Facing Reality: Trying to Make Sense of Life and Choosing How to Live

Facing Reality: Trying to Make Sense of Life and Choosing How to LiveJohn Gough – Deakin University (retired) – [email protected] [NOTE: A version of this paper was originally published as:- Gough, J. 1990. “The Meaning of Life and How to Live it: Some User’s Guides”; in Chris Hill (ed.) Fiction For Adolescents: Proceedings of a Conference Sponsored by the Graduate Diploma of Children’s Literature. Victoria College; Toorak, pp. 144-173.At that time, John Gough was a Lecturer in Mathematics Education at Victoria College (Toorak Campus) – later to become part of Deakin University.An early draft of the paper, at that time titled “The Meaning of Life and How to Live it: Some User’s Guides”, was presented on 25 August 1990 at Victoria College (Toorak Campus) at a Children’s Literature Conference with the theme of “Fiction For Adolescents”, sponsored by the Graduate Diploma of Children’s Literature.The final draft of the published paper was completed in March 1991.The Conference Proceedings were published sometime later in 1991, but with a putative publication date of 1990.This version of the paper was revised in June-July 2015.]

SynopsisThis discussion explores children’s, Young Adult, and some adult works of fiction (and one autobiographical account) thatconsider existential questions about the meaning of life, and what to do with it; human connectedness and individual moral responsibility; and the struggle to understand death, especially in a meaningless, arbitrary world.

EpigramsThe paper begins with two epigrammatic quotes:

The Chief Wood-louse looked sternly down at the assembled crowd and began to speak … “The purpose of life is to climb up the side of the bath. That is what we are here for. That is why we were born. No one has ever succeeded. But the purpose of life is to try … BECAUSE IT’S THERE!”

Penelope Lively A House Inside Out (1987 pp 23-24)

“… all that stuff about happy endings is lies. The only ending in this world is death.” Katherine Paterson The Great Gilly Hopkins (1978, p 138)

Introduction: How Shall We Live? Can Books Guide Us?We don’t all have an obvious and unquestionable vocation or calling in life. We don’t all have heroic tasks set out clearly before us. The ghost of Hamlet’s father called on his son to be avenged. But we are not all Hamlet. What are the tasks of being human? Are there any tasks? Must we love one another or die? (This quote comes from W.H. Auden’s poem “September 1, 1939” – the date when Nazi German began invadingPoland, starting World War II.) How can we know what to do with our life? What is the point of doing anything? And if there isn’t any point, what do we do?

How should a person live? In our Western culture, one-time Christian but now seriously eroded and challenged by secular, skeptical, and multicultural values, there is still widespreadacceptance of the “Golden Rule” – “Do unto others as you wouldhave them do unto you”. Lurking at the bottom of our legal code are the remnants of the Ten Commandments that Moses brought down from Mount Sinai to the Jewish people.

But none of these moral principles are guides to help a persondecide what to do during a life: simply, guides for how to live. And none of them say anything about what the life might mean. Believer and non-believer alike are confronted with these questions.

If we look back over years of living and reading, have there been any books that really stand out, books that we would wantour friends and our children to read, books that have changed our life, or shaped the way we live? A great deal of everyday reading for pleasure is concerned with “entertainment” in a

general sense. Character and plot, setting and telling are some of the things that entertain. But there are books that seem to do far more than tell about some interesting people and events. There is, after all, more to reading than just turning the pages because we want to find out what happens next (although this is also necessary) - or there should be more. This is reading at its best.

What are the books that:

- consider fundamental questions about the nature and meaning of life?

- examine what it means to be a human, sharing life and the world with other humans?

- are honest about relationships, confusion, uncertainty, ambiguity, pointless, difficulties, boredom …?

- are psychological, political and emotional milestones in their reader's growth towards adulthood.

How can we recognise these kinds of books?

Let us try to find them, and find out more about who we are, and how we became such people.

At this point it is appropriate to give some cautionary fine-print. The books I discuss are, quite simply, the books I knowthat seem appropriate. Other people who know other books may wonder why I do not mention the books they think are appropriate. I cannot comment about books I have not read.

It must also be admitted that all I can offer is one person’s view. Unavoidably any discussion of the meaning of life must be subjective. Indeed, regardless of the topic, all critical activity is, quite simply and fundamentally, subjective, regardless of how diligently we strive to make our feelings and judgments explicit, trying to be as objective as possible.

To the extent that argument and definition are laid open to scrutiny, there is some possibility of being objective. Different opinions, and different illustrative examples or

quotations can be analysed, compared and criticised. But the subjective element lurks beneath this all the time. Literary-critical academics, in their ivory towers, manipulating specialist jargon, constructing, discoursing and deconstructing, being wildly post-modern, might think they areengaged in an objective pursuit. But whatever critical approach they adopt (Freudian, Marxist, Jungian, Deridean, Lacanian, Levi-Straussian, Blytonian, etc.), and whatever decisions they make in exercising critical thought (choosing to comment on this point in one way rather than on that point in another way) they are inescapably subjective.

All human endeavour is personal, partial, inherently flawed, and imperfect.

Up to a point we can subject people’s world-view to logical and ethical scrutiny. But beyond questioning and subjectively criticising some values (such as negative “values” of intolerance, exclusivity, cruelty, untrustworthiness, prejudice, and dishonesty) which may be esteemed in some cultures, and exploring the logical consistency of argument and definition, we have no objective basis for saying that this world-view is good/better/worse than another. However we can reasonably ask whether someone has a world-view or not. Wecan reasonably talk about one another person’s world-views.

I believe it is valuable to do so. It is in this spirit that Ioffer my discussion.

Reading Patterns Reflect the Reader’s Needs and World-ViewOf course this search for books that help us live the best lives we can is a serious undertaking. Is there any evidence that people read books as part of a search for some guide to living?

It is interesting to consider which books or which type of books readers return to again and again, perhaps without realising why they do so. Consider people who read and reread

war books such as Paul Brickhill’s Reach For the Sky or Nicholas Monserrat’s The Cruel Sea. Repeated reading suggests there is much more going on than just finding what happens next. There must be more, because a re-reader already knows what will happen in the story. Are they finding something in such war books which tells them what life is like when it is intense, purposeful and directed? This might stand in marked contrast to their experience of adolescence when they are uncertain about studies at school or about possible choices ofwork or confused about personal relationships and changing relationships with parents and other adults.

Consider readers who seem hooked on science fiction. For them it may not be the lure of fantastic worlds but the continual experience of successful problem solving, in particular the business of making sense of unusual circumstances, which is the heart of science fiction.

Similarly the reading of murder mysteries or detective fictionmay provide models of purposeful activity which is significantly different from the commonly experienced aimlessness of teenage years and secondary school life. The on-going fashion for swords and sorcery fantasy (springing from J.R.R. Tolkien’s seminal fantasy saga The Lord of the Rings) may not be pandering merely to escapist longing, as is commonly suspected. Instead it may be feeding a subconscious need for the kind of imaginative role models that younger children find in fairy tales. Heroes and heroines are threatened by horrible monsters: the only way to overcome themis by confronting the monsters and by growing up.

Consider repetitive reading of romance fiction. What does thissuggest about a romance-reader’s world view or sense of purpose and meaning in life? Consider the interest older adults have for biography and autobiography. Perhaps this provides models of lives which can be seen to show larger, clearer patterns than may be seen in the readers' own lives.

Adolescence and Meaning: Existential ConfrontationsIt is impossible to be clear-cut about the boundaries between “childhood”, “adolescence” and “adulthood”. I like to think that “adolescence” dawns when children begin to become aware of themselves and of other people and become articulate about their relationships with others. This entails grappling with “adult” concepts about fundamental things such as sex, death and purpose.

There are a number of grim facts which all of us confront at different times:

- we are all going to die;- we were all created by our parents’ sexual activity;- individual life is fraught by chance events and the pressure of circumstances;

- we are essentially alone because we can never really know what another person’s life is like, …

and so on.

“Adolescence” in its broadest sense is the time when these facts first begin to disturb us. Trying to find ways to deal with this disturbance is the process of becoming more or less “adult”. It is a growing process that begins in childhood, when a child sobs in the night, “I don’t want to die”. It continues after the teenage years and through what is commonlycalled “adulthood”. It is never actually finished, except by death.

Some writers play with these serious questions. Douglas Adams’The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (1979) offers a splendidjoke about it. Apparently, aeons in the past, a super-civilization built a computer that would contemplate “the great question of Life, the Universe, and Everything!” When the computer has finally worked it out, the answer is revealedto be … but no, I will not spoil the joke here.

Some writers play with the questions while making serious points. William Golding’s swashbuckling historical pastiche

romance adventure, The Princess Bride (1973), ends with the narrator saying:

I’m not trying to make this a downer, understand. Ireally do think that love is the best thing in the world, except for cough drops. But I also have to say … that life isn’t fair. It’s just fairer than death, that’s all.

The seemingly trivial way that “cough drops” are regarded as “the best thing in the world” is part of Golding’s joking approach to a story that looks like a fairy tale adventure, but has a serious heart.

Another rollicking novel that uses jokes to reflect on death is Terry Pratchett’s fourth fantasy “Discworld” story, Mort (1987). Pratchett’s “Discworld” is a bizarre fairy-tale land in an alternative universe, full of bizarre gods and fantasy creatures and grotesque humans who experience what ordinary humans experience in our own world, but heightened by the presence of magic, fairies, witches, dragons, and other fantastic specimens. The book’s blurb may be sufficient to indicate some of Pratchett’s methods.

Death comes to us all. When he came to Mort, he offered him a job. After being assured that being dead was not compulsory, Mort accepted. However, hesoon found that romantic longings did not mix easily with the responsibilities of being Death’s apprentice …

The central character is a young man called Mort. (This is a joke, as “mort” is the French word for “dead”.) Because Mort has no aptitude for or interest in his father’s farm, he is sent away to find a job, and becomes an apprentice-assistant to Death, an anthropomorphic personification of death. (Incidentally, Death rides a magnificent horse, called Binky, rather than a skeleton horse often favoured by traditional

depictions of Death. The bones of a skeleton horse tend to fall off, and need to be rewired back into the skeleton, seriously disrupting Death’s travelling.) But complications arise when Mort falls in love with a beautiful princess who issuffering from a fatal condition … It is a startlingly stimulating book, and funny, and serious!

Not All Books Are Centrally Concerned With Questions of MeaningOne of the critical points to be made in this discussion is that it is necessary to distinguish carefully between books when we consider their central themes. The alternative would be to make the critical error of thinking that one book is about a certain theme, and to criticise it for the way it appears to handle that theme, when in fact it is actually about something quite different.

As an example, consider Christobel Mattingley’s Southerly Buster (1983). The central character Julie, confused and depressed about family events, almost allows herself to drown in heavy surf. But this is not really a book about the problemof teenage suicide – which, sadly, for some young people is one way of responding to the grim fact that we will all die. Indeed the near-drowning is far more accidental than intentional. But it IS about a young girl coming to terms withthe facts of her parents’ sexuality, and with her own beginning experience of sexuality and passion. It is a Cinderella story that reworks the motifs of the traditional tale in terms of ordinary suburban family life (see Gough, 1987a, 1990).

