay there - those are the ones that have a special place in my heart. What about you? Which books do that for you?

What's In A World by Steve Gladwin?

I really feel sorry for people when they say that they either don’t enjoy reading, or find it painful. As someone who has loved reading like the very blood or breath of life for as long as I can remember, the idea of not having it would be a torment. I have been thinking recently about which of three loves – TV and film, music and reading – I could least give up and the answer is obvious. Yes I’d miss music, but I’d always have it in my head, whereas without reading I’d have to create the stories for myself. So OK, as both a writer and a storyteller I should be able to do this, but despite my own recent attempts within the fantasy genre, I could never be Tolkien or Lewis, Susan Cooper or Catherine Fisher, Guy Gavriel Kay or William Horwood. Nor could I write like Philip Pullman, and it is my recent decision to re-read the His Dark Materials books that has led to this blog.

Like most books, a good fantasy can be experienced either through discovering it retrospectively – responding to a recommendation or just not wanting to be left out - or as a brand new sparkling entity. The two feelings you get are similarly thrilling, even if they are at one remove from each other. In the first you can barely contain your enthusiasm at being party to all the secrets and thrills that everyone else has told you about. You might almost call this the ‘it’s all true’ factor. In the second it’s more likely to be a ‘oh this is so wonderful and I have to tell everyone about it.’ I’ve met a number of those in fantasy in my life, of which more in a minute.

Back to the Gladwin household in the early seventies, and much to everyone’s surprise, my father took himself into our front room for three weeks running, stuck on the gas fire and meticulously ploughed through all 1076 pages of The Lord of the Rings. I remember him saying how much he enjoyed it too.

The book  club edition my dad read

What was maybe more unusual was that I decided to read it straight after him, and I was only maybe thirteen. OK, I had read the Hobbit, but apart from that my only experience of fantasy must have been the Narnia books and Alan Garner. I too enjoyed it, and also remember meticulously copying out the entire map of middle earth which was in the above edition. It would however be many years before I repeated the experience.

A couple of years later I tried to write my own fantasy novel which I called ‘The Chronicles of Action’ (pronounced ac-tee-on). It wasn’t a bad premise, the discovery after a dust storm that a desert race had once been a great civilisation. I wrote quite a bit of it, but is was usual with these things soon gave it up as hard work. What I did realise years later was that it was partly a rip-off of an absolutely wonderful series called The Trigan Empire which my sister and I used to read in a children’s magazine called ‘Look and Learn’. My sister Chris and I were riveted by this intergalactic story of men in loin cloths fighting over an empire and couldn’t wait for the next installment. I’ve just checked and apparently you can get the whole thing now as a free download, which is a good job as you should see the prices of the originals on Amazon!

But the LOTR experience must have triggered something, because it was in  my teens that I completely embraced fantasy writing and what was then called Sword and Sorcery in particular. For a good few years my bookshelf was crammed with Corum and Conan, Dorian Hawkmoon and Fafhyd and the Gray Mouser, The Witch World and The Worm Ouroborus, Thongor and Elric. I couldn’t get enough of the stuff. Just recently I re-read Michael Moorcock’s second series about Corum, his Celtic myth inspired hero. It must have been a series I had at the time, but didn’t read, but boy had I missed out! With twenty odd years of Celtic myth loving behind me I now positively reveled in this particular world.

My fantasy reading after that splurge was patchy at best, but I’ll always remember the series of books which reignited it and has remained my favourite set of books of any genre. It was in my early twenties that I discovered Guy Gavriel Kay’s magisterial and haunting trilogy, The Fionavar Tapestry.

I’ve talked about it in previous blogs of course, but for me the series had all the things which no other fantasy novel I have read before or since has quite had. Not the least of these is that it has the sort of depth that less empathetic writers like Robert E. Howard - who created Conan the Barbarian, but who was after all paid to write magazine pulp fiction in the same way Conan Doyle was - or Michael Moorcock, who dreams so well ,but doesn’t always seem to care very much about his characters, can only aspire to. After a rather clunky beginning involving our five heroes and heroines actually getting to Fionavar, the world building itself, its geography, myths and customs, is both carefully and lovingly done.

