Four British Fantasists: Place and Culture in the Children's Fantasies of Penelope Lively, Alan Garner, Diana Wynne Jones, and Susan Cooper (review)

The eponymous British fantasists of Charles Butler's study are, by his own admission, four of his personal icons, but they are also four writers who were central figures in the development of British children's fantasy in the late twentieth century. All four began writing during the 1960s and 1970s and thus were part of the onset of the "second Golden Age" of British children's literature. In addition, all four writers have been consistently popular with the reading public on both sides of the Atlantic and, with the exception Diana Wynne Jones, with critics as well. Thus, as Butler argues, these four authors have been significant players in the development of a body of modern children's literature "manifestly capable of bearing the weight of academic scrutiny" (2). His contribution to that academic scrutiny is a densely developed, thought-provoking work of scholarship. A senior lecturer at the University of the West of England, where he teaches both children's and Renaissance literature, Butler is also a British fantasy author for children in his own right, one who fits neatly into the traditions laid down by these four literary mentors; In one respect, then, Four British Fantasists is an exploration of the debt he owes as a scholar and a writer to Garner, Lively, Cooper, and Jones. Yet it also is a fine contribution to literary studies and a key critical text for those seeking to understand the works of these four individual authors, the development of contemporary British children's literature, or the role that place and culture can play in the creation of a work of fiction.

As the subtitle suggests, Butler's study is more than an analysis of the lives and works of four distinctive British authors, although the discussions of each author's works provide perceptive and useful insights, particularly in the case of Jones, who has received less critical attention than the others in the past. Four British Fantasists is also a exploration of Britain itself as a catalyst for fantasy—how "living in an old country" heavily imbued with cultural and local myth, history, and long-held ways of life has inspired and shaped modern British fantasy literature. All four of his subjects, Butler argues, "share a profound concern with time, myth, magic, the nature of personal identity, and the potency of place" (7), concerns that go far deeper than nostalgia or nationalistic pride, as some have argued. Because of these shared concerns, rather than taking the obvious approach of looking at each author as a separate study, Butler chooses to discuss them thematically, looking at all four in terms of such rubrics as "Contexts and Connections" (chapter 1), "Applied Archeology" (chapter 2), "Longing and Believing" (chapter 3), and "Myth and Magic" (chapter 4), and concluding with a consideration of what it means to read these four authors specifically as writers for children. This approach serves to elucidate similarities between the four authors that might otherwise be missed or de-emphasized, as well as to identify overarching literary influences and concerns.

In "Contexts and Connections" Butler examines two main biographical influences on these writers. One is the fact that all four were children in wartime England and experienced firsthand, and at a young age, the fear and dislocation of the time, experiences that, as one might expect, were critical in their imaginative development. Three of the four (Jones is the exception) have overtly written "a war book," for example, and the works of all four, as Butler briefly demonstrates, are full of images, motifs, and even plot elements that seem influenced by those years. The other biographical influence Butler discusses, and in much greater detail, is the fact that all four were at Oxford during the early 1950s, when Lewis and Tolkien were at the height of their powers and literary...