By contrast in Aidan Chambers’ Now I Know (1987) the first page presents the young hero contemplating existence, realising, not for the first time, that “eventually he would die” and recognising “the separateness of his being”. He is soemotionally struck by such blunt existential facts that he vomits in his bath. Here the theme of the book is, or should

be, unmistakable: knowing that death looms ultimately and we are all ultimately alone, how should a person live?

My interest in this topic came into focus recently when I was reading Derek Eales’ article “Enid Blyton, Judy Blume, and Cultural Impossibilities” (1989). I was flattered that he referred to an earlier article of mine (Gough 1985, and 1987b)on Judy Blume’s novel of teenage love and first sexual experiences, Forever … (1975), challenged by some of his ideas, and annoyed that, once again a critic had misjudged Forever …. Eales made one very telling point, but then omittedto follow it through. It stimulated me to begin thinking aboutthe central topic of this essay. Unfortunately, in making thispoint, Eales misrepresented what he was discussing.

According to Eales the “main inadequacy of [Forever …]” is that it “does not give its readers any purchase at all on whatit means ‘to make other people happy’” (Eales, p 87). This phrase is offered by the heroine of Forever … as the answer tothe question “what do you want to do with your life?” (Forever… p 185). However, Eales leaves out the end of the conversation in the novel so that what he quotes is given out of context. Kath is talking to her boyfriend’s uncle. She saysshe wants to be happy, and to make other people happy. Eales ends the quote at this point. But the uncle goes on to show his adult maturity, saying that the sentiment is very nice, but not enough. Kath, who has just graduated from senior high school, replies, “That’s all I know right now.”

In fact, this is not a bad answer, although not a profound answer. But it is a much better answer than Eales’ quoting outof context suggests. What would YOU say to your boyfriend’s uncle (blunt fellow) if you were just eighteen? It is not a bad answer, either, if your experience of life has been limited by having spent the last twelve or more years in a conventional school. At least Kath recognises her limitations.Indeed, it is precisely the impact of leaving school, and getting a summer job at a tennis camp that challenges her

romantic school-days’ dream idea of “love-forever …”. Apart from school, friends and family, Kath’s only experience in a larger world comes through her voluntary work in a geriatric hospital. Clearly further experience will force Kath to question the meaning of her own life. When her grandfather dies, the book begins to explore this.

Eales’ comparison between Kath and the ex-police cadet Sandra in Jan Needle’s Piggy in the Middle (1982) concludes that it “is hard to believe that [Sandra] is as young as Katherine Danziger” (Eales, p 87). But not only has the incompletely quoted conversation about “what do you want to do with your life?” made Kath seem banal, superficial, and naive, the comparison is inherently unfair. What is at stake is not chronological age, but breadth of experience. Sandra has been out in a real, tough world for a year. Compared with this, Kath has been sheltered. But that is not her fault, nor does she deserve to be criticised for it. What would Kath want to do with her life after a year out of school? If she is going straight on to tertiary study there is more sheltering there.

Consider, by comparison, Louise in Katherine Paterson’s Jacob Have I Loved (1980). It is only when she leaves her family andcommunity at Chesapeake Bay that she can begin to break free of the personal constraints and limited experiences that result from her upbringing, community and culture. Some of these constraints she is not even aware of until she has left home for several years. That is what growing up is all about -becoming aware of self, and constraints, and making considered, independent choices that will change our lives.

Nonetheless, Eales’ critical point is a good one. We might look beyond the end-of-school limitations of Forever … and consider what sort of answers are given by Blume’s other heroines, some of them adult women. Kath may be inexperienced,and therefore naive, although she is aware of this, and is likely to grow. But it seems that the middle-class wives in Wifey (1978), for example, have no better answer than Kath’s.

They also hope to be happy and to make other people happy. Butthey live confused unhappy lives, dominated by their menfolk, and misled by romantic ideals. Blume’s adult books offer no better or more profound alternative. But then, whose life does? Are there better answers? Marilyn French’s The Women's Room ends with a heroine teaching feminism to other women. This is like teaching “resistance” techniques to underground troops or a liberation army. But after the “war” has been won,or ended in some less conclusive way, what will the people do in the newly achieved “peace”? After women are liberated, whatwill they do with their liberty? How can we make or contributeto a balanced world? Is such a thing possible?

In fact, perhaps without realising it, Eales is focussing on an extremely important question - “What do you want to do withyour life?” It is different from the question “What is the meaning of life?” But the two questions are linked. What a person chooses to do makes some kind of meaning at the same time that it makes the person. It also reflects the person’s world-view. In reverse, what the person believes to be the meaning of life will colour the kind of choices the person makes about what to be doing in life.

“What do you want to do with your life?” is an important question, and a very hard question to answer. One of the nastiest things well-meaning adults can do to a child is to ask, “What do you want to be when you grow up?” Grownups should know better. The scope for making such choices is, we know, enormously constrained by external circumstances, and personal abilities, personality, personal interests, ….

It should be recognised that Forever ..., like many other books, is about something else. It is not a book that seriously tries to answer questions about the meaning and purpose of life. It is about one part, or stage, of an otherwise ordinary life - the part that for most people is naturally and unavoidably sheltered or constrained by the limitations that are imposed by living within an ordinary

family, going to an ordinary school, and living through that time when human bodies become sexually mature and human emotions become more adult, and physically expressed. Accepting this, as Eales says, in fact it “does ‘enlarge the scope of the discussions’ girls [and others] have about this subject” (Eales, p 86). It does this, as I have argued (1985 and 1987), better than many critics have realised.

Incidentally, Eales is annoyingly wrong in his interpretation of the first sentence of Forever …. The sentence is, “Sybil Davidson has a genius I.Q. and has been laid by at least six different guys”. Quoting this, Eales claims that, “Wisdom equals being a clued-up sexual partner” (p 88). Then Eales ties this to what he claims is Blume’s underlying message: that the outside world is dangerous, and to protect ourselves we need to limit our vision and look inwards or away from the world.

No. This first sentence is given by Kath, telling the story. At the start of her journey through sexual and emotional experience, Kath is confused by conflicts of values. She believes, before experiencing either “true love” or sex with another person, that sex without love is “bad” in some way. Yet in the first sentence this apparently “clever” girl thinksotherwise. Who, we are asked, is clever?

Further in the book this “clever” girl, Sybil, appears, according to Kath’s implicit moral values (or is it just my reading?), to be stupider and stupider, or perhaps sadder and sadder. In the first place, she is fat, which, implicitly, is not so smart. Later she gets pregnant, and cannot be sure who the father could be, which is also not so smart. She decides not to have an abortion, but to have the baby, just for the experience of birth, and then give the baby for adoption. Having learned nothing from this except to avoid having unwanted pregnancies, she is determined to go on the pill so she can continue to have sex as she had before.

Eales’ attempt to interpret Blume’s account of Sybil is way off-target. “Wisdom” is not being “sexually clued up”, not if it means “clued-up” like Sybil. She may be a “genius”, but when this is combined with “selfishness”, then “promiscuity”, “greed” and “irresponsibility” are natural consequences, and not “wise”. There is no approval from Kath (or implicitly fromBlume) for Sybil’s behaviour. By contrast, Kath’s “ordinary intelligence” is matched by “caring” and “responsibility” - which of course leads to enough problems anyway. Even for ordinary Kath, life is not easy.

Trying to Live With Ourselves and Other PeoplePrompted by Eales’ key question, I wonder where are the books that young adults or adults can read that have solid answers to the hard important question? J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher inthe Rye (1951) clearly deals with this. But Holden Caulfield has been so deeply traumatised by the death of his brother Allie, feeling guilty about being alive and growing up when his younger brother is dead, that he becomes a casualty to thequestion. By the end of the book, Holden has achieved or at least clarified his “vision” of becoming a “catcher” who can care for and protect little children from the dangers of the world. But it is unclear whether he has won through his crippling sense of guilt and personal confusion and will be able to do more with his life than be what he calls a “madman”or avoid the pitfalls of “phoniness”, more than be a bigger child protecting smaller children from becoming adult or exposed to adult weakness.

Raymond Brigg’s comic-strip picture-story book, or graphic novella, Fungus the Bogeyman (1977), explicitly raises the question: “What is it all for? What does it mean? There must be more to life than this”. Poor Fungus, who is not an adolescent, is going through an existential crisis. Certainly the book is full of scatalogical and prurient humour which mayamuse human readers. But at the end, Fungus has no answers. His wife, Mildew, urges him not to worry over it. Fungus

thinks, “I am, yet what I am Who knows … I am the self-consumer of my woes”. This is actually a quote from one of John Clare’s poems although Fungus – naturally, he is only a bogeyman, after all - seems to be unaware of this. His last words are “Oh Mildew, my love. Thou art Fire and Iceberg to anaching soul!” then he drifts off to sleep thinking “ … Love isstill the Eternal Calm of Strife …? [another quote from John Clare]”

It can be argued that the fact that Fungus the Bogeyman does not offer answers to Fungus’s questions is itself a kind of answer. Recognising the fundamental pointlessness or meaninglessness of human existence may well be a useful step forward to building a life which, paradoxically, dares to challenge this otherwise hopeless fact.

Even if everything else is unanswerably pointless, at least there is some comfort for Fungus in caring companionship. Thisis one of the ideas behind fables of post-holocaust or post-disaster survival such as Robert C. O’Brien’s Z For Zachariah (1975) and John Christopher’s Empty World (1970). In both books, almost every human has been killed, and only isolated survivors are still alive. How should these few individuals connect? If A is for Adam, the first man, what should a solitary surviving woman do when the last man alive drags his radiation-protection suit over the radioactive hills?

Robinson Crusoe battled on, for years, alone, with his dog, two cats and a parrot, before meeting Friday. Is it enough simply to have one’s own life, alone? For Daniel Defoe’s “Crusoe” (1719: loosely based on the experiences of Alexander Selkirk, a sailor who was really marooned for four years by his piratical shipmates, and possibly other marooned sailors Defoe knew) it is enough, despite the loneliness. He is sustained by his Christian faith, and a copy of the Bible.

Indeed, if it were not for the others who matter in our lives,what would be the point at all?

Ah, love, let us be trueTo one another! for the world which seemsTo lie before us like a land of dreams,So various, so beautiful, so new,Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain. (from “Dover Beach”, Matthew Arnold)  

It was Arnold, in his Inaugural address as Oxford Professor ofPoetry, who wanted “modern poetry to be adequate to its time”,consoling, bracing, and able to induce a capacity for action. We may hope for the same for OUR modern fiction and poetry (for adolescents).

Whether or not Briggs seriously intends young children to realise that this is actually what Fungus the Bogeyman is all about is perhaps beside the point. For younger readers the dirty fun and word-play seems to be enough. (For example, Fungus’s pet cat is called Pus, and his dog is Mucus.) Similarly the larger social questions of purpose which are raised less directly by the plight of the central adult characters in Briggs’ overtly adult comic strip books Gentleman Jim (1980) and Unlucky Wally are left unanswered, orare left to be answered, if at all, by the reader. The immediate target is social satire. But for adult readers thereis at the end a sense of pity for Jim and Wally who have been short-changed by life and have no recourse but to accept this dimly without question.

