and nature. These poems, celebratory rather than facetious, are likely to appeal
individually. The much more ambitious What is the Truth? presents a mosaic collection
of poetic fables interspersed in a portentous dialogue, affirming the Creator’s presence in
all living forms. In Ffangs the Vampire Bat and The Kiss of Truth (1986), he creates a
promising fable character, Attila the Fighting Cock, whose brief adventures usher in the
unfortunate Ffangs. Female characters are manipulated into passivity, as an incomplete
truce is uneasily negotiated. A revenge fable element is discernible in the specific
actuality of life-forms in Crow (1970) and in some of the Moortown (1979) poems, both
for adults. In both The Iron Man (1968) and The Iron Woman (1993) bewildered child-
heroes encounter a monstrous, but benign agent, primed to challenge a global threat
humans are more or less blind to; though the ferrous couple are allowed a mutual
polishing, Iron Woman remains barren, clumsy and destructive, crushing and uprooting
whole trees. Relying on the energy of a post-primal scream, Hughes permits women
momentary power, although food production and electronic communication instantly
fail without male involvement. An ‘ecological fantasy’ rendered ‘too didactic’ (Alderson
1993:31), it contains austere illustrations, rather adult for a children’s book; these
contrast with the large-scale, soft-edged pictures of What Is The Truth? which suggest a
child’s close-up view of living forms.
Hughes has authorised the publication of most of Sylvia Plath’s work, including The
Bed Book for children, which first appeared in 1976. Plath (1932–1963) wrote both prose
and poetry; some of her most famous poems were addressed directly to her own children,
such as ‘You’re’, ‘Morning Song’, while others voice a mother’s thoughts: ‘Words for a
nursery’, ‘For a fatherless son’, ‘Nicholas and the candlestick’. The Bed Book invites the
child, who is directly addressed, to range imaginatively in fantastic bed-vehicles. Plath
explores a child’s inventiveness within adult constraints in humorously affectionate and
rhyming verse, which allows the child-reader all the tricks and treats of adventure with
a reassuring circularity of narrative direction which prepares the child for sleep.
The singular literary experience of Salman Rushdie (1947-), has prompted him to
articulate protest against ‘Silence Laws’ in a children’s book: Haroun and the Sea of
Stories (1990), a fantasy of exuberant humour. Its vitality renders solemn didacticism
elsewhere quite inert by contrast. The teasing game played by the author with the
reader, so conspicuous in Midnight’s Children (1981) where Rushdie’s ‘chutnification’ of
history is achieved (Rushdie 1981:442) is evident in the children’s text. Haroun, like
Midnight’s Children, is best described as magic realism. It employs bold patterns of
opposition and refraction: Sengupta, the shadow people, the dark factory ship and web
of night in turn confront the radiant source, the fertile stream of Rashid’s story-telling.
In Midnight’s Children, Rushdie’s Shandyean resonances are clear in the pervasive sense
of the instability of the text and in the narrator’s preoccupation with his nose; Haroun is
similarly allusive, though its fields of reference are more popularly accessible. The living
and transforming power of Logos, the word, is most ironically affirmed in the case of
Haroun’s creator.
This survey has necessarily neglected many authors who have worked in both the adult
and children’s fields with equal distinction. Equally, in the last thirty years the
interchange between writing for children and writing for adults has increased, perhaps
as the distinctions between the two kinds of writing have become finer, witness the work
TYPES AND GENRES 415