From Tots to Teens, StarMag
SO you must have heard by now that Enid Blyton’s
Famous Five books will be revised in
order to make them more accessible to 21
stcentury readers.
No, the five young detectives will not be carrying iPhones
and Tweeting about their adventures: “Something fishy’s going on at the
abandoned mill”, “High tea at Cherry Tree Farm was simply delicious and now I
can’t button my jeans”; “I hate doing the dishes. I wish I were a boy L”;
“Woof … wooooof .. grrr!”), but certain expressions will be updated because research
has shown that phrases like “mercy me”, “awful swotter” and “very peculiar” are
keeping children from truly understanding and enjoying the books. Those phrases
will be changed to “oh no”, “bookworm” and “very strange” respectively.
Well, I don’t buy it for a moment. After all, Malaysians
have enjoyed Blyton’s books for decades and had no problems with the “queer”
language. If children can cope with specially and newly invented words like
muggles and apparate (in Harry Potter),
why shouldn’t they be able to make sense, from context, of terms like “school
tunic” and “school mistress”?
It’s all very peculiar … I mean, strange.
However, it seems that children will be totally put off by
the time and effort taken to work out what George, Dick, Julian and Anne are on
about. In an article in
The Guardian,
Anne McNeil, publishing director of Hodder Children's Books said that,
"Children who read [the
Famous Five
books] need to be able to easily understand the characterisations and easily to
get into the plots.”
What is there to understand? The main characters are two
bossy lads, a girl who wishes she were a boy, another girl who prefers keeping
house to having adventures, and a dog who’s more human than canine.
And the plots? You certainly won’t need to make notes to
keep up with any unexpected twists and turns.
The Famous Five
books are fun to read because they are interesting without being too
challenging. Every thing about them is predictable and that makes them easy to
understand. For young children, they provide some suspense and excitement
without ever being too scary or stressful.
When I was growing up they also provided a peek into a world
totally different from my own. I must admit that a combination of Blyton, other
British children’s books and the sort of British television programmes that
used to be screened by RTM, formed a totally unreal picture of Britain in my
mind. But this is unlikely to happen today, now that the world has got that
much smaller thanks to cable television and the Internet.
The Famous Five affords
readers a glimpse into a past era, a certain class of people, and some of the
social attitudes and prejudices of that time and community. To me, a bit of
social history has been captured on the pages of those books and it would be a
shame to erase that.
The original edition of the books will, however, remain in
print so I guess readers will at least be given the choice of a jolly good read
or just a very good one.
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