Let's hear it for the boys

[fgoodwin]

Let's hear it for the boys

 

http://books.guardian.co.uk/departments/childrenandteens/story/0,,1797080,00.html

http://tinyurl.com/r7g4v

 

Is a new book of chap-like pursuits good clean fun, or does it hark back to a nostalgic, colonial past?

 

Dave Hill

Wednesday June 14, 2006

The Guardian

 

Valiant as a Spitfire pilot, fearless as an Elizabethan seafarer, a big red hardback called The Dangerous Book for Boys has soared to number one in the Amazon chart. Part miscellany, part homage, part pastiche, the brothers Conn and Hal Iggulden's bumper collection of Useful Skills, Ripping Yarns and Jolly Interesting Facts is already a publishing phenomenon. As I write, Amazon can only promise to dispatch within seven to 10 days, suggesting that demand has far outstripped supply. And without getting too, you know, girly about it, the book's success demands that we desist for a bit from building that go-cart out of things retrieved from skips and reflect a while on what it means.

 

The authors' introduction gives a big clue. "In this age of video games and mobile phones," they declare, "there must still be a place for knots, treehouses and stories of incredible courage." Perhaps they're right. "Is it old-fashioned?" they inquire. "Well, that depends. Men and boys today are the same as they always were, and interested in the same things. They may conquer different worlds when they grow up, but they'll still want these stories for themselves and for their sons. We hope in years to come that this will be a book to dig out of the attic and give to a couple of kids staring at a pile of wood and wondering what to do with it."

Such craving! Such nostalgia! Such faith in and yearning for an unfashionable model of boy and manhood that transcends the passage of time and can be handed down male generations like an adventuring gene! Authorial tongues may be tucked at times into their cheeks, especially in the (very small) section on girls, but there's idealism, the sense of a mission to assert certain upright principles in the face of history's mocking. Right at the front Sir Frederick Treves is quoted, on the occasion of the 25th anniversary of the Boy's Own Paper: "The best motto for a hard march is 'Don't grumble. Plug on.'" He concludes: "Keep clean, body and mind."

 

The book is beautifully accomplished, from its instructions about hunting and cooking a rabbit to its diagrams explaining how to wrap a parcel in brown paper and string. ("Not a very 'dangerous' activity, it's true, but ... extremely satisfying.") But does the chord it has struck also reveal the stubborn prevalence of some rather foolish and deluded fantasy vision of British boyhood? Of a past less noble and less real than it may seem in hindsight, a past which those books and comics that inspired this one would have us believe?

 

I suppose the answer is mostly yes. I'm old enough to have grown up in a time when the sorts of virtues championed here - wholesome curiosity, diligent teamwork, pluck and decency - still enjoyed some currency, especially in schools and in the cub scouts. However, while boys of my generation enjoyed a freedom to roam and to construct bows and arrows and to play football until dusk, those good-egg moral virtues were often scarce in reality. Boys who were not "hard" or sporty got picked on by boys who were, just as happens now. Bob Cherry, the brave and hearty hero from the Billy Bunter series, was very much a fictional character.

 

Is this book, then, purely romantic? That's quite a tricky one to call. I'm wondering why it is called "dangerous". Does the choice of adjective simply express that hankering after a time when parents were less fearful about their children? Or is it some sort of a comment being made to the effect that it is dangerous these days to insist that boys are totally different creatures from girls? A chapter called The British Empire (1497-1997) repays careful rereading. It's all battles and rebellions and good intentions that didn't always work out, but were still good intentions anyway. It is hard to see this as anything other than a conservative reading of the imperial centuries, which makes me inclined to see The Dangerous Book for Boys and its popularity as of a piece with a modern lament about the loss of an old gender order under which a chap knew what a chap was meant to do and the world was a happier place.

 

I don't believe it ever was that simple, and pining for it will do none of us much good. Yet there remains much that is admirable here. Some more advice from Sir Frederick Treves: "Don't swagger. The boy who swaggers - like a man who swaggers - has little else that he can do ... It is the empty tin that rattles most. Be honest. Be loyal. Be kind. Remember that the hardest thing to acquire is the faculty of being unselfish. As a quality it is one of the finest attributes of manliness." Not much to quarrel with there.

 

http://davehill.typepad.com/temperama