Tales of Two Torn Cities

Gerard Whelan
The Guns of Easter
O’Brien Press, 1996
Paperback, 166pp, €8.99

ISBN 978-0-86278-449-2

and

Elizabeth Laird
Oranges in No Man’s Land
Macmillan Children’s Books, 2006
Paperback, 116pp.  £6.99 / €8.70
ISBN 978-0-330-44558-0

 

A difficult subject, war remains a common theme in children’s books. Such adventure stories appeal to writers and readers because they suddenly place you in the shoes of characters facing extremely bad situations, while their historical settings provide a safe distance to explore highly emotional experiences. They also offer a subtle way of examining what adults deem important.

With so many tales set during war, from The Iliad to World Wars I and II and even more recent conflicts, it’s natural that war novels share similarities. Consider Gerard Whelan’ The Guns of Easter, and Elizabeth Laird’s Oranges in No Man’s Land. Whelan’s is the first in a trilogy exploring Ireland’s Easter Rising, War of Independence, and Civil War, while Laird’s stand-alone piece happens during the Civil War in Lebanon. Both relate adventures of a child protagonist navigating unavoidable, dangerous excursions.

In Whelan’s book it’s 1916 and Jimmy Conway’s dad is away, fighting in the British Army. His Uncle Mick is with the Rebels, and his mother works hard to keep the family going. Set over the days just before and during the Easter Rising, the twelve-year-old’s loyalties are divided as he crosses the city, dodging army patrols, shootings, and disruption. Desperate to find food for his family, Jimmy encounters good and bad on all sides, and acquires a more mature understanding of himself and his relatives, and the struggles of his country.

Laird’s protagonist, ten-year-old Ayesha, must cross the Green Line on a forbidden journey through civil-war Beirut to get much needed medicine for her granny. This book also depicts delicate and long-established relationships between individuals from different religious and ethnic backgrounds damaged by a forcibly divided society.

Both books have many parallels. Their naive protagonists must both find paths through a war-torn city, negotiating with individuals on different factions of the conflict, while simultaneously finding everything familiar becoming unfamiliar and unexplainable. Missing parents, divided families and communities, changing loyalties, taking risks for loved ones, and a discovery of common humanity on all sides of a deadly conflict: these are recurring tropes in Jimmy’s and Ayesha’s exploits.

Although set during conflicts decades apart, in cities 3000 miles from each other, both novels follow the classic structure of children’s adventure stories, with realistic, sympathetic depictions of characters and settings. They are enthralling, immersive books that deserve to be widely read.

While Guns of Easter is for a slightly more advanced readership, with Oranges in No Man’s Land being shorter and having fewer historical facts to comprehend, it’s rewarding to explore both simultaneously with children. Together they work well in mixed-ability classes of intermediate readers.

Pat Ryan

by IBBY

The King of Ireland's Son / Story Telling New & Old | Padraic Colum

‘Fado Fado Fado’ or as it’s said in English, ‘Long Long Ago…’

reviews of

Padraic Colum, illustrations by Willy Pogany
The King of Ireland’s Son
Dover Publications, 1997 (originally Macmillan, 1916)
Paperback, 320 pages
ISBN: 9780486297224

and

Padraic Colum
Story Telling New & Old
Macmillan, 1968 (originally published in Colum’s
The Fountain of Youth, Macmillan, 1927)
Hardback, 32 pages
ISBN: 9781476708942

In 1914, when a short visit turned into an unexpected longer-stay in America, with circumstances changing how he and his wife both made their livings, Padraic Colum indulged himself by translating from Irish into English traditional folk and fairy tales he’d heard as child. He did so to maintain his fluency in Irish. It led to a highly regarded reputation in the USA as an oral storyteller and writer for children (whereas at home and in the rest of Europe he was already established in the Irish Literary Revival as a dramatist and poet).

To earn a needed income, Colum published his fairy tales in the New York Tribune. These caught the attention of Hungarian illustrator Willy Pogany, who proposed they collaborate by putting the stories into a book. As an experiment, Colum wove the narratives into a novel, The King of Ireland’s Son. Well received by children and children’s librarians, the publishing house Macmillan offered Colum a lucrative contract; over subsequent decades, he produced for child readers several anthologies of folktales, legends, and myths from all over the world.

Colum’s first children’s book took the form of an epic. The King of Ireland’s son wanders out with his hound, his hawk, and his horse, and meets a stranger who invites him to gamble. Lulled by easy wins, the king’s son eventually loses the wager, and the stranger, an enchanter and enemy of his father, assigns the king’s son a hazardous task. On the journey to complete it, he becomes romantically entangled with the enchanter’s daughter, and they work as equals to defeat the villain. Magic chases and battles, eccentric characters, and wild escapades from Irish folklore are encountered on this quest, with disparate elements coming together to bring this adventure to satisfying conclusion.

Crafted from traditional folk tales, which normally provide minimal detail to describe characters, settings, objects, and actions, Colum’s writing style is reminiscent of early experiments in Modernism. This minimalism is reinforced by the English translation, which recreates or mimics Irish syntax while using oral storytelling techniques—rhythmic or formulaic language, poetic devices, and figurative speech, such as runs (repeated descriptive passages which incorporate alliteration and/or onomatopoeia). Colum’s mode of writing is supported by Pogany’s illustrations, which have been described as beautiful and bizarre in their use of brilliant colour and a startling Modernist style.

