This is the Harry Potter generation. The rush for the finale, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2 and all the hype about the book and movie is natural in an age defined by heavy marketing
This is the Harry Potter generation. The rush for the finale, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2 and all the hype about the book and movie is natural in an age defined by heavy marketing. As Potter fans all over the world weep salty tears into their popcorn during the movie, I cannot help but think of another writer called Enid Blyton. Many years before they went potty about Potter, young readers were hooked on to Enid Blyton. Her books lined shelves at a time when a book release was not the global circus it is today and the pre-release decibel level was not even a whisper compared to today.
If J K Rowling brought London's Kings Cross station and the Hogwarts Express steaming into peoples' lives, Enid Blyton's was a more realistic world. Her stories were about mystery solvers, secret clubs and teen detectives who inevitably stole a march on seasoned policemen with their natural intuition and penchant for solving mysteries.
The typically English scones with cream, ginger ale and tall glasses of lemonade often featured prominently in the books. The young detectives, all Enid Blyton's protagonists picnicked in verdant English countryside, wolfing down sandwiches and washing it down with lemonade. The neighbourhood dairy where scones cakes were served formed the meeting point for amateur sleuths in her books.
Enid Blyton was a prolific master of the young reader. Her stories were for a less complicated, more innocent age. Her plots were simple but never banal. Her characters were compelling. The mysteries usually revolved around a theft in a sleepy village, with the crime shaking residents out of their complacency. Blyton's protagonists usually on holiday from school, solve the mystery, which befuddles the entire village including the police. Blyton scored because even her characters like Mr Goon, the at-his-wits-end policeman, bumbled and fumbled ludicrously but he was always real, never a caricature.
Blyton also proved that like all great writers, she understood human nature so well. In the boarding school series of Mallory Towers and St Clare's, there are solid, British girls with their feet on the ground, airhead students and rebellious teens at school and inevitable personality clashes result. The highlight is a midnight feast, where students revel in breaking the rules and indulge in a feast.
The Harry Potter tsunami may have flattened other children writers in its wake, but, for a generation weaned on the prolific Enid Blyton's at times frothy books, it is still the realistic that rules. She made the world simple with her divisions of black and white; her crime in her books at its darkest was a jewellery theft. She was as gentle as the rolling hills of England and her work had the fizz of ginger ale that her characters quaffed.u00a0u00a0u00a0u00a0
