How children’s books challenge us to hope harder

Reading an award-winning children’s book challenges Elizabeth Wainwright much more than expected - to imagine and hope.

Elizabeth Wainwright

Elizabeth Wainwright is a writer, coach and walking guide. She's a former district councillor and has a background in international development.

A close up of face, showing an eye, mostly obscured by a closely-held open book.

This year, the Waterstones book of the year prize was awarded to Impossible Creatures, a fantasy book for children by Katherine Rundell. This was not the children’s book of the year; this was overall book of the year – it beat novels and non-fiction books for adults. I felt momentarily but deeply joyful when I heard the news and was curious why.

During the pandemic, I found myself unable to read the non-fiction books I usually turn too. Even adult fiction felt heavy. It was children’s books and authors I turned to. Philip Pullman, Dodie Smith, Alan Garner, Ursula K Le Guin. Others new to me. On reflection, I wasn’t reading these books because they were in any way easier, because they weren’t – they asked me to think and hope and imagine much harder than a lot of adult books, despite everything the news would have me believe. And it is for that very reason that I sought these books out. The Waterstones prize made me think a bit more about this – and why it might matter now especially.

Imagination helps us to confront and solve problems – it is not an indulgence, it is essential for the becoming world, and for being the people we are called to be.

First, I thought about my time as a District Councillor in local government. Here, I quickly learned all sorts of things about planning, environment, community, working across opposition and more. I needed to call on my perseverance, patience, strategic thinking. But the things that I found myself calling on again and again were imagination and relationship-building. Building relationships – especially with people who weren’t like me – was the only way to get things done. And imagination because it’s the thing that recreates, that sees things as they could be not as they are. Albert Einstein said, “we cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them”, and I’ve seen how that’s true. It did not feel enough, for example, to try to fix problems of dwindling budgets with more cuts and more inefficient meetings. Instead, imagination asked me to think about what this budget-setting process might look like at its best, and how the wider community might help us decide priorities, and how we might restructure our work so that the District doesn’t just scrape by, but thrives. It asked me to step out of business-as-usual, and imagine business-as-it-could-be.

Jesus too shows us the importance of imagination – he so often called out who he saw people to be, not who they were. And he points us now towards what is yet to come. He calls us to wait, and to trust in his arrival – however distant it might feel. Children’s books often do this too: Frodo trusting that the ring would be destroyed, imagining life outside of the grip of the darkness of Mordor, despite all evidence to the contrary. Bastian’s imagination helping to save Fantasia in the Neverending Story. Jo March showing the possibility of another kind of life in Little Women. Imagination helps us to confront and solve problems – it is not an indulgence, it is essential for the becoming world, and for being the people we are called to be.

I think the best children’s books do the same thing – they ask us to look up, to look out, to feel the whisper of the voice behind us urging us on to something more beautiful.

Second, the children’s books I read during lockdown gave me hope in a way that books for adults didn’t at the time. Hope is, I think, innately tied to imagination. It asks us to look ahead, even when things aren’t clear, and walk forward. Rebecca Solnit explores hope, optimism, and activism in her short book Hope In the Dark. She says,

“Hope just means another world might be possible, not promised, not guaranteed. Hope calls for action; action is impossible without hope.”

I think the best children’s literature shows us how to hope, and shows us what right action can look like when we invoke that hope. In Rundell’s Impossible Creatures, Mal and Christopher must save the ‘Archipelago’ – where mythical creatures still live – and the world beyond them from a growing darkness. Hope shines bright, reminding the reader that it is not naïve but necessary and world-changing, if we let it be. Hope changes things. In the New Testament, Paul tells that along with faith and love, hope will remain. When it feels like the world – fictional, or real – is falling away, hope will remain. Coupled with imagination, bound with faith and love, made active with hands and hearts, it might just pull us through to things we cannot yet see.

When she won the National Book Award, Ursula K Le Guin underlined the necessity of imagination and hope right now:

“Hard times are coming, when we’ll be wanting the voices of writers who can see alternatives to how we live now, can see through our fear-stricken society and its obsessive technologies to other ways of being, and even imagine real grounds for hope. We’ll need writers who can remember freedom – poets, visionaries – realists of a larger reality.”

Jesus was the ultimate realist of a larger reality. He asks us to love in the face of hate, to believe that food and wine can come from faith, to believe so hard in love – not as a pink heart-shaped commodity, but as a world-shaking force – that we might literally see resurrection. Jesus lived in a particular place, at a particular time, grounded in people and soil and society, but always pointing to the bigger truth he knew, and to a world that did not yet exist. I think the best children’s books do the same thing – they ask us to look up, to look out, to feel the whisper of the voice behind us urging us on to something more beautiful. Importantly, this is not a rejection of the world as it is – we are called to love our neighbours here and now, to build the kingdom on earth as it is in heaven. But in what is, there is the seed of what could be, there is a light that shines in places that are still dark. I think the gospel, and the best children’s books, help us to see that light and see what it might illuminate. Jesus knew that children’s minds were perhaps better at seeing this light – he even says, “Truly I tell you, unless you change and become like little children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.” Allowing ourselves to imagine, to hope, is perhaps the only way we’ll take the kingdom of heaven seriously here on earth.

Katherine Rundell herself has pointed out that children’s books don’t just make good readers, they make good people. I think that with imagination, hope, courage, and more, they help call forth the people we are becoming, and the world that could become. That is why I turned to them during lockdowns, that is why I turn to them now as parts of our world seem dark, and that is why I turn again and again to Jesus – the ultimate realist of a larger reality.