Guy Gavriel Kay had spent a year helping Christopher Tolkien to prepare The Silmarillion, so it’s hardly surprising that some of this rubbed off so beautifully. In the series Celtic and Norse mix effortlessly, but unlike say CS Lewis, who seemed to take shiny bits of myth from here and there like some out of control literary magpie, (and much to the frustration of his more meticulous friend Tolkien), the mix works and adds to the depth of the whole.

Flash forward a good few years and a friend tells me about this set of children’s books which really aren’t like children’s books at all. I order The Dark Is Rising sequence on his recommendation alone and halfway through Over Sea, Under Stone I am roundly cursing him for getting me to read something which seems so juvenile and with such irritating kids in it. Still I’m nearly forty and maybe they’re not meant for me.

Then I read the second book, The Dark is Rising itself and the whole world changes. It changes so much that I wonder if some other writer hasn’t elbowed the writer of the first book out of the way, and is showing her what she really wanted to write.

In The Dark is Rising in particular there is a sense of the ancient and often uncompromising that seems to permeate the whole book with an ominous foreshadowing which just gets darker and darker as the forces of the Dark themselves close in. In the chapter on children’s writing in his recent wonderful book ‘Landscapes’, Robert Macfarlane calls The Dark is Rising the most eerie book he has ever read and I have to agree, for never before had I felt such a sense of what I can only call book claustrophobia. It seems to be not just the walls that are closing in around the reader, but the whole world.

The sequence which Robert Macfarlane regards as the most memorable is Will’s awakening to his inheritance as an Old One on solstice morning. Here he realises that he has been transported deep into the past where everything is older and more intense and the snowbound landscape far more threatening.. Susan Cooper is expert at taking us in and out of Will’s familiar world and almost dipping us into another one, so that, like a wandering pen nib, we pick up some of the story’s mythic ink and add it to our knowledge. Unlike Lewis, where the story passes back to our own many narnian years later, or Tolkien, where there is no passing into other worlds or tricks with time, Susan Cooper renders time fluid, which has the result of making it all the more unsettling.

Again I could spend a whole blog talking just about that series of books, but I have to move on. My most recent discovery is the Hyddenworld books of William Horwood and like The Dark Is Rising, His Dark Materials and The Fionavar Tapestry, they have had an effect on me as a writer as well as an intermittent reader of fantasy.

In Hyddenworld the smaller race called the Hydden live alongside - and for the most part unnoticed - our own, in much the same way as the Muggles co-exist with the magic folk in Harry Potter. The centre of their version of Englalond is Birmingham which is re-christened Brum and it is that area where the myth that underpins the four books, the smith Beornamund and his making of the gems for his lost love, takes place. But like Middle Earth and Fionavar, the southern counties and Wales of Will Stanton in The Dark is Rising series and the adjusted version of our world in His Dark Materials, William Horwood’s books are about landscape and traveling, as much as anyone else. And as in Philip Pullman’s trilogy, the journey to get there and the reason for going is everything.

Robert E Howard’s great warrior barbarian Conan too bestrode the glittering and always deadly world of the Hyborian age, fighting and wenching and rescuing, overturning plots by a combination of brute force and native cunning and by making the right alliances. Conan is no milk sop of a hero folks. When in the story A Witch Shall be Born, he is crucified by his enemies, he bites the head off the first vulture to dare to go for his eyes, before he is rescued by a former ally. One of the many great disservices done to fantasy by modern cinema was that Big Arnie’s versions made him into little more than a one dimensional pile of muscles. The real Conan has a great deal more to him over and above the muscles and head lopping. He gets to be King of Aquilonia after all, and despite all the usual plots, a good and successful one who holds his throne.

I set out in this blog to try and understand what makes a great fantasy novel for both adults and children. I soon became aware however that all I could write about was the fantasy I myself had loved and experienced.