It is interesting that some picture-story books should attemptthis kind of serious inquiry, whether there are ultimately answers, or not. Certainly apart from the attraction of the illustrations and the simplest kinds of humour, they contain little that could be understood by young children. Such picture-story books are in fact written for much older readers. Another example are the four books in the “Ponders” series by Russell Hoban. Lavinia Bat (1984), for instance, tells about the whispers Lavinia hears in her winter dreams –

“Pass it on … The something from the other … The other dream”- and how Lavinia realises she has passed it on when she has taught her new daughter how to “tune in” to everything, “rolling with the rolling world”. However futile conscious existence of a (human) being may be, in the long and large picture of the Solar System, the Milky Way galaxy, and the vast universe, there is a vivid short-term sense of meaningfulachievement in giving birth, and then successfully raising a child. For many, that may be all that can be achieved, and formany it is enough.

Lavinia is, of course, a bat. The same theme, “passing it on”,is central to the human cross-generational family stories of Alan Garner’s “Stone Book Quartet” (1976-1978), in narrative sequence, The Stone Book, Granny Reardun, The Aimer Gate, and Tom Fobble’s Day. Each tells one day in the life of Garner (asa child during World War II in the final book, Tom Fobble’s Day) and his ancestors, back to his great grandfather who was a stonemason in Cheshire. The diverse life-styles, historical settings, and family connections, across the generations, are evoked poetically, and with great subtlety.

The other books in Hoban’s “Ponders” series each have a central animal character – a frog, a turtle, and a field mouse. They are differently concerned with the threat of death, the diversion of art, and brave persistence with duty, however (existentially) absurd – ultimately futile and meaningless, within the context of an infinite (?) eternal (?)universe. Children may be amused by the pictures (by Martin Baynton) and some of the verbal sleight of hand but would otherwise only be bemused. But older readers can respond as deeply as these searching, and consoling books deserve.

“What do you want to do with your life?” “How should a person live?” Aidan Chambers’ novel Now I Know (1987) offers one challenging answer to these questions.

Be, my dictionary says, means: To have presence in the realm of perceived reality; exist; live. Which being translated

means, I suppose: To live in the world you accept is truly THERE.Lief, my dictionary says, means: Gladly, willingly. And adds that the word is related to the Old English word for love.So Belief means: that you will to give all your attention to Living with loving gladness in the world that you think really does exist (p 231).

(The final words in this last quoted sentence hint at “solipsism”, the philosophical theory that the world does not really exist, but is only the imaginings of one person. We getanother hint of this in Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking-Glass, when “Alice”, who we know is dreaming, is told that sheis merely part of the vivid dreaming of the Red King, and if he should wake up, the whole dreamed-world would disappear – including Alice.)

Julie, the character who says, or writes this, means very special things by her chosen words: “attention” (she means a kind of “prayerfulness”), “will”, “love” and the capitalised “Living” (or godhead). But even without any of the special meanings, this statement explaining “belief” is as good a statement as we could hope to get about how a person should orcould live in an uncertain world that is often less than pleasant and that we must share with other people. The moral stance is clear and takes a far larger view than the Golden Rule’s stance only to “others”. Of course this says nothing about what Julie might actually do in terms of things like choosing what to eat for today’s breakfast, or earning a living, or having a long-term relationship with someone else. Neither do such moral stances as the Buddhist’s attempt to seek detachment from the illusion of reality. With any personally chosen moral stance, there are still very hard decisions to make about day to day living. Of course Chambers cannot provide all the answers. On the contrary, having survived an accidental bomb attack, it is notso much that nineteen year-old Julie has found a solution as that she has decided to act as though she had found one. For her, this means continuing to struggle to find ways to come closer to her God. Of course she knows that there will be

times of temptation and doubt. But she is determined (consciously and deliberately “willing”) always to seek to putHer (god) as her first priority (giving all her attention) - even ahead of her best friend, the young man Nik who is the other main character of the book. Julie’s “solution” is to dedicate herself and her life to her relationship to God, and then only through God to relate to other people. But this is not Nik’s solution.

Whatever Nik comes to know (as the title expresses it) of loveand suffering and god, he cannot accept Julie’s religious decision. Different people make different decisions. We build our lives out of the compromises and accidents we make, and out of those compromises and accidents which affect us that are made by the other people with whom we share the world. Thehappiness Julie finds at the end of the book and continues to hope for, by deciding to put her love of God before her love of Nik, is tensely balanced in the narrative by Nik’s sense ofloss and regret. It is all the more keenly felt because Nik too has had some experience of the peace that can be found in such a religious life, but he will not (“will” not) choose such a life for himself. (Interestingly, Chambers spent time as an Anglican monk in a monastery, grappling with the religious issues that Julie grapples with, as well as the question of engaging with non-religious life, which is eventually Nik’s sad choice.)

Finding Comfort in a Transcendent View of Life, and Other MoreWorldly PhilosophiesMadge Fielding in Jill Paton Walsh’s Unleaving (1976) gives aninteresting answer to the question of what to do with one’s life. At the risk of simplifying a powerful and complex book, it is clear, at a moment of crisis in her life and in the lifeof her new friend Patrick Tregeagle, that Madge makes exactly the same choice as Kath in Forever … - to use her life to makeother people happy. By the end of the book this is seen to have been a very successful choice.

Jill Paton Walsh shows remarkable strength as a writer. She deals with essential matters of human life and death in ways

that are accessible to young adult readers. I have discussed Walsh’s two early historical novels, Hengest’s Tale and The Emperor’s Winding Sheet in another article, showing the way that her historical characters direct their lives through ideas of “honour” and “duty” and, transcending these, through “human love” (Gough, 1986). The Emperor’s Winding Sheet, for example, explores the scope for free will and endurance available to a young boy who is a kind of hostage in besieged,doomed Constantinople. Millicent Lenz’s essay “Through Blight to Bliss: Thematic Motifs in Jill Paton Walsh’s Unleaving” (1988) has many interesting and valuable things to say about images which recur through Unleaving, giving poetic shape to the intellectual and emotional content of this powerful book.

Unleaving is very challenging. When I first read it, being familiar with its “prequel”, Goldengrove, I felt it would be helpful to clarify who was related to whom by constructing a family tree that could link “Gran” with her descendants. My first attempt to do this went badly wrong, however. As the story progressed, I was struck repeatedly by the links that were occurring over large spans of time between events in Madge’s life and in Gran’s life. Initially I thought the linksran from the time when Madge as a young girl returns to her grandmother’s house after “Gran” has died, backward to when Gran and the young children are on the beach. Of course, by page 144, it becomes clear that all the “flashbacks” to Gran have not been to Madge’s grandmother, who is also known as “Gran” (e.g. p 78, and all through Goldengrove), but are actually flashforwards to the time when Madge, much older, is now a grandmother herself. As Lenz points out, this shows the “continuity … which transcends time and death”. This is the emotional heart of the book, and the basis for Madge/Gran’s whole approach to life.

One of the most important features of Unleaving is, in fact, that it does have an emotional heart. By contrast, Goldengroveends in a mood of desolation and heartless loneliness. In Goldengrove, Madge, confronted with the catastrophic

information that she and her “cousin” Paul are actually brother and sister, believing that her father had rejected her, falls through pity into a kind of love for and wanting tobe needed by the blind Literature professor. But he rejects this, telling Madge, “nobody can be trusted … some wounds cannot be healed” (p 128). And at the very end of Goldengrove,in despair, Madge feels and believes that the embittered professor is right: “I just thought that sounded sick and wicked, I didn’t understand what he meant at all. But now I see” - the last words of the book, ending a bitter Cinderella story (see Gough 1990a). Madge’s (fairy) grandmother is powerless to help, and Professor Charming will not dare to return her love.

Surprisingly, and unmentioned by Lenz, there is only a year ortwo between the end of Goldengrove (when Madge is doing or about to do A-Levels, or Matriculation, the entry examination preparatory to going to university) and the start of Unleaving(when Madge has almost finished school and is trying to decidewhether to go to university). Yet she has grown a long way from this, and remarks to her friend Patrick, “I knew a professor once … he was blind” (p 33), and later Paul asks her, “Do you remember that perfectly frightful blind man you got taken up with one summer?” (p 138) - Paul, her brother, has grown a great deal, too.

The worst to be suffered in Goldengrove is injury, such as blindness, or parental rejection, or rejection of offered love. But in Unleaving, death, the ultimate wound that cannot be healed, is considered and seen to be something that doesn’tmatter because of the book’s transcendent vision of immortality. Madge thinks to herself, as an old lady, remembering her own experience of seeing her grandmother’s dead body, and the body of her husband Patrick: “it’s not the romantic opinion about the departing soul that is shaken in the actual presence of death … in the actual presence of deathit is the rational belief in mortality that is shattered” (p 146).

Challenged by the fact of the death of people she loves, and by knowledge of her own imminent death, and buoyed by her irrational faith in immortality, the point of living for Madgeis shown to be to “sing” to celebrate the beauty of the world.Madge, who has always been at home with the great poets, quotes Yeats’ “Sailing to Byzantium”,

An aged man is but a paltry thingA tattered cloak upon a stick, unlessSoul clap its hand and sing ….

Talking about death to her young grandson, Peter, Madge recalls Donne’s advice not to ask for whom the bell tolls. Then remembering again seeing her dead grandmother’s face, Madge thinks, “that absence seemed not only absolute, but irrevocable. It is just another mystery, like everything else.Not how it is, but that it is, is the heart of things” (pp 144, 148). This last sentence is Madge’s/Walsh’s adaptation ofthe quote from the philosopher, Ludwig Wittgenstein’s first major work, that stands as the epigram for the whole of Unleaving: “Not how the world is, is the mystical, but that itis”. (Wittgenstein Tractatus Logico-philosophicus, 6.44.) For Madge, and Jill Paton Walsh, mystery is the heart of things, mystery that transcends rationality, world and time. Irrational (existentially absurd) - but sustaining and enriching life.

There is one point about this mystery that Lenz does not make.Although Madge is the central character, hers is not the only vision of meaning that is offered. Walsh, through the figure of Madge/Gran, gives a mystical vision - a double vision that encompasses paradox and opposites within the ineffable mystery. It is not a single vision of beauty, but an apprehension of beauty and its opposite. This double vision is, in fact, another thematic motif which is crucial to the whole book. Pairs of opposites recur. Land and sea, singularity and universality, temporality and eternity, mortality and immortality, misery and glory (a key moment

occurs when Patrick and Madge both see the same tombstone and respond in diametrically opposite ways - p 57), music and non-music, awareness and unawareness, being and not being, purposefulness and randomness, head and heart, feeling and unfeeling, means and ends, absolutism and relativism.

