World War Two Wins the Carnegie—Again

 

Postcards From No Man's Land by Aidan Chambers won the Carnegie in the year 2000. It's an important book in the history of the Carnegie because it's the first to address homosexuality and bi-sexuality directly, and it also contains extensive discussions about assisted dying, but I found it hard going, chiefly because I couldn't quite believe in the central character, Jacob. Chambers says in the Afterword of my edition of the book that he deliberately wrote Jacob's story in the third person in order to create some distance between reader and character. The book's second, linked storyline about a Dutch girl who falls for a wounded English airman during the battle of Arnhem is told in the first person. Aidan Chambers puts it like this:

"We live intimately with Geertrui, whereas we only travel alongside Jacob as a witnessing companion. And I suppose that's why so many readers have told me how much more moved they are by Geertrui's story than they are by Jacob's. They say they think about Jacob but they feel with Geertrui. And that was my intention."

I was meant to be distanced from Jacob, but I don't think I was meant to be quite as distanced as I was. I knew a lot of bookish grammar school boys - I was one myself - but I don't think I ever knew one quite like Jacob. As one reviewer says, 'Do young people really talk like this?' And as for Geertrui, I did enjoy this story more, but I couldn't quite shake the feeling that I was getting a history lesson as well as a love story, which was interrupted at intervals by Jacob's struggle through the symbolic labyrinths of Amsterdam.  I sometimes felt as if I was reading a Lonely Planet guide, both to Amsterdam and to Jacob's inner emotional turmoil. 

But this is a book about fiction as well as being fiction.. Here's Aidan Chambers again: 

"One of the stories in Postcards is about love of a place, in this case Amsterdam. Another is about the love you can feel for a character in a book - Anne Frank, who was a real person, of course, but you can only know her by reading her book in which she is the main character. So Jacob is a fictional character who loves a real person, who he only knows because she is like a fictional character in a novel. Which is an example of the way Postcards weaves everyday reality with fiction, actual people and events with invented characters and events. Both are true in their own way."

That's the kind of book this is. With Aidan Chambers, expect meta-fiction. Postcards is part of the 'Dance Sequence' of seven novels and apparently contains the most straightforward narrative of all of them. I've only read one of the others, Breaktime. It's about Ditto, a clever, bookish, verbose grammar-school boy desperate to get laid, and about his relationship with his father, but at the same time it's a discussion of the value of fiction and literature. It's a clever, bookish book for 'new adults' full of lots of narrative tricks—parallel text, graphics, rapid shifts of point-of-view, play text—but I found this one more fun to read than Postcards, which is odd because Aidan Chambers believes that the more direct narrative in in Postcards is one reason it did so well. In the end though I think that Aidan Chambers's sixth-form boys just don't resonate with me and I've noticed that most of the enthusiastic reviews of Postcards are from female reviewers. But then, female reviewers also love my very favourite sixth-former, K M Peyton's Patrick Pennington.

Interestingly, on Ditto's bookshelves are Orwell, Lawrence, Joyce and Richard Brautigan. Those are the books I was reading when I was 13 or 14 and onwards, but we didn't spend our time during lunch-breaks and illegal gambling sessions in the common room discussing literature and moral philosophy. We talked about music and TV and movies and football and drugs and I think in the end it's the slight lack of all that in both these books that makes it so hard for me to engage with them. And if you've been reading Joyce I wonder how you'll feel about the Aidan Chambers books.

Don't let me put you off though. I have learned that if certain reviewers dislike a movie or a TV series then there's a fair chance that I'll love it. So if I don't enjoy something then plenty of others will think it's the best thing ever. As indeed proves to be the case. Aidan Chambers says that Postcards From No Man's Land 'brought me more awards and prizes than any of the other novels, as well as a great many appreciative letters and emails.' There are plenty of enthusiastic reviews of Postcards From No Man's Land on Aidan Chambers's website, along with a huge amount of other information about him and his work.

Postcards from No Man's Land is an interesting book, and an important one, and it's appropriate that, as the new century began, it looked both backwards to WW2 and forwards to a world of gender fluidity. Not that the Carnegie has finished with WW2 just yet.

Aidan Chambers has been hugely influential in the field of children's and YA literature and education. With his wife, Nancy, he founded the periodical, Signal -  Approaches to Children's Books, which was published three times a year between 1970 and 2003 and was essential reading for anyone involved in education or children's literature. He also wrote extensively about children's reading, and wasn't afraid to have a pop at the Carnegie selection committee back in the 1960s, so there's a nice circularity about him winning the award nearly 40 years later.

Originally published on ABBA October 2023