Hazel Edwards's Blog - Posts Tagged "the-land-of-far-beyond"

Authors are often asked, which is the book they remember from their childhood.

I admit my secret. I was an Enid Blyton fan.

My grandfather had a private lending library and the children’s section was a wall of Enid Blyton. So I devoured the Famous Five and the Secret Seven, and then moved onto flying with Biggles. Sunday School prize books were the only other option. They were very moral tales of missionaries and far off places like Fiji and China.

But the book which impacted on my early life was Enid Blyton’s ‘The Land of Far Beyond.’ This was my first experience with an allegorical story, which was a quest, and where the characters had the names of their attributes. E.g. Mr Doubt, and the giant’s page boy called Fright. Even the places they travelled matched their names.As an adult, when we orienteered on a real map with Mt Disappointment labelled, it reminded me of ‘The Land of Far Beyond.’

Because I no longer have my own copy, I Googled the title and had a feeling of familiarity as I looked at the cover on the Enid Blyton Society webpage.

Today’s children would consider this cover bland, but I loved the sense of a journey conveyed in the artwork. I liked the economy of a story with several meanings and layers. But the story ALSO needed adventure and danger with eccentric characters to interest me.

My family taught me to read before I went to school. I used to read under the bedclothes with a torch. An aqua- readaholic, I still read in the bath or listen to audio books in the car or when walking.

‘Animal Farm’ by George Orwell had the same multi-appeal because at one level it’s a children’s story of animals taking over the farm, and the pigs walking on their hind legs, but really it is a political satire . It’s about the cycle of power.

I don’t think I knew ‘The Land of far Beyond’ was based on Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress until much later .I still like symbolic shape and sub-text within a story.

Flying home from Kuala Lumpur, during Ramadan, I watched a translated reading of the Koran on the in-flight screen and decided the poetry was similar to psalms.

Maybe reading ‘The Land of Far Beyond’ contributed to family orienteering, going on an Antarctic expedition and co-writing ;Hijabi Girl’ which is also a puppet musical. And the now 40 year old 'There's a Hippopotamus on Our Roof Eating Cake'? But mainly it opened the possibility for me that a book could take you into imaginatively structured ‘other’ worlds, beyond suburbia.

Which book do you remember from childhood?