As a young girl, Madge is pushed to find her double vision during the philosophical debates she is hurled into by her involvement in the philosophical reading party (an informal gathering of keen students and mentoring academics in a country house over a few days of “holiday”), and by her experience of Patrick’s retarded sister who has Down’s syndrome: “I don’t think one should do sums with good and evil, and what will happen if, and if not. I don’t think one ever knows … I think one should watch; and be” (p 103). Quite correctly, Matthew, the clever, dispassionate philosophy student who plays intellectual games, sees this as being “pacifist … mystical”. At this point, Madge, the young woman, discovers what is later shown to be Gran’s mystical credo for living.

Matthew sees the world being “directed” by random chance, rather than believing in any god. But, despite such a potentially bleak view, he remains committed to the intellectual game of philosophising. Faced, as he believes he is, by a world of chaos, his response is not despair, but cheerfulness and intellectual playing. This is his own versionof Madge’s response of singing. Matthew provides a close intellectual match for Madge’s emotional way of responding to the complexities of life and the world, offering his own answer to the existential question of how to live in an absurdworld.

As Madge/Gran expresses it elsewhere: “she would no more move to change [things] than to alter the fall of the light, or re-orchestrate birdsong. One should just be pleased, if one can, by events” (p 87). Naturally she would prefer things to be pleasing. But if they are not, for her there is no

alternative, and nothing to be done. It is a mystical acceptance of paradox and contradiction that is offered as a way of making a satisfactory human life. It stands in contrastto the intense single vision that the Godrevy lighthouse symbolises, the “dark Cyclops eye” (p 114). (This same lighthouse also features in Virginia Woolf’s adult novel To The Lighthouse. Paton Walsh deliberately builds her work on the literature of others.)

But this does not mean that Madge is totally fatalistic. Just as Patrick dared to disturb the universe by taking action (a dark deed, fraught, and complicated), so too Madge dared - offering the consolation of emotional acceptance and physical love to Patrick when he is agonised by guilt for his deed. (The image of daring to disturb the universe initially appearsin T.S. Eliot’s questioning modernist existential poem “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”, 1915.)

But Matthew, “who loved [Madge] just because, not needing anything” (p 148), is not the right match for Madge. Her double vision is matched, in love and marriage, by Patrick’s single vision, his “searchlight attention”, his willingness toengage in action, his changing moods (p 67); her usual quietism and acceptance matched by Patrick’s rebellion againsthis father’s intellectual antisepsis. As a rebel he dares to interfere with the world: he talks about wanting to be a lighthouse keeper saving people (p 83), even though this wouldentail the loneliness he fears most, and at the narrative climax of the book he throws (or it appears that he may have intended to throw) Molly over the cliff (p 114). Paradox and tense uncertainty is at the heart of Madge’s being and in her love.

Lenz draws on Gerard Manley Hopkins’ poem “Spring and Fall” toremind us of “the paradoxical truth that we mourn our own mortality in our grief for the deaths of others” (Lenz p 195).But despite this, repeatedly Madge/Gran rejects such an idea of mourning. Death is not the reality it is commonly thought

to be. There is nothing to mourn: “In the presence of death itis mortality that seems preposterous” (p 148). Madge/Gran may be “going through the process of unleaving”, paring down to the essentials of being, as Lenz (p 197) suggests so poetically. But this is not a matter for tears, as in Hopkins’poem which gave both Goldengrove and Unleaving their titles. Rather it is a matter for celebration, for “watching and being”, as Madge realised as a young woman and has lived by ever since. There is no grieving in the last words of Unleaving, despite the imminence of death for Madge/Gran: “What shall we clap?” she says to her grandson ,Peter, “The lifeboat in the storm. What shall we sing? O, the beauty of the world!”

At the end, as Lenz makes clear, Unleaving is a remarkable, powerful book, with far more in it than any short discussion can reveal. It completes and counteracts the loneliness and suffering at the end of Goldengrove. It also has much to say about ideas of god.

This is something that Walsh has taken up in her later book A Parcel of Patterns (1983). Unlike the philosophising freethinkers of Unleaving, in the later book the point of viewis that of Puritan Christians at the time of the Great Plague in England, profoundly, fiercely devout, but also profoundly assailed by events. Patrick in Unleaving can say, “If God,[i.e. if God exists] he’s a bloody bastard!” (p 63), but can then reject god, and still grimly see that “life is bloody” (p83). Yet he continues to live, bravely and hopelessly. Madge can accept all possible contradictions, and still choose to sing and celebrate.

By contrast, Mall, the young woman in A Parcel of Patterns , is unable to reject her Puritan faith in this way. Yet at the very end of the book, when she has lost her first husband and family, she can only say, “Tomorrow Francis takes me with new heart, to a new home, new hope, New England! And may God

better understand and love us, than we, in our weakness, can do him” (p 136).

There is a terrible wisdom in these books of Jill Paton Walsh.We can only wonder what next she will write that may continue these powerful developments of theme, emotion and experience.

[Postscript: 2005: Indeed Jill Paton Walsh has continued to write powerful searching novels. But I leave these as further reading!]

The Struggle to Live Despite Meaningless and SolitudeIn looking for books that deal with Eales’ question, I am not looking for social doctrines or political action. These have their relevance for their particular circumstances. Pacifism, for example, may be appropriate now, and not appropriate at some other time. Instead I am looking for books which recognise death, freewill, absurdity, loneliness, decency, andfriendship. Without being doctrinaire, such books will consider the pointlessness of existence and propose some reason for living positively, despite the bleak context and prospect.

A key book in the development of existential thinking is Albert Camus’s The Plague (1947). In many ways more a fable than a novel, initially seen as an allegory justifying French resistance to Nazi Occupation, it tells the story of an Algerian city struck by an epidemic of bubonic plague. The characters’ various responses to the threat of infection and death offer several different ways of dealing with life.

The doctor, Rieux, who knows that eventually all the people henow struggles to save will eventually die anyway, is faced with obvious pointlessness. Yet he chooses to go on, trying asbest he can to prolong life and alleviate suffering, despite the fact that all his efforts will indeed be ultimately defeated. Other characters, in their own ways, arrive at similar conclusions. Still others choose to ignore the facts,

or, despairing, seek consolation in drunkenness or escape in suicide. Certainly The Plague is not a book FOR adolescents. But there is no doubt that it is accessible to adolescents, and that it can offer constructive models for living with a purposeful stance, despite acknowledging, and accepting, that life is or may well be seen to be ultimately without purpose. The doctor’s stance is a brave resolve to live in ways that may improve the world despite the hopelessness of doing so.

There are other books that are written FOR adolescents (whatever that may mean) offering similar views

Erik Christian Haugaard (a Danish-American writer) is not well-known in countries governed by British Commonwealth copyright, but he deserves to be better known outside of NorthAmerica. Millicent Lenz’s recent article on Haugaard (1990) discusses four of his novels. Of these I only know The Untold Tale (1971), a book as bleak as Cormier’s The Chocolate War orWalsh’s The Emperor’s Winding Sheet. It is the story of children caught up in a war between Denmark and Sweden during the Seventeenth century, struggling to survive, and to make sense of the destruction that surrounds them. Lenz quotes a Seventeenth century Danish princess whose journal entry inspired Haugaard: “Life could be compared to a drinking cup with two handles. On one was written, ‘Life is bearable’, and on the other, ‘Life is unbearable’. And everything depended onwhich handle you lifted the cup with”. Living more or less comfortably in Australia in the latter part of the Twentieth century [and, now, in the early decades of the Twenty-first century], I need to be forcibly reminded of how grim life can be for some people. Haugaard is able to do this very persuasively, without tipping the balance over to madness or despair. Indeed The Untold Tale is very delicately balanced, showing human life as inextricably, but not irredeemably mixedwith good and evil.

William Corlett’s early work is not as well-known as it deserves to be. The Land Beyond (1975), the second of

Corlett’s novels and part of a trilogy, takes an un-named young man through the aftermath of a three-year relationship with a girl. Although the end of a non-marital affair can be of interest to teenagers, all the characters are adult. The narrative progresses through several different styles and levels: stream of consciousness, notebook, diary, TV screen play, meditation, dream, memory, a time-slip narrative as the man explores the temples at Delphi, and metaphysical speculation about life - and the last page contains a poem. The reader must work with this rich mass of narrative and emotional material. Certainly Corlett makes substantial demands of the reader. But young adults will be stimulated by the challenge.

Reflecting on his affair with the young woman called Gilly, the man wonders about the nature of his “love” and the way people relate. “How little we understand one another. Maybe that’s what it is all about - just understanding” (p 151). He realises a paradox of loving: “I love you and - I must let yougo” (p 152). Near the end he recognises the limitations, even the trap-like nature of his “love”: “I can’t struggle any more, Gilly. I give up. I can only live” (p 168). Pondering existence, he muses: “Life, trapped in matter, yearning for release” (p 113); “There is nowhere that I wish to be … I justwant time to pass … The whole of existence seems pointless” (p128).

It is a crisis similar to that in Jean-Paul Sartre’s Nausea (1938), another key work of existentialism, which hints at theoverall theme of the whole of Corlett’s trilogy:

For Man’s cry to be heard he must create a God; only then can compassion arise; only then can Man'ssuffering be understood, can Man's cry be answered … “HELP ME.”Thus Adam cried at the gate of Eden …

The first words that [the children of Adam] utter on the great journey back to Eden and the return tothe gate. (p 114)

The crisis achieves an ambivalent resolution in the last wordsof the diary entries: “Perhaps when I get back to London, I will piece it all together./ I am (p 173)”. Later these are almost the last words of the whole novel: “And now? How am I now? I can best answer with that last entry in the diary: I am” (p 184). These two cryptic words reflect the great cry of godhead in the Old Testament’s book of Genesis - an affirmation rather than a naming, or an answer or an explanation. Faced with ineffable mystery, what else is possible?

The main story of the rebirth of the young man after the deathof the affair is framed within a confrontation or mutual haunting between the young man and the young Ancient Greek whowas the real-life model for the famous statue of the Charioteer of Delphi. The central character experiences the death of the charioteer, and then is “reborn” after terrible struggles on Apollo’s holy mountain. This use of time fantasy and living mythology links the book with the (children’s) genre of a modern story being haunted by the presence of ancient mythology, popularized by Alan Garner in The Weirdstone of Brisingamen (1960). However the experimental nature of Corlett’s writing, or narrating, demands far more than is usual with children’s books. Better comparisons might be with Penelope Lively’s first real adult book Going Back (1975), Alan Garner’s notorious and fascinating Red Shift or B.S. Johnson’s experimental novels.

After the trilogy, Corlett’s next novel works on a more compressed scale but deals with existential questions even more bluntly. The Dark Side of the Moon (1976) interweaves three stories: David Mason, an innocent (?) school boy, is kidnapped as a philosophical protest against confining social values; Geoffrey Wormsley, a policeman, tries to investigate

the kidnapping; and Wayne Andrews, an astronaut, breaks down on the first trip behind the moon. Each story reflects on the other, and each raises serious questions about the meaning of life, madness, identity, good and evil, and social decay - questions which we cannot reasonably hope to have answered butwhich deserve to be considered.

