The Cool Web: The Pattern of Children's Reading (review)

Taking their cue from the Robert Graves' poem about our common need to soften and control human experience through language—"There's a cool web of language winds us in"—the editors of this formidable anthology have gathered a rich and varied assortment of approximately fifty essays which explore the forms and functions of narrative art in order to illuminate, as the subtitle points out, the pattern of children's reading. What makes The Cool Web such a demanding collection to work through is the breadth of its content, the fact that its approach to the various modes of fiction is both a genre- and child-centered one with most of the authors focusing on the reader's experiences with a book. In fact, this shift from a purely adult—that is, an academic or specialist—concern with the world of children's books to one which includes, as Aidan Chambers would have it, "the reader in the book," serves as the editors' justification for compiling yet another collection on the nature and pleasure of children's reading.

The range of perspectives is wide. Contributors to The Cool Web include teachers, librarians, authors, philosophers, parents, an educational researcher, and many others, each convinced that an ongoing sense of story is a natural human condition, one which begins with our first awareness of the power of language. As shown throughout The Cool Web, this inclination towards storying is an essential, if not crucial, phenomenon for coping with conscious and subconscious experience, for making sense of the inner and outer worlds of human existence.

The many insights which comprise The Cool Web are categorized into four sections, each preceded by a thoughtful introduction. Section One, "The Reader," takes an extended look at the way children freely move in and out of the world of concrete experience and, to use Susanne Langer's phrase, the world of "virtual experience" as fashioned by the creator of stories. A selection of transcripts from Arthur Applebee's delightful and penetrating research on how five, six, and seven-year olds perceive and judge narrative elements sets the tone for the entire section complementing, in particular, C. S. Lewis's "On Stories" and W. H. Auden's "Afterword—George MacDonald" which both suggest how it is possible for a reader of any age to enter and live through the heightened world of story.

In Section Two, Beatrix Potter, Geoffrey Trease, Joan Aiken, Alan Garner, Jill Paton Walsh, and others illuminate a perennial controversy: Whether or not the author whose books are adopted by children is restricted by a sense of audience. Critical approaches are offered in Section Three with two schools of thought represented. Elizabeth Cook's intense analysis of seven versions of "Cinderella" is a superb example of the critic who assesses a work using standard literary criteria—regardless of the audience, while Mordecai Richler's hilarious impressions of comic book heroes is never without a notion of children and childhood.

"Ways Forward," the last of the major sections, is a curious blend of suggestions for further research and a series of insights which prompt an interdisciplinary approach to the field of children's literature. The impressions of such diverse professionals as a radical publisher and a neuropsychologist further prove that a consideration of children and their books must necessarily defy boundaries.

The sixteen-page annotated bibliography of "Specialist Studies" as well as the highly selective list of "Studies and Surveys of Children's Literature" which comprise section five reflect the high caliber of the entire collection.

The Cool Web is meant to be pored over and contemplated, given the often profound insight it offers into the complex, if not awesome, transaction which characterizes the reader's journey through a book.