Re-reading books many years later, by Elizabeth Kay

I have just re-read Wild Swans, by Jung Chang, for my book group. It wasn’t my choice, as I read it several decades ago, and I thought I remembered it. But once I opened it I realised there was so much I didn’t remember at all. Even though I had a Polish father, and was well aware of the paranoia associated with a totalitarian government due in part to a trip to Poland in the middle of the Cold War in 1966, I still hadn’t grasped the full implications of mind control. Mao was a ruthless and heartless dictator, and the hero worship he encouraged looks far more familiar today than it did then. The England in which I grew up was a safe and relatively honest country, and I simply couldn’t believe it could be so dangerous to say the wrong thing. The China of Wild Swans bears a strong resemblance to the North Korea and Russia of today, and strong rulers are in vogue with populations who believe what they read on Tiktok, Instagram and Telegram. This time, I saw things very differently from the first time I read it, when it didn’t seem linked to contemporary life at all.

A tepui

My all-time favourite book in Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Lost World, which I read as a teenager. Once of the most exciting and gripping narratives ever, particularly for someone who had only just discovered dinosaurs. They weren’t nearly as popular in the sixties as they are today. It’s the story of four men who travel to South America to climb a tepui, a remote table-topped mountain, to
investigate the contents of a notebook written by deceased explorer which suggests there are still dinosaurs alive and well and living the good life on an inaccessible plateau. It wasn’t until I travelled to Venezuela that I realised these mountains really do exist, and that many of them are still unexplored. However, when I re-read the book I realised how politically incorrect it is.

          …the sloping forehead and low, curved skull of the ape-man were in sharp contrast to the broad brow and magnificent cranium of the European…

          …a gigantic negro named Zambo, who is a black Hercules, as willing as any horse, and about as intelligent…

          And after a bloody battle between the ape-men and our four privileged white males… the rule of man was assured forever in Maple White Land. The males were exterminated, Ape Town was destroyed, the females and young were driven away to live in bondage…

          And thus was genocide extolled.

 And then we have children’s books. During a period of extreme nostalgia, I started hunting for the books I had loved as a child that were no longer in print. Being horse mad, I loved both Mary Elwyn Patchett and Elyne Mitchell. Mitchell’s Silver

Brumby books have been reprinted, so that was easy, but Patchett’s tales of her childhood in the outback haven’t been, as far as I am aware, even though she was once the most widespread of all Australian children’s authors. I found Tam the Untamed second-hand, and just as enjoyable as the first time I read it, with the heroine’s nervy part-throughbred horse Tam, and her loyal dog Ajax. There were a few shocks, though. Mary’s parents were surprisingly broad-minded for the time (Mary died aged 92 in 1989). Used to books such as The Secret Garden extracts such as the one below didn’t stand out at the time, but they do now. Mitta, an aboriginal child who is recovering from a broken leg, falls into a flooded river and is rescued by the narrator’s dog. She can’t go home for a week due to the floodwater.

 …Mitta never showed her affection the way white children show it… On the night before she was due to go home my mother said goodnight as usual, but as she straightened up from smoothing Mitta’s hair, two skinny arms were thrown  round her neck and Mitta put her small black face against my mother’s and burst into tears! Nothing could have astonished us more. Little Abo girls simply do not cry… my mother was so touched that she went in and discussed it with my father; they decided that they would offer to let Mitta stay with us indefinitely, perhaps until she could be trained to help in the house… (my italics)

 Reluctant as Mitta is to go home, she changed her mind instantly when her father announced that the family is about to go walk-about. Given the choice between living in a comfortable house and careering all over Queensland in the wake of her family there is no contest. Mitta goes. There are plenty of other dubious reflections, but I wouldn’t change a word. Those books gave a valuable picture of inequality from both sides, which weren’t always what you’d expect today.

 During his lifetime Dahl had urged his publishers not to “so much as change a single comma in one of my books”. In 2023 Puffin Books announced it had hired sensitivity readers over the span of three years to assess Dahl's works, rereleasing his work with multiple changes regarding Dahl's depiction of race, sex, and character. A report from British newspaper The Telegraph determined that Puffin Books altered hundreds of passages in Dahl's work, including in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Matilda, James and the Giant Peach, Fantastic Mister Fox, and The Witches. Facing backlash from readers and authors, in 2023 Puffin Books announced that Dahl's original publications would be released alongside the expurgated versions as “The Roald Dahl Classic Collection”, but did not retract the revisions.

Various authors, politicians, and organisations have provided commentary on the controversy. In the following month it was announced that the works of Enid Blyton, (author of The Famous Five) and Ian Fleming, (author of James Bond) would be expurgated as well, and it was revealed that R.L.Stine's Goosebumps had already been expurgated, without the author's knowledge or consent. (Wikipedia)

I think my point here is that is as we remove or alter books that the current zeitgeist deem offensive we are losing a sense of what the world was like when they were written. We don’t seem to take things in context any more, and we are losing history as a consequence. How can we understand the things that have happened if we don’t know how people thought at the time? Apologising for things that happened centuries ago is pointless; it’s like blaming modern Italy for the atrocities of the Colosseum. The Spanish philosopher George Santayana is credited with the aphorism, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it,” while British statesman Winston Churchill wrote, “Those that fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it.” I think it is the second version which is displayed at the entrance to Auschwitz.