Two quotes from King Lear are epigraphs for the book: “Poor naked wretches … how shall your houseless heads and unfed sides … defend you from seasons such as these?” (III, 4), and “As flies to wanton boys, are we to the Gods;/ They kill us for their sport” (IV, 1). This grim tone runs through the book. Things that Lear and his terrible companions agonise over also afflict the central characters of all three stories.

The kidnappers leave a note: WE HAVE GOT YOUR BOY. MAY SOCIETYROT AND THIS MESS OF A WORLD PERISH (p 9). At first, the pointof the kidnapping remains concealed. Much later an incomplete manifesto suggests that the kidnappers, themselves ex-studentsfrom the same school, hope to change society by indoctrinatingDavid into their world-view and using him to communicate to the world.

What is their world view? They are against violence and personal greed (p 111). Reasonable enough. But the leader of the kidnappers, Paul Lanyon, goes much further. Quoting Lear, “What a piece of work is man”, he goes on to ask, “A beautifulwell-oiled machine. For what? To procreate? To make more beautiful machines?” (This is a paraphrase of the biologist’s joke, that a chicken is an egg’s way of making another egg – the central theme of Richard Dawkin’s classic non-fiction exploration of sociobiology, The Selfish Gene, published in 1976, the same year as this novel of Corlett’s.)

Then Lanyon articulates a crucial existential question: “What is there that is worth doing? … there is not a man living who can begin to answer the questions in my head. And THAT’S despair, Mason; THAT’S hell” (p 113). Everyone, he says, is aslost and despairing as he is: life is a game, a dream, ending

only in oblivion, death. “How does one avoid the incredible boredom of living once you’ve seen through the facade of it all?” (p 114). This is the very nub of modern anxiety, and fewother writers, whether for children or adults, come anywhere as close as Corlett to considering it so openly.

These bleak thoughts began while the kidnappers were still at school, experimenting with drugs. After they were expelled they all opted out of society, in different ways. “All life isjust filling in time” (p 114). David, the kidnapped boy, argues back that some activities are more worthwhile than others, and cites Shakespeare, Mozart, and Rembrandt. He says that there is some point in making decisions to live in one way rather than another – for example, feeding a dog rather than beating it to death. Desiring beauty, he claims, is different from desiring ugliness. But Lanyon will not have it.He wants to be convinced.

David knows that no one can answer these questions for anyone else. “You can see whatever you want to … that is why each individual must be free. And that’s what we have to work for -that all men should be free” (p 115). But against Lanyon’s “madness” – his nonsensival quest for an undefined “freedom” -there is no answer. All David can do is struggle for his own freedom. When he does manage to escape from the kidnappers he is caught in a terrible blizzard, and wonders why he continuesto struggle to survive. Corlett does not attempt to offer any clear solution, but there are hints of a mystical insight to alarger kind of life that cancels out individual death. SomehowDavid struggles on, and, finally mad, attacks a person he thinks is himself.

The boy and the policeman (similar to Stephen Chance’s – a pen-name of Philip Turner - fascinating ex-detective priest, “Septimus”) are well realised. But the moon-story, a small part of the whole book, does not integrate convincingly, despite its profound symbolic significance. Much of the speculative-questioning writing tends towards poetic

meditation and resembles Corlett’s adult non-fictional Questions series on religions. The Dark Side of the Moon is a brave experiment, deserving comparison with John Fowles’ The Collector (1963) and William Golding’s Free Fall (1959). The kidnap narrative deserves comparison with Cormier’s bitter After the First Death (1979).

Working to Make a Life, Searching for Models and Meaning: SomeExamples of Novels and FablesWe define ourselves through what we do and the effort we make as we go on living. Rudyard Kipling’s Captains Courageous (1897) and Frances Hodgson Burnett’s The Secret Garden (1911) both propose responsibility for self and others, and show the value of work – real everyday physical labour, and other everyday forms of adult work - as a way of finding ourselves and contributing to others. (I have discussed these, and otherchildren’s novels as examples of “modern Cinderella” stories: Gough 1983, 1990a.)

Tove Jansson’s Moominvalley in November (1971) and Moominpappaat Sea (1965) deal with anxiety, uncertainty, absurdity and the risk of madness. These two books are major developments beyond the amusing adventures of imaginary talking animals in Jannson’s earlier Moomin books. (The existential explorations of Jansson’s later “Moomin” novels have been discussed at somelength in my article, 1990.)

E.B. White’s Charlotte’s Web (1952), Lloyd Alexander’s Taran Wanderer (1967), Natalie Babbit’s Tuck Everlasting (1975) and Ursula Le Guin’s The Farthest Shore (1972), amongst others, deal with the need to accept death. We do not have many alternatives but to accept it. We may be innocent of the factsof existence; we may rage against them, or choose to ignore them; we may escape into madness, or suicide - or else we mustchoose to accept the little that may be available, and make the “best” we can of that and of ourselves.

White’s little pig Wilbur, who has been saved from the chopping block by his friend Charlotte, a very clever spider –and writer – is heartbroken when Charlotte dies of old age. His consolations are that Charlotte has laid eggs that hatch, providing a sense of seasonal cross-generational continuity, and his own happy, loving memories of her as his special friend. He lives, not happily ever after, but happily until he, too, dies naturally of old age.

It is interesting to compare Taran Wanderer, Le Guin’s “Earthsea” trilogy [that is, “trilogy”, as it was, writing in 1990 – but since then Le Guin has added several more pieces toher accounts of Earthsea!], Mary Q. Steele’s Journey Outside (1969) and John Marsden’s The Journey (1988). All of these “fables” describe the travels of a central character through different kinds of communities, each character searching for the right kind of life for him. Steele’s book is the most allegorical and preaches most overtly. Alexander is much more realistic (albeit, describing a world in which magic can and does happen, and special kinds of “people” are immortal) in his account of a kind of medieval guild society in which Taran(who is a mortal human being) struggles to find who he is and what he wants to do in the world. Part of Taran’s dilemma is becoming emotionally involved with a princess-sorceress who isimmortal!

Ursula Le Guin, daughter of a noted anthropologist, and trained as an anthropologist, is the least allegorical and most plausible. She is content to describe, accepting many different ways of living with little subjective or critical evaluation. The fact that Le Guin continued her “trilogy” witha fourth book Tehanu (1990) prompts reconsideration of the earlier work. Clearly A Wizard of Earthsea (1968) is about personal responsibility and the need to live within the world-balance, while The Farthest Shore (1972) is about the need to accept death as a necessary adjunct to life.

However, the theme of The Tombs of Atuan (1971) is not immediately clear. The story seems to be about a kind of rescue of Sleeping Beauty, as Tenar, a young woman being trained as a priestess for dark powers grows beyond the Freudian latency period towards full adult sexuality. The vigorous young (black-skinned – not all readers realize this!)wizard Ged is chosen in preference to the parent-substitute, the princess’s guardian eunuch, Mannan. But there is no ultimate conjoining of princess and prince at the end of the book, only the establishing of a relationship of mutual respect. It is difficult to see what the book is really about,behind its apparent motif of Sleeping Beauty and its strong narrative of escape adventure.

Until Ged appears, the first part of the novel presents with utter conviction and without a hint of question or criticism aPharaonic or Babylonian world of consuming ritual, power and blind faith - the world of the white-skinned Kargish Empire. This is the only culture amongst the many peoples of Earthsea that Le Guin describes in a critical way. (Le Guin’s “demonizing” of a white race and culture is an interesting twist.)

But at the end of The Tombs of Atuan why should Tenar reject this Kargish world in favour of Ged’s world, the larger world of Earthsea which seems more closely to resemble our own world? Is this an act of cultural arrogance or religious intolerance? The Kargish Empire and the larger worlds of Earthsea are both ruled by gods, albeit, very different gods. Ged makes it quite clear that he believes in the reality and power of Tenar’s gods. It is not a matter of religious conversion. Instead, although this does not seem to have been noticed by many readers, the book considers WHICH gods a person should serve or worship. Its theme is the nature of good and evil, not considered in terms of isolated deeds but in terms of whole lives, within a multicultural polytheistic world.

Tenar’s gods, not named but referred to as the “Old Ones” are indeed great powers, deserving awe and careful, respectful treatment and devoted ritual. Ged knows this. But the underlying point of the book is that the Old Ones do not deserve more than this. They do not create, or care. They seekto dominate, possess, and crush. They resemble Patricia Wrightson’s “Nargun”, an ancient Aborginal spirit (1973), or Tove Jansson’s eerie, menacing “Groke”, or the mysterious intelligence in John Christopher’s The Lotus Caves (1969) - powerful, barely conscious, and so self-concerned as to be malicious to anything else. They are very different from the dragons of Earthsea, which are totally non-human and yet not indifferent to humans. They are also completely different fromthe (absent) creator gods of Earthsea, who are powerful and caring.

What Ged offers Tenar is freedom from the pointless worship, the willing placation of the careless Old Ones. It is their carelessness and the way they enslave people that makes them “evil”, although this ethical judgment can only be made from aposition based on the fundamental acceptance of human worth. The alternative for Tenar is a life that “worships” a caring attitude to people and to the world at large, and this is borne out in the events of Tehanu. It is important to recognize, however, that the religious truth and power of the Old Ones is not denied by Ged. They are not an untrue superstition, as we might say of the Egyptian or Sumerian or Viking gods – although Ancient Egyptians, Sumerians, and Vikings would beg to differ. They are true, but unworthy to beserved.

Tenar’s real life begins once she sees this and rejects the sterility of her pious devotion to the service of the Old Ones. The need to change and the struggle to achieve this radical change in (Tenar’s) cultural perception and religious faith is the book’s theme.

Importantly, Le Guin’s fourth “Earthsea” book, Tehanu, adds a completely new feminine element. Tenar, freed from her loomingservitude to the Old Ones, becomes a Wise Woman – a female alternative to the chaste, asexual, masculine world of wizards, such as Ged, and other mages. Moreover, following hisnear-death experience in the third book, The Farthest Shore, Ged is freed from the constraints of his wizard’s training, and is able to explore his male sexuality, in conjunction withlearning, and valuing Tenar’s womanly wisdom. (Le Guin is a subtle, thoughtful, and often provocative writer.)

Le Guin’s anthropological descriptive approach, usually uncritical of seemingly alien cultures, resembles that of Henry Treece in books such as The Dream-Time (1967) where a crippled boy struggles to find a way to express himself and beuseful in a primitive and violent society. In John Marsden’s The Journey, the imaginary semi-medieval pre-technical community is more like a fable than a view of how real (modern) life might be lived, or was ever lived. But it is notable for the poetry that is written by its central character as he travels and matures.

(Incidentally, while discussing fiction for adolescents, consider how little poetry there is for adolescents, and how little of this is concerned with questions of life rather thansimply singing lyrics of love and loneliness. See my discussion of this, Gough 1990c.)

