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Friday 9 January 2009

A power to enthral

Henrietta Bredin on how book illustrations can bring the narrative to life

The pictures in my edition of E. Nesbit’s The Five Children and It are uncredited, but there’s a memorable drawing of the brilliantly funny moment when the children unwisely wish that they might become ‘as beautiful as the day’. They are transformed from four rather hot and grubby specimens into a contemporary idea of fashionable pulchritude, complete with ‘enormous blue eyes and a cloud of russet hair’ for Jane and long golden curls for Cyril. They have a miserable time, with neither luncheon nor tea (an absence they mind greatly), as their nearest and dearest fail to recognise them, refusing them entry to their own home. Increasingly hungry and fed up, whenever they look at each other their woes are increased by the realisation that ‘their faces were so radiantly beautiful as to be quite irritating to look at’.

Beyond all others, the drawings that had the most power and that entirely enthralled me were by Charles Keeping. It was in books by Rosemary Sutcliff that I first encountered his work, but where I was most gripped, both by text and illustrations, was in the two collections of Greek myths co-written by Edward Blishen and Leon Garfield, The God Beneath the Sea and The Golden Arrow. These were a revelation. Uncompromising and fabulously wrought poetic language with bleak, often terrifying images.

Some years later, the Folio Society had the inspired idea of commissioning Keeping to illustrate new editions of the novels of Charles Dickens. It must have been a daunting prospect — 16 volumes, and the long shadows cast by the familiar and much-loved illustrations of Cruikshank and Phiz to contend with. But the results are startlingly subtle and strong, and always sensitive to the text. One great advantage for Keeping was that he didn’t have to work under Dickens’s personal direction — he could make his own choices, selecting the angles that suited him.

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