Julia Eccleshare
Outsiders were a recurrent theme in this year’s shortlist for the Guardian Children’s Fiction Prize. That did not mean the books are gloomy, but they all reflected an understanding that conventional family relationships have been replaced in children’s lives by broader, more complex structures.
Nowhere is this more sharply observed than in the winner, The Illustrated Mum (Doubleday), by Jacqueline Wilson. Told in a child-like first-person narrative by Dol, the younger daughter of the tattooed Marigold, it is the story of how two girls cope with looking after their manic- depressive mother. They have created a make-believe world that has gilded her foibles, allowing them to feel she is special rather than ill.
But Star, Dol’s half-sister, longs for conformity – and, above all, an end to caring. Escaping briefly with her father, she leaves Dol to manage the make-believe alone. The results are disastrous, and force the girls to get help.
There are no easy answers, but Wilson offers an ending that gives them some security and support. The outline sounds bleak, but the warmth between the sisters, as well as their deep love for their mother, and hers for them, provides emotional sustenance. “I wanted to get across the fact that though Marigold is technically a bad mother, she still loves her girls. She is a warm person, but irresponsible,” says Wilson.
Along with Anne Fine, Robert Swindells and Melvin Burgess, Wilson has led the fashion for social realism in children’s books. “The tradition in children’s books used to be that there was a beginning, a middle and an ending, and the ending was the happy bit,” she says. “Now, real life isn’t like that for most children. I try and end positively, but not necessarily happily. Things are usually slightly better in fiction than in the real world.”
Wilson wanted to create the books she would have liked as a child, but couldn’t find. “The nearest I got was Eve Garnett’s The Family From One End Street. Instead, I read adult books about children, like Catherine Cookson’s books about Mary Ann, whose parents drank, and Rumer Godden’s A Greengage Summer. When I was 13 I was given Cookson’s The Devil and Mary Ann, and at the same time I discovered Lolita, which made me see how you tell a story.”
In The Illustrated Mum, Dol’s inexperienced and optimistic view of her mother speaks straight to children, making her problems seem strange and unpredictable rather than scary. Wilson’s interest in manic depression was triggered by her admiration for Sylvia Plath and Virginia Woolf, but she admits that putting it into a children’s book was entering difficult territory.
“The Illustrated Mum is a blacker book than any I’ve written before, and dealing with Marigold’s mood swings became very scary. But you can’t have a laugh a minute. Adults find it more upsetting than children; soaps have given them an appetite for drama, and from them they are used to huge emotional extremes. EastEnders, Brookside and The Simpsons are all stories with lots of domestic detail and real social problems – these influence what children read. Kids are now very much part of adult society: they know about anorexia and sex and drugs, they’ve observed all sorts of things on TV. This is their world.”
Wilson doesn’t preach, believing that the morals of society are not always the same as children’s inner moral code. “If there’s any preaching in my books it’s saying, ‘OK, be what you are. You don’t have to be like anyone else or do what anyone else wants. You have to try and like yourself.'”