Like Corlett’s The Dark Side of the Moon, Penelope Lively’s The House in Norham Gardens (1974) argues for choosing to go on living, despite anxiety and inevitable death. However this is not necessarily obvious in Lively’s book which is, arguably, the greatest book for children since Burnett’s The Secret Garden. Certainly Clare, the fourteen year-old orphan who lives with two maiden great-aunts, is agonising (quietly) over something or some things that are distressing her, and bythe end of the novel she has found some resolution. But she isnot fully aware of what is bothering her. Lively leaves it to

the reader to make sense of a very subtle story in which simple daily events of a fairly ordinary school girl are linked to a much larger world of space and time.

As with many books written at this time, there is a fantasy element in The House in Norham Gardens. But this involves no more than Clare dreaming, and waking without remembering what she has dreamed. The fantasy is totally internalised and demands no suspension of disbelief. Yet her dreaming works powerfully within the narrative to suggest some of what is distressing her, and to show how it works towards resolution. One final image indicates the new strength that Clare finds: she chooses to give a tree as a birthday present to one of hergreat-aunt’s, knowing that the tree will not mature for many years. The full significance of this treasured gift can only be found by reading the book.

We should also remember such adult classics as Sartre’s Nauseaand Camus’s The Plague, as well as Thonton Wilder’s The Bridgeof San Luis Rey (1927) Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932),Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon (1940), Samuel Beckett’s Waiting For Godot (1955) and Richard Hillary’s The Last Enemy (1942), all of which discuss different ways that a person might live and what sort of meaning this would give the person's life. They are not always easy to read. But they are all in reach of a confident adolescent reader, perhaps with a little assistance, or in the case of Beckett, with a little help to see the humour that provides some relief for the agony. (Beckett is famous for having one of his suffering characters, in The Unnamable, 1953, say, “You must go on, I can’t go on, I'll go on” – a seemingly paradoxical declarationof persistence in the face of almost overwhelming depression and adversity.)

Thornton Wilder’s narrator, Brother Juniper, an eye-witness tothe disaster, searches for some hint of meaning in the accidental death of five travelers when a rope bridge in Eighteenth century Peru breaks, hurling the unlucky travelers

into the rocky chasm below. He discovers the words of a bereaved father to a bereaved twin: “We do what we can. We push on … as best we can. It isn’t for long, you know. Time keeps going by. You’ll be surprised at the way time passes” (p74). At the end Brother Juniper says:

But soon we [those who survived the disaster, and remember those who died] shall die and all memory of those five [who were killed when the bridge broke] will have left the earth, and we ourselves shall be loved for a while and forgotten. But the love will have been enough; all those impulses of love return to the love that made them. Even memory is not necessary for love. There is a land of the living and a land of the dead, and the bridge is love, the only survival, the only meaning (Wilder 1927 p 124).

Richard Hillary’s autobiographical account of his experiences in the Battle of Britain as a Spitfire pilot, the “last of thelong-haired boys”, shows how he found himself and a profound sense of purpose in the chaos of war: “Yes, you can realise yourself, but not by leading the egocentric life. By feeling deeply the deaths of the others you are conferring value on life” (p 251). Hillary’s theme in wartime is just as true in peace. By being involved in other people’s lives we become people ourselves in our own right.

The question, “If it wasn’t for the others, what would be the point?” implies its own answer.

More recently Russell Hoban’s Kleinzeit (1974) tackles these issues head on, and is accessible to young adult readers. The hero, Kleinzeit, is hospitalised with a severe pain in his hypotenuse. (Hoban’s misuse of a mathematical term as though it were a medical term is typical of his verbal humour.) Therehe talks with characters called Hospital, Death, Chance and other surreal characters – and they talk back to him! - as well as with his nurse, Sister. He considers the myth of Orpheus and spends some of his time in the hospital bed reading Thucydides’ account of the absurd war between Athens and Sparta. Knowing that he has a fatal condition (which may

or may not be the same as being alive) he chooses to resist rather than surrender, and hopes to make what sort of life he can, despite his human condition, constructing artistic sense out of chaos, showing courage rather than dishonourable cowardice. It is a remarkable book.

(Re-reading, and revising these ideas that I began drafting in1992 – writing now in 2015 – I remember that initially I wanted to give this essay the title “Joining the Resistance”, but later decided against that. I have always read war books, and find the ideas of war shed light on existential problems. For me, the idea of “joining the resistance” makes sense, in war – alluding to the brave Resistance fighters in Nazi-occupied France and other parts of Europe – but I felt that what resonated conceptually for me would be opaque for other readers. But, interestingly, Hoban also found the idea of “resistance” made sense in his non-war book, albeit one that does refer to a much older war.)

Robert Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance could also be mentioned, though its formal discussion of philosophy makes it less accessible to young adult readers, unless they have a head for abstract ideas and a profound discussion of Plato versus the Sophists. The other novels for adults can be read as straight novels, even Sartre’s psychologically intense “stream of consciousness” and Hoban’s delightful experimentation with language, character and narrative.

Being Responsible for the Consequences of Free ChoiceFree will and moral responsibility are important aspects of being human. Almost all of John Christopher’s novels, such as The White Mountains (1967), The Lotus Caves (1969) and The Guardians (1970) consider these aspects again and again. (Importantly, Christopher regarded his “White Mountains” or “Tripods” trilogy as a science fiction depiction of the underground resistance against the German occupation of Europein World War II, although it would apply with equal force to any regime that uses propaganda to control the minds of its subjects – such as Stalinist Russia, or modern North Korea.)

As Will and his two companions struggle through a kind of medieval France (modern Twentieth century technology has been eradicated by the invading aliens who drive around their conquered territories in giant tripod walking machines) in TheWhite Mountains, they find themselves befriended by a French family. Will knows that he could choose to stay with this family and live a contented life. But to do this he would haveto submit to being “capped”, that is, to let the Tripods placea machine on his head that would control his thinking. He can choose freedom or happiness, to resist external domination or to submit with contentment.

Similarly in The Lotus Caves two boys on a moon station accidentally discover a cave that contains a telepathic alien intelligence of enormous power. There is also another earthmanwho has been in the cave for nearly a hundred years, his life prolonged by the alien and with every comfort provided. The earthman’s response is to worship the alien, to submit his lesser intelligence to that of the creature. The two boys choose not to do this – they choose to resist this temptation.(In effect, they are refusing to accept a version of immortality, at least, on the terms offered by this alien super-intelligence.) But even as the boys escape they feel enormous regret at the endlessly contented life they are rejecting in order to be merely human. J.M. Barrie’s classic little-boy-who-refuses-to-grow-up, Peter Pan, may say “To die will be a great adventure”, but being “merely human”, and mortal but free, is equally adventurous.

In a very different way, but one that should not be misunderstood, Tolkien’s Middle Earth and C.S. Lewis’s “Narnia” stories also consider the importance of choosing values, choosing to obey or to rebel. It is by our choices that we define ourselves. In Tolkien’s and Lewis’s scheme there are spiritual forces and authorities that go beyond human concerns. But this is not different in essence from the brute facts of the natural world which are also forces and “authorities” that dominate and go beyond the limitations of

humanity. Again and again Lewis’s child characters must chooseto continue, to carry out instructions, to believe, to trust, and to care. They do not have to do these things. Life will goon in different ways regardless of their individual actions. But the importance of their choices is always made clear. (This is discussed in more detail in Gough 1977, 1980.)

Similarly with Tolkien’s characters there is a continual need to try to resist the corrupting influence of power and the possession of objects. Bilbo, in The Hobbit (1937, 1951), could choose not to go on with the silly idea that he is a “burglar”, to quit the expedition and seek safety. But he doesnot do so and he must then take the consequences of that choice, and the consequences that follow from the way he uses the Ring that he finds in a dark underground cavern. The Ring,and other powerful magic objects, continues to be a profound temptation through the sequel The Lord of the Rings (1954-1955, revised 1966.)

At a simpler level, the central moral action in Betsy Byar’s The 18th Emergency (1974) is that Mouse must accept responsibility for having slandered Hammerman, when he described the brutish boy as an ape-man. Certainly Hammerman is an unpleasant bully, but he is also a human being. Mouse isentitled to his private opinions. But Hammerman is also entitled to public restitution. Even an (alleged) ape-man has his dignity. For older readers there are similar messages about the need to take charge of one’s own life in Paul Zindel’s teenage novels such as Confessions of a Teenage Baboon (1977) and The Amazing and Death-Defying Diary of Eugene Dingman (1987). Flawed by the extreme situations that Zindel’s characters find themselves in, surrounded by bizarre and caricatured adults, nonetheless, his novels explore ways that teenagers can grow towards adulthood, making decisions for themselves, taking the risks that go with being adult, andaccepting the consequences when things go wrong. His characters learn that they need to resist being manipulated byothers, to resist day-dreaming and wishful thinking, to look

at themselves honestly, and to do something about it if they don’t like what they see.

Similar how-should-I-choose-to-live questions arise in UrsularLe Guin’s realistic teenage novel, A Very Long Way From Anywhere Else (1976), in which a young man and woman, both highly intelligent, find themselves closely attracted to one another, despite having very different personal interests and goals. (He wants to become a scientist. She is a musician who wants to become a composer.) But, tempted by the social pressures of their peers and wider society to change their friendship to a sexual relationship, she does not want this, and they thoughtfully choose not to do so. At the end of the book, as the young woman is leaving on a train to begin her university studies, the young man stands on the platform, clearly loving her and saddened by the separation, but determined to be the best person he can. He expresses this by doing a “human act”, which deliberately contrasts with his earlier clowning “monkey act” that had been part of what made him eccentrically attractive to the young woman in the first place. (The place that is “a very long way from anywhere else”is an imaginary land, similar, perhaps, to the island of St Helena’s, based on the imaginary land of “Gondal, created by the young Brontë children in the imaginative writings, before they wrote their adult poetry and novels. Le Guin’s two characters develop a mutual interest in their version of such a place, feeling that it reflects their own longings, and sense that they do not easily fit in with their age-peers.)

Without being willing to make an effort, and choosing to live by positive moral values, life is not worth living.

Sometime starting to take positive control of one’s life meansaccepting the inevitable, and, perhaps, accepting accidents, however cruel. For example, Morris Gleitzman’s Two Weeks With the Queen (1990) describes a young boy’s desperate, and essentially futile efforts to find some kind of miracle cure to save his younger brother from dying of cancer. As I read

the book, the boy seems to be unbelievably foolish in persisting with his wild hopes. He deliberately ignores the obvious, inescapable medical facts that adults put before him.But young readers find Gleitzman plausible, entertaining and moving. Eventually the boy accepts that a miracle cure is not possible, that everything that medical science can do has beendone. He is helped to this acceptance by meeting a man whose homosexual lover is dying of AIDS. (At this time, HIV/AIDS wasa terminal illness.) What can NOT be changed must be accepted with grace and compassion – a hard lesson to learn.

Sometimes starting to take charge of one’s life means NOT having to take responsibility for things that have happened. For example in Margaret Mahy’s Memory (1987), Johnny has to stop agonising over responsibility for his sister’s death. Instead he must accept it as an accident so that he can be freed from guilt and self-punishment. A similar need to acceptthe death of a sibling is the central theme of John Marsden’s experimental, post-modernist novel Out of Time (1990), which uses the idea of a time machine as, potentially, a way for thecentral character to go back in time, and save his younger brother from a fatal asthma attack.

