Reality, an Adventure in (edited)

When I first read Swallows and Amazons, as a boy, as with many of the other novels that I read, but especially this one – I remember being repeatedly struck by the way that here was a story – .  My life lacked this altogether; it had no story in it. Indeed that feeling of a defining absence was something that children’s stories of the time often mentioned themselves, as part of the story’s framing concept. The boredom of ordinary life and the yearning for adventure. The children would be moping around at home on a rainy day with nothing to do.  They would be pining for something to happen. And then something would happen. An adventure in which they would fervently wish that the normality which they had so thoughtlessly undervalued would return so the whole adventure thing could be forgotten about. This was a general idea therefore but the Ransome novel contained the added poignancy that its concept broke that mundane or routine surface life (that it discovered adventure) by symbolising a just vanished world; the tail end of the pre-industrial.  It made this the adventure’s very essence.  If we look at its symbols of industrial life they are strictly rationed.  Trustworthy authority figures, Father or Mother, are their custodians.  

The time in which the novel is set is recognisably this time, it is connected with now.  But its cars are as rare as Crippsian butter.  Yet still cars exist.  Even if there are no or very few modern sorts of boats yet still … The point is that that it is the ‘modern’ that forms the novel’s almost invisible and in any case strictly quarantined backdrop.  It is the present ‘invisible’, and it has to be, because this is what provides the story with its catalyst.  It is provided by the way that the story acts as a means of neatly setting it all, all modernity, to one side.  In other words the story amounts to a kind of disappearance into the ’past possibility’ of the present – that is, into this tale of old boats, past boats - by reason of the way that this conjunction of old and new creates an ideal delimiting fantasy.  A comparable example might be a CGI production that enables its makers to produce a wholly authentic seeming image of the prehistoric.  The monsters are at once terrible and harmless, having become mere screen ghosts even while they seem ‘real’.  In Ransome one finds something like this in his image of the natural world.  The picture painted is of an old-style (that is, of an heroic) clinker-built dinghy which of course is powered by and built out of ‘nature’.  The Swallow is the key to it, the heroic and natural component.  The Swallows and Amazons picture of an ideal NATURE is part of the book’s simultaneous believability and unreality.  The narrative, or the ‘now’ as it were, consists of a present that is not present: that yet takes its penetrative force – its ability to convince us, and to break with the mundane, and with routine (its story-making value) – from what is actually present. For its ‘now’ is the now past and the possibilities that seem to inhere in that.  Thus we find that in the very way that it makes the wilderness its subject it paradoxically tames it also, by the way that it achieves this enabling by rendering the industrialised world ‘absent’. The children are in communion with nature, camping, sailing, walking, exploring.  Thus, I read of this ‘adventure in reality’; but only as a kind of voided now; for it was only in that balance with nature that the tale existed, the tale being about this very balance: a balance achieved through its images of an idealised present-past. In other words, I found myself identifying with characters who could survive ontologically (as it were) only to the extent that the link with the past was observed: observed, understood, brought into play, experienced in one’s own life.  But of course for me at that time, in the Sixties, it was wholly impossible. Swallows and Amazons was impossible.  It was all dead and gone. The book instead, for me, expressed an acute sense of the past’s irretrievable loss. Think of the general way that Ransome’s novels can happen only in the absence of ‘adults in general’.  They rarely appear except to frame the story; forming the parameters of what it quarantines.  The way that this resonates on different levels should also be obvious. Since it is only in the ‘days of innocence’ thus identified, when children, fending for themselves, discover nature, that ’nature’ exists to begin with. The under-story as it were, the implication that in the modern world there is no story, is a creation of the way that the world is ruled by ‘adults in general’. The two concepts are convergent. There is no story in the child’s mundane life because that ‘life’ takes place in the adult world – in the industrial or post-industrial landscape of Britain, which does not allow for this kind of innocence … I remember thinking this as a child: what kind of story does a television have?  What kind of meaning? These objects seemed rootless; to be without context.  What was a car?  How was electricity natural?  What kind of meanings - stories - did adult lives have?  They had none as far as I could see. So they represented a corruption of the ‘innocence’ that Ransome usese so effectively for dramatic ignition in his creations of a convincingly pristine world. To get a story - a meaning – at all, one had to go back to these innocent things, to old or to proper things, to the clinker built boat, to sail, to the natural unspoiled landscapes described by Ransome in Secret Water and Swallowdale, etc: ideal worlds that were no longer or perhaps never understood by adults.