Musings on art and modern audiences

  Matilda : beating the back-to-school blues WIth everyone going back to school and uni over the past few weeks I thought it an opportune moment to think about one of the most famous students in children’s literature: Roald Dahl’s eponymous heroine, Matilda Wormwood.  Matilda is a young girl, curious about the world she lives in, the family she was born into, and the possibilities of her own power. She’s only very young, but she shows such a sensitive and open perspective on the world that you can’t help but be drawn into her story. Just as Matilda finds escape from her troubled family life in books at her local library, so too do we wonder what it might be like to go back to being a child finding our way in the world. But this is not a story just about a girl going to school; there’s an element of magic and fantasy, too. We can imagine how she manages to lift a pencil with only her mind, and we wonder whether we can do the same. We follow her schemes to challenge Miss Trunchb...

  Neverwhere : The world we know and the worlds we don’t To imagine as we read is one thing, and to watch someone else’s imagined version play out on screen is another thing. To listen to a story performed to you is something else entirely. Listening to drama feels like a combination of imagining and being imagined on behalf of; it’s a strange and wonderful middle ground between reading and watching.  Neverwhere is a story I first encountered with Neil Gaiman’s original novel, and then by listening to the 2013 BBC radio drama adaptation. Before then, I’d never really encountered radio dramas. I'm not one for audiobooks, and radio dramas in my mind were adjacent and therefore not for me. I knew they existed, but hadn't thought of how they could open up the imagination in new ways. How wrong I was. Consider this post, then, a manifesto in favour of radio drama adaptation.  Reading can sometimes feel like a lot of work. As we read, we’re constructing worlds and characters a...

  The Doll Factory : feast your eyes… I think one of the main reasons why we’re curious about and seek out visual art is because we want to see things from a different perspective. That’s a very simplified statement of what I’m sure is an extensive academic debate, but I know it’s why I’m drawn to the arts myself. Whether that’s pictures or films or otherwise, the arts in their various forms give us the most immediate and literal means of seeing differently. We see through the eyes and lenses of others, and in so seeing we wonder about how we are connected to and disconnected from each other. Why are we drawn to some arts and artists over others? How can subjects worlds away from us - real and unreal - feel familiar, or present, or important in some way?  This sense of legacy and insight is one of the key throughlines of Elizabeth Macneal’s novel The Doll Factory , where aspiring painter Iris Whittle meets the (fictional) Pre-Raphaelite artist Louis Frost. As you might imagine...

  Mortal Engines : disturbing dystopian prophecies Dystopian fiction gives us an opportunity to imagine what our lives might look like if we take things to an extreme version of their current state. Dystopia can often feel repetitive, melodramatic, or unrealistic, but it can also feel uncanny, disturbing, and terrifying. Dystopian fiction for young people often finds itself somewhere in between. The world of Philip Reeve’s Mortal Engines is the post-apocalyptic product of global war in which capitalism, imperialism and aggression make people do horrible things to each other and their societies.  On the one hand, Mortal Engines isn’t necessarily doing anything new. It reimagines the systems and structures of power and control and progress that already exist and places them under extraordinary circumstances to propose a scenario that we should try our best not to replicate. In this case, roving cities are great monsters of consumption and violence which quite literally prey on...