Really? Are Enid's villains largely a "multitude of 'swarthy', poor, poorly-spoken types? Do her books really teach "a fundamental mistrust of anything other than four posh white people"? You could easily take a handful of Blyton books with passages that could be interpreted as such. But reading across Enid's entire oeuvre - as many of us here have - I suspect an attentive and unbiased reader might find a different, and far more nuanced, story.But. We all know why she’s controversial, but it takes going back to reread as an adult to feel the weight of it. It’s not only the obvious things: Noddy’s infamous carjacking golliwogs; the multitude of ‘swarthy’, poor, poorly-spoken types her investigators can just tell, somehow, are up to no good; simpering Anne, so useless compared to George who is - phew! - ‘as good as a boy’ - and of course, the predictable prose, the repetitive plots. There’s a core of judgemental selfish nastiness running through them that sours the fun; a fundamental mistrust of anything other than four posh white people.
Hmmm. Well, for such a professed Blyton fan herself, Susie Day could start by getting her titles right - there is no Enid Blyton book called "the Enchanted Wishing Chair"!Enid Blyton’s writing is some sort of weird sorcery.
Seriously. I read a bunch of stories with small relatives that holiday, and wow. I know no other writer who understands reading age and how to mediate her work across different age groups so well. She nails bedtime stories: just long enough for you to be able to say ‘ok, one more’. There are moments in the Enchanted Wishing Chair which are throwaway rubbish but which I have apparently remembered across decades because they were reread time and again. Her plots are about botany and ‘the butcher’s boy,’ such opaque distant stuff, and it doesn’t matter. And because they are so many, because they are familiar and repetitive, because they are by the same author - they carry you from the flimsy to real confidence, independent reading, a whole book all by yourself. Magic.
As for her other criticisms, like "familiar and repetitive plots", I wish she (and others with similar complaints) could have been at David Rudd's lecture in Canterbury two months ago. The way he dismantled just about every criticism of Blyton you can imagine (and then some)...! I could have stood up and outright cheered by the end.
On top of that, I just find it galling to hear/see Enid accused of "repetitive plots", "predictable prose", etc. when, while I was growing up, there were so many endless series of cheap, trashy children's books being churned out - The Babysitters' Club and Goosebumps, for example - with dozens of titles that really WERE repetitive and predictable and far, far less imaginative and rewarding than Blyton.