Then something clicked, and for the first time I was able to see why I have loved most of the fantasy books and series I have read in my life and what they had in common. For there is something that unites Will Stanton, Will Parry and Lyra Belaqua, Conan and Corum, Jack, Catherine and Bedwyn Stort in Hyddenworld, The Fellowship of the Ring on their long road to Mordor, the four Pevensea children in the Narnia Books and the five travelers in the Fionavar Tapestry. I will try to pace out what it is.

Clearly all of them have a destiny, which they are both at first unaware of. and later refuse to accept. Having finally given into that destiny, they gather companions for their quest and they set out through various trials and disappointments, taking and rejecting advice and friendship as they go, until they enter the belly of the beast, fight their battles, suffer their dreadful losses, win - but often at a cost both personal and spiritual - until in the time to come they must decide whether they can live with those memories or not. Having made that decision they may then either symbolically die, or leave the world in which they have journeyed for somewhere calmer.

In other words they are all of them undergoing the Hero’s Journey, as related by Joseph Campbell in his seminal book, The Hero With a Thousand Faces. So far so predictable I suppose, because one presumes we authors had that in our DNA long before it became someone’s life's work.

But in my case one of the things my favourites have in common is landscape. Now I love landscape, but I can't pretend to have walked a great deal of it, with the exception of a 49 mile pilgrimage walk on the Pembrokeshire Coast Path. However it does seem that what the fantasy books I have read and loved - from Conan to Corum, Will Stanton to Will Parry, and Bedwyn Stort to the little hobbitses and never forgetting Kim, Jennifer, Dave, Paul and Kevin - have in common is not just the journey, (or more often journeys) themselves, but the lands in which they travel. Whether it be Middle Earth or Brum, the Hyborian Age or Citigazze, the lands and spaces always have thrills and experiences to offer in their own right independent of the characters themselves.

As I was finishing this blog, my partner and I were reflecting on the last, for the most part, very difficult year when an idea lit up like a flame in my mind. 
It is the tradition in a fairy or folk tale to end a story with the phrase 'and they all lived happily ever after'. It's a nice, neat, sealing off device isn't it and we come to expect it. For the most part and even after such horrendous events in something like say The Juniper Tree, with all its child abuse, dismemberment and cannibalism, all can become well just like that.

Of course it can't, because how on earth could a family live with the legacy of those circumstances outside of a fairy tale? There are far too many other examples to mention, but to take just one how, in the story of Tam Lin, after Janet has rescued her husband to be from the Queen of Elf Land, do they then go about living together - the man who has been under enchantment in an enchanted land for seven years and a day and this spoiled if now wiser daughter of an earl who is pregnant with his child. One is after all recovering from years of potential trauma and the other from third degree burns!

Of course the easy answer may be just to say that these are all just fairy stories and therefore make-believe, so how can we expect them to make sense? But equally that isn't good enough.

Surely the people who told these tales - which were after all traditional tales, handed down from mouth to mouth before they were ever collected, published or filmed - were canny enough to understand that some things can never be got over and - as a late friend of mine so wisely said - can only be come to terms with, Perhaps then that neat little ending is in many cases little better than a ' coming to terms'.

'So the little boy, (who had been killed, eaten, resurrected as a magical avenging bird and then brought back to life as himself again), and their father, went back into the their sweet little cottage under the Juniper Tree leaving the smashed corpse of their awful stepmother under the giant mill wheel and they all --- somehow learned to come to terms with it.   

It doesn't quite have the same neat little bow ring to it, does it?

And so in conclusion it's no surprise for me to find that apart from the hero's journey, the landscape and the quest element and the rest of it, the vast majority of the books I've mentioned have a sense of profound loss at the end of them and little choice but for the characters to have to come to terms with all they have endured. Friends, innocence and sometimes a whole way of life have gone, and Jack and Catherine, Will and Lyra, Frodo and Sam, and Kim and Dave now have to adjust to a different kind of life, where memory will always be bitter sweet and the pain of those things they have lost a mere heartbeat away.

Is this why we read these books then, knowing that they will offer us something more mature and searching than fairy stories, knowing as we do that life very rarely is all 'happy ever after'?   