Colum’s children’s books remained popular in America well into the last century. I remember The King of Ireland’s Son as a favourite read. Coming back to it as an adult, I’m not so sure it remains accessible to young readers today. My memory, probably false, suggests I read it when I was eight or nine; more likely I was twelve or thirteen. Young adults keen on fantasy fiction would still enjoy it, I think. Recently, public librarians in Ireland read several children’s books by Irish writers and illustrators as part of a staff development project. Those who read The King of Ireland’s Son loved the book, saying it reminded them of Game of Thrones and contemporary young adult fantasy series based on Irish mythology.

Storytelling, New & Old was first included in Colum’s 1927 publication Fountain of Youth: Stories to be Told. The essay was republished several times, into the late 1960s. Colum describes the traditional storytelling of his youth, which he encountered in rural Longford and Cavan in the late 19th century. He then compares it with oral storytelling practiced by children’s librarians in public libraries.

Fountain of Youth consisted of stories meant to be told orally from memory, in a conversational style, without props or costumes. Such storytelling was expected of children’s librarians in North America from the 1890s through the 1930s and until recently was still common in some public library services. This library storytelling was aimed at children aged six to twelve who were told traditional folk and fairy tales, myths, and legends from around the world. This wasn’t the library story time material typically seen today for audiences aged five and under, which usually consists of rhymes and shared reading of picture books.

Colum defends this ‘modern storytelling’, demonstrating its similarities to Irish storytelling he heard as child. His eye-witness descriptions provide a window on this kind of storytelling and its place in Irish society for folklorists, anthropologists, and contemporary professional storytellers. Colum’s advocacy for the role of storytelling, poetry, and literature in child development, and his explanation of how listening to stories and poems develops imagination and what we would today recognise as critical literacy, means this essay remains relevant.

Pat Ryan

by IBBY

The Cat and the Devil | James Joyce | Little Island Books 2021

James Joyce, with illustrations by Lelis

The Cat and the Devil

Little Island, 2021 (illustrations 2012)
Hardback, 32 pages
ISBN: 9781912417919

Joyce’s grandson Stephen remembered that as a child he knew ‘Nonno’ was a famous writer whowrote complex and difficult books. Even so his Nonno found time, when Stevie was little, to sit with him and tell him stories in a language any boy or girl could understand. Many of Joyce’s friends recollected how Stevie crawled onto his grandfather’s lap and asked persistent questions which Joyce answered patiently in a Dublin drawl, offering increasingly fantastic replies.

Some of these ended up in correspondence. In August 1936, when Stevie was four, Joyce sent him a toy cat with sweets inside, smuggled under the noses of his parents. That inside joke, and a shared love of cats, led to The Cat and the Devil coming in a letter Joyce posted from Beaugency a few days after.

Based on a Beaugency folktale, The Cat and the Devil tells how a mayor makes a bargain with the
devil to have a much-needed bridge built overnight. The price is that whoever first steps across it
belongs to the devil—and the crafty mayor makes sure it’s a cat who crosses the bridge. Joyce added
humorous touches, such as depicting Beaugency’s mayor as Alfred Byrne, a famous Dublin politician
who was quite a character, and making jokes about the devil reading newspapers to find wicked
ideas and speaking French badly with a Dublin accent. Versions of the folktale, and countless
numbers of actual bridges attributed to the devil’s craftsmanship, exist in almost every European
country and as far away as the Caribbean, USA, and Argentina. Many of these folk tales and legends
are found in folklore anthologies and picture books in many languages.

But Joyce’s playful way with words make his version especially delightful, so that many countries
have published it. The latest edition, by Little Island, has wonderful illustrations by the Brazilian
illustrator Lelis (the book uses the images from an earlier publication in Portuguese from Brazil). Like
many other interpretations, the devil shares Joyce’s features.

A few weeks after Stevie received The Cat and the Devil, Joyce was in Copenhagen and sent his
grandson another letter with a story about cats. This eventually found its way into another children’s
picture book attributed to James Joyce, The Cats of Copenhagen—but that’s a story for another day.

                                                                                                                    Pat Ryan

by IBBY

Mucking About | John Chambers | Little Island Books 2018

John Chambers

Mucking About

Little Island Books 2018

ISBN 9-781912417056

Although set in Ireland’s legendary past, plenty of modern readers will recognise and be much amused by the misadventures of Manchán, his best friend Pagan-of-the-Six-Toes, and his know-it-all older sister Méabh. Each of the six fun-filled chapters relate mad escapades of a boy and his family who ‘lived when old ways were changing in Ireland and new ways were just getting started.’

His mother has plans for Manchán to be educated by Brother Abstemius, his uncle, and become a monk. However, the boy has other ideas for his future, ones that include keeping company with Muck (his pet pig), making up songs like his dad, and messing about with Pagan in local forests and on nearby lakes.

But as his mother says, ‘The world is always coming at us, in good ways and sometimes in bad ways too. It is best we are prepared for both.’ They reach a compromise. Manchán agrees to try-out the monastery for a year, learning music, and reading and writing, and all things useful that the monks may impart, on condition that he has Muck for company and regular visits from Pagan (but not Méabh).

While there’s the odd anachronism here and there, jumbling up druids and monks and Vikings, Chambers makes the past accessible, relatable, and fun. The book is great for readers transitioning into chapter books, with a friendly map and glossary to help with unfamiliar Irish words or aspects of history. Chambers, an Irish cartoonist, screenwriter, illustrator, and author based in Berlin, has other popular books that children will enjoy as a follow-up to this one.

Pat Ryan

by IBBY