This is the reverse of the kind of responsibility taken for a very similar situation in Unleaving, where responsibility for causing an accident is accepted and lived with. This is the moral strength which is lacking in Holden Caulfield, whose unacknowledged emotional agony prevents him from growing up, from accepting his own sexuality, from being properly alive even though his younger brother, Ally, is dead. It is the resolve to get on with living and growing up, regardless of what has happened and what might happen, while all the time knowing these things, which is at the heart of The House in Norham Gardens. It is living courageously, with some hope, however tentative or illusory. It is being human.

ConclusionOf course, we should accept that different books in fact do different things. It would be silly to expect EVERY book to deal with the questions: “what do you want to do with your life?” or, “how should a person live?” It is thus unreasonableto criticise a book that does not tackle such questions on thegrounds that it ought to do so. As an example, Forever … is not a great book. But what it does is well done, and does not deserve the full thrust of Eales’ criticism.

However, when we consider books such as Aidan Chambers’ Now I Know, or Jill Paton Walsh’s Unleaving, or Ursula Le Guin’s A Very Long Way From Anywhere Else, which also deal with problems of teenagers growing up, we can see that much more isbeing discussed than just personal happiness and romantic aspirations. We can recognise a qualitative difference betweenbooks: some are “good”, others are “better” - because they go further.

This discussion has only scratched the surface. The books mentioned are not all great books. Some of them are flawed or limited, if considered as works of literature, or even as attempts to tell a story. Yet they are all in their different ways concerned with profound matters. They are books that can change the way we live. Compared with the mass of books which deal with other things, or which merely entertain, there are relatively few books which consider Eales’ crucial question. Their comparative rarity makes them all the more valuable. They are books to be sought out, treasured, shared with friends - books to build lives!

This discussion ends with a post-epigrammatic poem.

          Distance PieceI may reach a point one reaches a pointwhere all I might have to say where all that one has to saywould be that life is bloody awful

is that the human condition is intolerablebut that I would not end it but one resolves to go ondespite everything despite everything B.S. Johnson in Penguin Modern Poets 25 Penguin; Harmondsworth, 1975 (from Poems Two Trigram Press; London, 1972: sadly, Johnson DID commit suicide, depressed by his feeling that his experimental writing was not being accepted by the wider literary establishment: happily, his literary works continue to live!)

Australian PostscriptWhen I presented an early draft of this discussion at the Children’s Literature Conference in 1992, to an Australian audience of teachers and Graduate Diploma students and graduates, I was ridiculed for not including any Australian children’s writers. In fact, this was an oversight on my part,as I was well aware of many excellent Australian books that deal with issues of how to live.

In revising this discussion I have included, for example, Morris Gleitzman, John Marsden and Christobel Mattingley. Apart in Marsden’s The Journey, where it is the crux of the book, as a rule Marsden is far less explicit about how “life should be lived”. Usually incidents demonstrate actions that areader might consider commendable, or characters debate these matters. One particular “lesson” Marsden teaches in this indirect manner is that no matter how grim life may seem to be, there is no excuse for refusing to take personal responsibility for living, and for one’s own actions and theirconsequences. Again and again in Marsden’s books, his characters discover the central importance of their human relationships. For Lisa in Take My Word For It, this comes partly through her mother’s words: “People try so hard to destroy themselves. … The only cure is to care about as many things as you can.”

I could add further details about other important books by these two authors – but they have been discussed by me in other articles (see Gough 1987a, 1996, 1999a, 1999b).

In hindsight, finalizing this draft in 2015, I realize that Ivan Southall, arguably Australia’s finest writer for childrenand young adults, was a major omission from my conference paper and the later published proceedings. Shortly after WorldWar II, in which Southall had served as an RAAF pilot of ShortSunderland flying boats, he wrote the history of his squadron,and then a biography of the ace Australian fighter pilot

“Bluey” Truscott, and a non-fiction book on the work of Australians defusing German naval mines that were dropped on England. Much later, as an accomplished writer for children, Southall returned to his experience in convoy patrols, air-searescue, and U-boat hunting in several of his books for children, as well as writing a children’s version of the mine defusers.

For a time, in the 1950s, Southall was successful as a popularchildren’s author with a series of books about a fictional AirForce pilot, “Simon Black”. One of these drew on Southall’s wartime experiences, but others were speculative science fiction, and all equivalent to the popular aviator-hero genre of the prolific W.E. Johns’ “Biggles” books, and “King of Space” books. But in the early 1960s Southall reinvented himself as a non-genre children’s author, with Hills End (1962), a dramatic adventure about a flood in a rural community, and Ash Road (1965), an even more drastic adventureabout a wild bush fire that a child accidentally starts, and must take responsibility for.

In Southall’s middle period of writing for children and Young Adults, we may take Bread and Honey as typical of Southall, athis most challenging. It is the story of a young boy with his head full of would-be heroism, coming to terms with manhood and adult-life, on the beach, during ANZAC Day (25 April: the day that commemorates Australian service men and women: the day that Australian soldiers first went into battle, in World War I, landing at Gallipoli). It is a personal coming-of-age for the young lad, and for an Australian culture that was still enmeshed in the Vietnam War, and long memories of earlier fighting in the two World Wars, Korea and Malaya, mingled, as ANZAC Day is, with Biblical reflection about the meaning of honour, belonging, struggle, loss, and reconciliation. The boy must confront his father’s secret war-related scientific government work, grapple with the gentler values of his grandmother, care for a retarded girl he finds at the beach, and resist neighbourhood bullies. In his mind,

the boy re-enacts, confusedly, but ultimately with resolution,the Australian beach assault against Turkish and German troopsin 1915. Told through the protagonist’s inner voice – one of Southall’s striking literary achievements - the layers of meaning resonate powerfully. Strong meat!

Southall’s next book, Josh (1971), won international prizes for a story about Josh, a sensitive city teenager, a boy who enjoys and writes poetry, who visits his grandmother in a small rural town. There he struggles with the local values, culture, and life-style. Confronted by local town bullies, andrealising he might have to fight to defend himself, instead hechooses to, literally, walk away from those who do not understand him. He walks home. Defeated by the bullies, but retaining his dignity. Again, the almost stream-of-consciousness of the protagonist’s inner voice is striking.

Southall’s close-to-last book, Blackbird (1988), is particularly remarkable, because, unlike many of his other books that end in an ambivalent, obscure final rush of action and emotion (like the film-screen going finally black with implicit “THE END” as the ultimate explosion engulfs the protagonist of an adventure film, leaving us unsure if the hero lives or dies), in Blackbird, scattered through the usualjumpily nervous telling and retelling of Southall’s narrative sections, and reflections, there are unusual flashforwards (!)that reveal how the narrator - who we are reading about, here and now, young and callow, and heroically trying, but foolish,and seemingly hopelessly romantic – later satisfactorily growsup, and casts off the childish confusions and misplaced romantic ideals and aspirations (castles in the clouds) of thenow-hero.

The youngster in Blackbird, Will Houghton, aspires to be like his military-hero Engineer father, and his military-hero olderbrother Geoff who joins the Royal Australian Air Force, and like his memories or awareness of a military approach to life.But, by the end of the book Will renounces this entirely. We

are told that Will, more than forty years after the events in the rest of the book, talks about these events to “me” - an otherwise un-named author-narrator (p 59 near the end of Chapter 9; and on the last page of the book, where “I”, the author-narrator, is revealed to be Will’s speech-writer. (Interestingly, “Will” is never called “William”. The abbreviated name can stand symbolically for “will”.)

Out of the shattered mental fragments, which are young Will’s thoughts, precariously sitting on the roof of his family house, as a would-be military look-out, watching for the approaching enemy, rather like the main character in Let the Balloon Go (where something simple like climbing a tree, or sitting safely on a high roof, comes to hold for the physically handicapped, and over-protected protagonist a symbolic significance akin to climbing a mountain, mapping theworld, or defending civilization against fierce barbaric enemies), we are told that Will becomes the Australian Prime Minister, Sir William Houghton, heroic national leader in a later time of massive bush-fires (end of Chapter 16, and end of Chapter 4), and instigator of new Child Care Laws (early inChapter 16).

We are also told that Will’s mother makes a memorial garden tohonour her son Geoff, who is killed in World War II. Typically, his death is obliquely revealed: on the last page we hear that; “in due course Geoffrey’s diary went home to thefamily with a few excisions. His mother kept the original close to her for forty years”. Perhaps ironically, as Geoff had been fighting in a war against Germans, Italians and Japanese, and Will’s father is working on Australia’s defence against invading Japanese, and Will’s childlike military imaginings are all (almost all?) concerned with confronting the possibly approaching enemy Japanese: ironically, the ornamental Japanese-style memorial garden includes a lily pond, “spanned by a small Japanese tea-garden bridge” (p 22, at the end of Chapter 3).

The blackbird of the title is, ambiguously, a parent blackbird, scolding the marauding house-hold cat (“he’s only being a cat”, Will says, or thinks. on p 102 near the end of Chapter 15), and is also the parent-bird’s offspring, a young blackbird that is killed, like a trainee pilot flying in fog: it crashes into a window of the house (these events occupy thelast pages of Chapter 15).

By the end of the book, young Will has reconciled the tragic, but natural and accidental death of the young blackbird, and the distress of the parent-bird, with his own failure to successfully climb the roof, and sets about “cultivating his own garden” (as the conclusion of Voltaire’s Candide puts it):he begins to clean up the shattered glass panes of broken “cold frames” - like small hot-houses - that are part of the overgrown abandoned old garden in the remote bush house his parents had moved the family to, for war-time safety (pp 108-109 near the end of Chapter 17, and p 124 at the end of Chapter 17).

Abandoning his militaristic fantasies of defending his bushy mountain hamlet, like a citadel, against possible Japanese invaders, Will declares the defenceless hamlet to be an Open City. (This is an historic concept from the last stages of World War II, when both Rome and Paris were declared Open Cities, so they could be spared the devastation of being fought over, like so many other towns and cities in Europe andAsia).

Through the fictional challenges of Blackbird, where the reader must work hard to piece together character, imaginings,feelings, and character-changing decisions, Southall makes hisown peace with the world. This is a considered pacifism. An acceptance of what is natural: and beyond this, an aspiration to compassion that transcends the red-in-tooth-and-claw of thehungry, aggressive natural world. The acceptance at the end resembles Mouse’s insight at the end of Betsy Byar’s The Eighteenth Emergency.

Ivan Southall’s prize-winning books speak frequently and urgently about the need for people to be courageous, persistent, insightful, and fundamentally moral. His narrativestyle is modern, and, at times, post-modern. He often makes great demands on his readers – but so do Robert Cormier, for example, Aidan Chambers, Jill Paton Walsh, Penelope Lively, and others.

Finally, if my long rambling discussion has shed any light on the authors I have considered, and their books, or if it has introduced any of my readers to a book they had not previouslyknown about, I will feel that my own reading and exploration has been worthwhile, beyond the personal interest, satisfaction, and understanding of life I have gained.