​

Steve Gladwin - 'Grove of Seven' and 'The Year in Mind'

Writer, Performer and Teacher

Author of 'The Seven' and 'The Raven's Call'

www.stevegladwin.co.uk

        

Reckless Hate by Val Tyler

This is the sixth time I have attempted to write my blog. So far, I have come up with nothing worth reading because I cannot move past Theoden’s quote from Lord of the Rings:

                              ‘So much death. What can men do against such reckless hate?’

Sadly, this is a quote for our times.

Theoden died fighting evil and was avenged by a girl and a hobbit.

I leave you with this message:

                              Don’t underestimate women or peace-loving little people.

Fictional crushes... by Cecilia Busby

I have a confession to make. I bought tickets six weeks in advance for The Force Awakens (for those of you who spent 2015 under a stone, that's the new Star Wars film) - and it wasn't because my kids were begging me to. It was because I couldn't wait to see it myself.

The main reason for this is that I was exactly the right age to be bowled over by the first two Star Wars films, and I was exactly the right age to develop a huge crush on Harrison Ford. I saw The Empire Strikes Back twice at the cinema (unheard of in my bookish, not very well-off family, where cinema visits were few and far between), and then refreshed my memories for months afterwards with the book of the film. My crush on Harrison Ford is a bit of a family joke now - but my excitement at heading to the cinema for the latest instalment in the Han Solo/Leia/Luke saga reminded me of just how strong those feelings can be.

Of course, crushes on fictional characters is a big part of growing up. My youngest is just coming up to the prime age for it - early teens - and I have a sneaking suspicion that her desire to see Spectre has less to do with the high speed chases and twisting plot and more to do with Daniel Craig's cheekbones... But crushes on fictional characters is something you can experience at any age - and although the classic crush is on a film star or pop singer, I think my strongest crushes have always been on book characters, because they are entirely my own. Even though other people may read the same book, and love the same character, they won't have exactly the same person in their head, because with books, you do some of the imaginative work yourself.

I still find that the books that grab me most are those where I have fallen just a little bit in love with one of the characters. Recently, my strongest fictional crush has been Thomas Cromwell, from Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall. I'm in good company on that one - Caitlin Moran asked others on twitter if they also fancied T. Cromwell, and was inundated with responses agreeing that he was, indeed, the thinking woman's crush de jour.

But the best and strongest crushes will always be those from the books I read as a teenager. So step forward, Beau Geste, who took the rap for a crime he didn't commit to save the girl he loved, and ran away to join the Foreign Legion. Take a bow, Ged, from Ursula le Guin's Earthsea series - who moved from being an impatient, proud and impetuous boy with enormous magical power to a wiser and sadder man, but still a great wizard, and took my heart with him on his journeys. Wave your sword, Faramir, from Lord of the Rings, the gentle, bookish second son who had to deal with his father's rage and anger that he was not Boromir, and who found solace eventually with the shield-maiden Eowyn (aka myself). Duck down behind the hedge, Stalky, on your way to some adventure outside the school grounds, running rings round the stuffy boarding-school masters.

(I discovered recently that another children's author had had a crush on one of the characters from Stalky and Co, but to her credit, it was with the poetry-writing, bespectacled Beetle rather than the adventurous leader of the gang - I'm afraid my crushes were much more conventional, as you can tell!)

But I didn't just fall for handsome boys - and in fact, if the main character was a classic 'handsome boy' I tended to avoid the book like the plague - I've never been a fan of romance as a genre. I liked my crushes to be witty, unusual, interesting, maybe a bit tortured but definitely with more to do in the story than just fall in love. And they didn't have to be human - one of my earliest crushes was probably Bagheera, the panther, from The Jungle Book. (I was recently rather taken with his alter-ego, Silas, in Neil Gaiman's The Graveyard Book.)

Now that I'm a writer, even though I concentrate on middle grade rather than YA, I find I can't help falling a little bit in love with some of my characters. I have to keep the crush well under wraps, but there are a few give-aways, and I like to think that some, at least, of my readers will share my crushes.

