I have decided that as I am a frustrated author (mostly frustrated by my own laziness) I should really read more books about how other people manage to get their work out of their heads and onto the page. To this end, I found myself browsing the biography section at my local library, and came across Looking for Enid by Duncan McLaren. I rescued it from the shelf and smiled at the instantly-recognisable Eileen Soper illustration on the front, depicting the fabulous Famous Five on one of their escapades. I was further cheered by the inside blurb proclaiming "...you are warmly invited to accompany Duncan on an adventure that will investigate what made Enid Enid and endeavour to reach the source of her torrent of stories". 'Oooo' thought I 'this'll do for starters'.
Like many of us, I read Enid Blyton's books with gusto and most of my early poems and stories are heavily influenced by what she wrote. When my peers were turning more towards Agatha Christie and Jane Austen, I clung to my copies of Malory Towers and St Claire's with a vice-like grip. Blyton's, to me, was a world in which justice was always done and people appreciated good manners and intentions. I always felt happy after escaping into one of her character's exploits (even although I blame her somewhat for fuelling my arachnophobia after reading a certain spider ate elves when they were naughty).
The thing that is great about McLaren's book, then, is that he genuinely seems to love her writing too, and is absolutely caught up in the energy and productivity of his chosen subject. What is refreshing is that the book becomes a labour of love and one which McLaren is very open to the possibility of not selling too well. He is under no illusions that his work will be particularly popular, he just wants to explore the reasons and circumstances that enabled Blyton to be such a phenomenon. McLaren's angle is to look at the three main men in Blyton's life and then to see if through her relationships with them he can get a handle on her success. In this endeavour, he enlists the help of his girlfriend Kate Clayton and, although there are sometimes gratuitous references to their nightly relations, she seems to help him with the intellectual process of writing the book and piecing together what Blyton's influences were.
McLaren may put off a few readers through his foray into fantasy exchanges between some of Blyton's better known characters. He has the Five Finder-Outers gambolling around Blyton's leafy home and tries to get under the skin of certain exchanges between George (of the Famous Five) and her father. However, I think these flights of fancy lend themselves pleasingly to the overall feeling of McLaren somehow being able to hear the echoes of the past reverberating off the walls of Blyton's former residences.
There has obviously been a lot of research that has gone on behind the scenes, as McLaren cites the other books that have been written about Blyton and also the questions that these have raised for him. McLaren puts forward a very persuasive argument for whom Blyton's policeman Goon is based on in the Mystery series, and also how Blyton portrays herself in her books. McLaren implies that Blyton vacillates between being the young girl missing her father and the genius in control of, and confident about, everything. Whereas, for example, McLaren's Freudian analysis of the role of underground passages in Blyton's work is a little questionable in places, again this shows much intellectual foresight and reasoning has gone into McLaren's work. Indeed, McLaren invites us to see the adult and the child at play in his writing, too.
Although McLaren's approach to this study of Enid Blyton is unconventional and creative, I think it is written in the spirit of what Blyton means to her grown up fans. We can come back to the stories of our youth with renewed vigour and a different perspective as we age, for life throws up the same themes time and again. In the penultimate chapter of his book, McLaren makes reference to a George MacDonald story that the young Enid read many times, and he comments on how it is usually adults who write for children. We are shaped by the experiences we have, the people and words on a page that we hold dear and that all collects in our subconscious, so I found it fitting that McLaren melded his creative licence with his exploration of his subject's creativity. I also find it appropriate that we are left with some disquieting imagery at the end of this book as we learn of Blyton's great mind dwindling rapidly at the closing stages of her life, and indeed of her final words. There is still some mystery surrounding Enid Blyton that has arisen from papers and diaries being destroyed, and my overwhelming feeling after reading this book, although I enjoyed it a lot, was that she was a person with many regrets who wrote so much in order to semi-permanently hide from our world in the cocoon of her vibrant mind.