References and Further ReadingAdams, D. The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Pan; London, 1979.

Alexander, L. Taran Wanderer. Holt Reinhart; New York, 1967.

Arnold, M. Selected Poems and Prose (Denys Thompson, ed.) Heinemann; London, 1971.

Babbit, N. Tuck Everlasting. Farrar Strauss; NewYork, 1975.

Beckett, S. The Unamable. (In French 1953) Grove Press; London,1958.

Beckett, S. Waiting for Godot. (In French, 1955) Faber; London, 1956.

Blume, J. Forever …. Bradbury Press; New York, 1975.

Blume, J. Wifey. Putnam; New York, 1978.

Briggs, R. Fungus the Bogeyman. Hamish Hamilton; London, 1977.

Briggs, R. Gentleman Jim. Hamish Hamilton; London, 1980.

Briggs, R. Unlucky Wally. Hamish Hamilton; London, 1987.

Burnett, F. H. The Secret Garden. Heinemann; London, 1911.

Byars, B. The 18th Emergency. Bodley Head; London, 1974.

Camus, A. The Plague. (1947) transl. Stuart Gilbert (1948) Penguin; Harmondsworth, 1960.

Chambers, A. Now I Know. Bodley Head; London, 1987.

Christopher, J. The White Mountains. Hamish Hamilton; London,1967.

Christopher, J. The Lotus Caves. Hamish Hamilton; London, 1969.

Christopher, J. The Guardians. Hamish Hamilton; London, 1970.

Christopher, J. Empty World. Hamish Hamilton; London, 1970.

Corlett, W. The Dark Side of the Moon. Hamish Hamilton: London, 1976.

Dawkins, R. The Selfish Gene. Oxford University Press, London, 1976.

Eales, D. “Enid Blyton, Judy Blume, and Cultural Impossibilities”, Children’s Literature in Education vol. 20, no. 2 June 1989 pp 81 – 89/

French, M. The Women’s Room. Ballantine; New York, 1987.

Garner, A. The Stone Book. Collins; London, 1976.

Garner, A. Tom Fobble's Day. Collins; London, 1977 —the last of four in narrative sequence.

Garner, A. Granny Reardun. Collins; London, 1977.

Garner, A. The Aimer Gate. Collins; London, 1978.

Gleitzman, M. Two Weeks With the Queen. Pan, Sydney, 1990

Golding, W. The Princess Bride: S. Morgenstern’s Classic Tale of True Love and High Adventure: The “good parts” version Abridged by William Goldman. Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich; New York, 1973.

Gough, J. “C.S.Lewis and the Problem of David Holbrook”, Children’s Literature in Education, vol. 8, no. 2, Summer 1977 pp 510-62.

Gough, J. “In Defence of C.S.Lewis”, (a paper presented to a Children’s Literature Conference in 1978): in Brian Murphy(ed.) Readings in Children’s Literature. Frankston State College; Frankston, 1980 pp 120-135.

Gough, J. “Cinderella Surviving in the Suburbs” Idiom vol. XVIII, Winter 1983 pp 5-9.

Gough, J. “Reconsidering Judy Blume’s Young Adult Novel Forever … ”, Use of English vol.36, no. 2, 1985 pp 29-36.

Gough, J. “Bitter Truths: the Human Realities of Courage, Betrayal and Defeat: Two Historical Novels by Jill Paton Walsh” Junior Bookshelf vol. 50, no. 1 1986 pp 7-11.

Gough, J. “Tapestries of Image and Emotion: the Novels of Christobel Mattingley”, Children’s Literature in Education vol.18, no. 2 1987a 97-104.

Gough, J. “Growth, Survival and Style in the Novels of Judy Blume”, School Librarian vol. 35, no. 2 1987b pp 100-106.

Gough, J. “Haunted Landscapes: Fantasy and Reality in the Fiction of Penelope Lively”: unpublished PhD thesis (University of Papua New Guinea), 1987c.

Gough, J. “Rivalry, Rejection, and Recovery: Variations of theCinderella story”, Children’s Literature in Education, vol. 21, issue 2, pp. 99-107, 1990a.

Gough, J. “Tove Jansson and the Moomin Sequence: Tales of Necessary Fear and Anxiety” Papers: Explorations into Children’s Literature 1 no. 1 April 1990b 24-33.

Gough, J. “Young Adult Fiction Rules - OK? So Where’s the Young Adult Poetry?”, Magpies, vol. 5, no. 4 September 1990c pp 5-9.

Gough, J. “Into the Minds and Worlds of John Marsden’s Out of Time” The Literature Base vol. 3, no. 2 June 1992 pp 22-24.

Gough, J. “ John Marsden’s Classrooms”, Bookbird, vol. 33, no.3, Summer, 1995.

Gough, J. “Christobel Mattingley” Bookbird vol. 34, no. 3, Fall, pp 48–51, 1996.

Gough, J. “John Marsden”, in Tom Pendergast and Sara Pendergast (eds). St James Guide to Young Adult Writers, St James Press, Detroit, Second Edition, pp. 545-547, 1999a.

Gough, J. “Ivan Southall”, in Tom Pendergast and Sara Pendergast (eds). St James Guide to Young Adult Writers, St James Press, Detroit, Second Edition, pp. 773-775, 1999b.

Gough, J. “Christobel Mattingley”, in Tom Pendergast and Sara Pendergast (eds). St James Guide to Children’s Writers, St James Press, Detroit, Fifth Edition, pp. 708-710, 1999c.

Gough, J. “Christobel Mattingley’s The Sack: Resource Review”, Prime Number, vol. 23, no. p 1, p. 19, 2008.

Haugaard, E.C. The Untold Tale. Houghton Mifflin: Boston, 1971.

Hillary, R. The Last Enemy. Macmillan; London, 1942.

Hoban, R. Kleinzeit. Jonathan Cape; London, 1974.

Hoban, R. “Ponders” series: Lavinia Bat, Big John Turkle, Jim Frog, Charlie Meadows. Walker; London, 1983-1984.

Huxley, A. Brave New World. (1932) Penguin; Harmondsworth, 1955.

Jansson, T. Moominvalley in November. (1971: trans. Kingsley Hart 1971). Penguin; Harmondsworth, 1974.

Jansson, T. Moominpappa at Sea. (1965 trans. Kingsley Hart 1966)Penguin; Harmondsworth, 1974.

Kipling, R. Captains Courageous. Macmillan; London, 1897.

Koestler, A. Darkness at Noon. (1940 translated by Daphne Hart) Penguin; Harmondsworth, 1947.

Le Guin, U. A Wizard of Earthsea. Parnassus Press; Berkely, 1968.

Le Guin, U. The Tombs of Atuan. Atheneum; New York, 1971.

Le Guin, U. The Farthest Shore. Atheneum; New York, 1972.

Le Guin, U. A Very Long Way From Any Where Else. Harper; New York, 1976.

Le Guin, U. Tehanu. Atheneum; New York,1990.

Lenz, M. “Through Blight to Bliss: Thematic Motifs in Jill Paton Walsh’s Unleaving”, Children’s Literature Association Quarterly, Winter 1988 vol. 13, no. 4 194–197.

Lenz, M. “The Two-Handled Drinking Cup: Imagination in Four Historical Novels by Erik Christian Haugaard” Children’s Literature Association Quarterly, vol.15, no. 1 Spring 1990 21-27

Lewis, C. S. The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. Bles; London, 1950.

Lively, P. The House in Norham Gardens. Heinemann; London, 1974.

Lively, P. A House Inside Out. Andre Deutsch; London, 1987.

Mahy, M. Memory. Dent; London, 1987.

Marsden, J. So Much to Tell You …. McVitty Books, Sydney, 1987.

Marsden, J. The Journey. Pan; Sydney, 1988.

Marsden, J. Out of Time. Pan; Sydney, 1990.

Marsden, J. Take My Word For It. Pan Macmillan; Sydney, 1992 – a “sequel” to So Much to Tell You ….

Mattingley, C. Southerly Buster. Hodder and Stoughton; Sydney, 1983.

Needle, J. Piggy in the Middle. Andre Deutsch; London, 1980.

O'Brien, R.C. Z For Zachariah. Atheneum; NewYork, 1975.

Paterson, K. The Great Gilly Hopkins. (1978) Penguin; Harmondsworth,1981.

Paterson, K. Jacob Have I Loved. Crowell; New York, 1980.

Pirsig, R.M. Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. Bodley Head, London. 1974.

Pratchett, T. Mort. Gollancz; London, 1987.

- also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mort

- http://www.au.lspace.org/books/apf/mort.html - [online annotations for Mort]

Salinger, J. D. The Catcher in the Rye. Little, Brown; New York, 1951.

Sartre, J.-P. Nausea. (1938: trans. Robert Baldick 1964) Penguin; Harmondsworth, 1965.

Southall, I. Hills End. Angus & Robertson; Sydney and London, 1962; St. Martin’s; New York, 1963.

Southall, I. Ash Road. Angus & Robertson; Sydney and London, 1965: New York, St. Martin's, 1966.

Southall, I. Bread and Honey. Angus & Robertson; Sydney and London, 1970; as Walk a Mile and Get Nowhere, Bradbury; Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, 1970.

Southall, I. Josh. Angus & Robertson; Sydney and London, 1971; Macmillan; New York, 1972.

Southall, I. Fly West. Angus & Robertson; London, 1974; Macmillan; New York, 1975.

Southall, I. What about Tomorrow? Angus & Robertson; Sydney and London: Macmillan; New York, 1977.

Southall, I. Blackbird. Farrar, Straus; New York, 1988; Heinemann; Melbourne, 1992.

Southall, I. The Mysterious World of Marcus Leadbeater. Farrar, Straus;New York, 1990; Heinemann; Melbourne, 1991.

Southall, I. Ziggurat. Penguin; Ringwood, 1997; Viking Penguin; New York, 1997.

Steele, M.Q. Journey Outside. (1969) Penguin; Harmondsworth, 1973.

Tolkien, J.R.R. The Hobbit. Allen & Unwin; London, 1937, revised1951.

Tolkien, J.R.R. Lord of the Rings. (1954-1955) Allen & Unwin; London, revised 1966.

Treece, H. The Dream-Time. Brockhampton Press; Leicester, 1967.

Walsh, J. P. The Emperor’s Winding Sheet. Macmillan; London, 1974.

Walsh, J. P. Goldengrove. Macmillan; London, 1969.

Walsh, J. P. Unleaving. Macmillan; London, 1976.

Walsh, J. P. A Parcel of Patterns. Kestrel; London, 1983.

White, E.B. Charlotte’s Web. Hamish Hamilton; London, 1952.

- also, P. Neumeyer (ed.) The Annotated Charlotte’s Web. Harper, New York, 1997.

Wilder, T. The Bridge of San Luis Rey. (1927) Penguin; Harmondsworth,1941.

Wrightson, P. The Nargun and the Stars. Hutchinson; London, 1973.

Zindel, P. Confessions of a Teenage Baboon. Harper; New York, 1977.

Zindel, P. The Amazing and Death-Defying Diary of Eugene Dingman. Harper; New York, 1987.