There's the partying, carefree Sir Gawaine, in the last of my Spell Series, who is very subtly an object of interest for would-be knight Olivia (previously a little bit in love with King Arthur). There's the bard, Caradoc, who has a little bit of magic and is surprisingly skilful with a blade (and you'll have to read Cauldron Spells to find out who he turns out to be). And in my Amber series, I have to confess to just a bit of a crush on the Druid - ex-Forest Agent, witty, sarcastic, strongly magical and with a distinctly shady past, as well as the bearer of a broken heart.

In my most recent work-in-progress, I've re-activated a longstanding crush on the Norse God Loki (I think I was always attracted to his combination of mischief and humour, as well as his tragic end, but Diana Wynne Jone's Eight Days of Luke sealed the deal when I was about 11).

(And talking of Diana Wynne Jones, she is responsible for quite a few of my teen and early adult crushes, including probably the biggest crush of them all - on Mitt, from the Dalemark Quartet).

My own version of Loki is, like many others, quick-witted, sarcastic, vain and powerfully magical. He's ready to fight when necessary but aims to run away whenever possible - doesn't suffer fools gladly, but won't stand for injustice either - and ultimately he's always willing to laugh at himself. He's probably my ideal fictional crush.

So there you are - my embarrassing crushes revealed. What are yours?




Cecilia Busby writes humorous fantasy adventures for ages 7-12 as C.J. Busby. Her latest book, The Amber Crown, was published in March by Templar.

www.cjbusby.co.uk

@ceciliabusby

"Great fun - made me chortle!" (Diana Wynne Jones on Frogspell)

"A rift-hoping romp with great wit, charm and pace" (Frances Hardinge on Deep Amber)

Accelerated Reader - What's it all about? Cecilia Busby

Those of you who have children at secondary school, or are teachers or librarians, may have come across a new(ish) scheme called Accelerated Reader.

Administered in the UK by Renaissance Learning, Accelerated Reader is a system that grades books, suggests appropriate reading levels and then monitors pupils' reading by giving them a multiple choice quiz on the book they've just read. The system analyses the quiz responses to show teachers whether the pupil has read the book, and what aspects of it they found difficult (e.g., vocabulary, or higher level comprehension).


If they fly through a couple of quizzes, they are rewarded with a higher reading band. They can also collect points according to how long the book was that they read - leading to a total score of words read, and the accolade of 'word millionaire' when they get to the magic 1,000,000 words. They are however expected to stay within their bands - books read outside them, although allowed, do not count for rewards and incentives. For a slower reader, expected to progress at a certain number of books per term, or for a competitive reader, determined to get to the millionaire mark first, this more or less prohibits reading outside the given bands.

According to the National Literacy Trust, the use of Accelerated Reader in schools does actually get more pupils reading, and increases the proportion of pupils in the difficult teenage years who say they enjoy reading, will admit to a favourite book, and read widely across genres.

My daughter's school has just started using the scheme and the number of pupils taking books out of the school library has tripled compared with the same time last year. It's hard to argue with that kind of boost to pupils' interest in books and there really does seem to be a noticeable encouragement to read through the motivation of online quizes and rewards, particularly for boys.

What interests me, though, is the banding structure and the rationale behind it. AR uses a computer programme which scans the books and then analyses them for vocabulary and syntax (proportion of complex sentences). The range of banding for the books in a secondary school library is roughly from about 3 to about 11 or 12 for the very hardest books (for a rough idea of what these mean - R.L. Stine's Goosebumps books are about 3; Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov has an AR level of 11.1 )

AR level 3.0

AR level 11.1

More complex sentences and more advanced vocabulary result in a higher banding: and this more or less seems to work in terms of what one thinks of as appropriate progression - nobody is capable of reading Karamazov before they're capable of reading Goosebumps.

But there are two things I think are seriously problematic with the underlying assumptions of this scheme.

The first is a prescription that I think is wrong-headed: that we progress in reading in a straight line - that when we are capable of reading Dostoevsky, we are 'beyond' R.L. Stine. In fact, I think there are plenty of people who might go back and forth between the two and get different pleasures out of each. AR schemes do talk about letting pupils read 'below' their level as occasional 'comfort reads' - but this is presented as a kind of reversion. It's a bit like the idea that we all sometimes need to watch crap telly and eat donuts. It won't enrich our lives but it will give us some 'down-time'. For me, the idea that you are 'slumming it' by reading the 'easier' book is a pernicious one. The lower-level books are not just donuts, they may have all sorts of fabulous and enriching things to say to us as readers - they just do it in a different, though not necessarily less crafted or effective, way.

The second assumption is that the 'straight line' of reading progression is entirely about syntax and vocabulary. And this is where the truly jaw-dropping anomalies of AR banding become apparent. Using the AR website to check the relative banding of books for my daughter, I was amazed to discover that Alan Garner's Owl Service is banded at 3.7. By contrast, Dav Pilkey's Captain Underpants is 4.3. And Captain Underpants and the Revolting Radioacive Robo-Boxers (presumably because of the number of multi-syllable words) is a whopping 5.3.

AR level 4.3

AR level 3.7

Bear in mind that the AR scheme suggests pupils are given relatively narrow bands to choose from - my daughter was started on 4.5–4.9. She was too high for The Owl Service, although she couldn't yet read The Weirdstone of Brisingamen, at 6.3. If she waited to be able to read the Weirdstone, however, she would be too high to read its sequel, The Moon of Gomrath, which is 5.4.

Philip Reeve's Here Lies Arthur (a fabulous retelling of the Arthur legend from the point of view of a young girl co-opted into helping the bard Merlin, who is presented as a kind of early 'spin-doctor') is 5.6, so she'd reach that well before she was able to read Reeves' knockabout books for younger readers, the Buster Bayliss series (Custardfinger is rated 6.3).

Meanwhile, she is lucky that her favourite author, Marcus Sedgwick, uses relatively simple sentences, as that means that many of his books are in her range (My Swordhand is Singing, a complex tale of vampires set in medieval Eastern Europe, is 4.9). However, she's missed out on his Floodland, which is 3.9, and it won't be long before she's progressed to the point where all of Sedgwick's novels will have to be 'comfort reads', as Kevin-Crossley Holland's magnificent Arthur books already are (4.2–4.3). Never mind - because she can always stretch herself with Daisy Meadows; Kate the Royal Wedding Fairy is 5.4.

AR level 5.4

AR level 5.0

I could go on - but here is one final one to ponder. Debi Gliori's Pure Dead Brilliant is a whopping 7.5. This means you won't be able to progress to it till you are too high for The Lord of The Rings (6.1), and in fact you'd be in the same ball-park band as The Silmarillion at 7.9.

The computer analysis used to grade AR books clearly doesn't read them - it processes them as strings of words. The more important aspects of books - the ideas, the plot twists, the characters, the emotions, the metaphorical language - all of this is entirely missed. Yet this is most of what makes a book enjoyable, memorable, heart-breaking, what touches or thrills you as a reader. I am immensely saddened by the idea that whole swathes of teenagers are going to flick past The Owl Service and fail to pick it off the shelf of the school library because it has a black sticker on it (easy) rather than green or purple (harder, higher, more worthy).

Accelerated Reader is beloved of Ofsted, because it produces quantifiable results and signs of 'progress'. It certainly seems to be getting more pupils reading, and excited about getting their rewards and stickers - but it's encouraging at the same time a very quantitative approach to what reading is, and how we should do it. According to the National Literacy Trust survey, an extra 7% of pupils using the scheme are prepared to say they enjoy reading compared with those that don't use it. I wonder if that's an achievement worth celebrating if 100% of those pupils now think of reading as a goal-oriented activity with 'difficult' vocabulary being the measure of value?



Cecilia Busby writes fantasy adventures for children aged 7-12 as C.J. Busby. Her latest book, Dragon Amber, was published in September by Templar.

www.cjbusby.co.uk

@ceciliabusby

"Great fun - made me chortle!" (Diana Wynne Jones on Frogspell)

"A rift-hoping romp with great wit, charm and pace" (Frances Hardinge on Deep Amber)