Review

Attention

Culture

Music

25 November 2024

5 min read

James MacMillan’s music of tranquility and discord

The composer’s music contends both the secular and sacred.

Jonathan Evens

Jonathan is Team Rector for Wickford and Runwell. He is co-author of The Secret Chord, and writes on the arts.

A conductor leans in toward an unseen orchestra with a raised hand.

MacMillan conducting.

Hans van der Woerd, Intermusica.

Sir James MacMillan is one of today’s most successful composers, as is evidenced by his achievements in 2024. This year alone has seen the premiere of a new work for choir ‘Ordo Virtutum’ (January), the UK premiere of his cantata ‘Fiat Lux’ (March), the premiere of his new version of Robert Burns’ song ‘Composed in August’ (March), the premiere of his ‘Concerto for Orchestra’ (September), and the premiere of his ‘Duet for Horn and Piano’ (November).

Back in March he also became the 26th Fellow of The Ivors Academy, joining a rollcall of extraordinary composers and songwriters, including John Rutter, John Adams, Sir Elton John, Sir Paul McCartney, Dame Judith Weir and Sting. While, in September, he accepted the Sky Arts Classical Music Award 2024 on behalf of The Cumnock Tryst, the annual music festival he founded in his hometown, which brings together many local community groups on stage alongside some of the world’s most acclaimed musicians.

His music, which is notable for its energy and emotion, is imbued with influences from his Scottish heritage, Catholic faith, social conscience and close connection with Celtic folk music, blended with influences from Far Eastern, Scandinavian and Eastern European music. Accordingly, Tom Gray, Chair of The Ivors Academy, describes MacMillan as “a titan of music, generous in his creativity and craft” and “a foremost proponent of the power of music to communicate and forge bonds”.

He first became internationally recognised after the extraordinary success of ‘The Confession of Isobel Gowdie’ at the BBC Proms in 1990. Since then, his prolific output has been performed and broadcast around the world with his major works including his most performed work the percussion concerto ‘Veni, Veni, Emmanuel’ (1992), a cello concerto for Mstislav Rostropovich (1996), an opera ‘The Sacrifice’ (2007), the ‘St John Passion’ (2008), and five symphonies. For his services to music, he was awarded a CBE in 2004 and a knighthood in 2015.

“In this age of unbelief, the search for the sacred in art and music hasn’t gone away”.

James MacMillan

As will be clear from the titles of works cited thus far, many of his works, such as ‘Ordo Virtutum’, a setting of a sacred music drama by Hildegard of Bingen concerned with the struggle for the human soul in a battle between good and evil, and ‘Fiat Lux’, a celebration of the divine gift of light, directly express his Catholic faith. David Clayton writes that, “Aside from being one of the greatest living composers and conductors of classical music, Sir James is a Catholic whose faith informs all his work”. Clayton also describes him as “a deep thinker who communicates clearly the nature of the creative process when one seeks to create beauty to bring Glory to God”.

MacMillan believes that “Far from being a "spent force", religion has proved to be a vibrant, animating principle in modern music and continues to promise much for the future.” When he speaks about music and the idea of the sacred, as he did most recently at The Sheldonian Theatre in Oxford in October, he emphasises that music seems to be “the most spiritual of the arts, and composers have always seemed to be on a search for the sacred in their work”. He notes that “In this age of unbelief, the search for the sacred in art and music hasn’t gone away”.

In brief, he sees himself as standing in a modernist tradition that includes: Stravinsky, who “was as conservative in his religion as he was revolutionary in his musical imagination”; Schoenberg, “a mystic who reconverted to practising Judaism after the Holocaust”; John Cage, who explored “the spiritual connections between music and silence”; Olivier Messiaen, who “was famously Catholic” with “every note of his unique contribution to music” being “shaped by a deep religious conviction”; Jonathan Harvey, “who has allowed eastern mysticism and his own Anglicanism to adorn his searchingly original scores”; John Tavener, whose conversion to Orthodoxy “had a dramatic impact on his style and aesthetic”; and the “intriguing and disturbing religious shadings of musical modernity” to be found in the post-Shostakovich generation from eastern Europe - Henryk Górecki (Poland), Arvo Pärt (Estonia) Giya Kancheli (Georgia), Galina Ustvolskaya, Alfred Schnittke and Sofia Gubaidulina (Russia).

In this 'obedience' of listening and following, we are stretched and deepened, physically challenged as performers, imaginatively as listeners.

He argues that while, for a time, a post-War reaction led many modernist composers to opt for a primarily abstract style and eschew the stirring up of emotions through music, in more recent years, composers have increasingly re-embraced emotion and, thereby, also spirituality. He also notes significant connections between the music of antiquity and that the modern world. The influence of plainsong and Gregorian chant on modern music, for example, demonstrates a continuing relationship between faith and the arts.

He has suggested that God's power “is presence as absence; absence as presence” and that this is also “precisely what music is”. So, “The umbilical cord between silence and music is the umbilical cord between heaven and earth”. As a result, “the war against silence is a war against ourselves and against our interior life”. He is in agreement with the Scottish Jesuit John McDade, who wrote that "Music may be the closest human analogue to the mystery of the direct and effective communication of grace". MacMillan suggests, therefore, “that music is a phenomenon connected to the work of God in the way it touches something deep in our souls and releases a divine force”.

In similar vein, he also quotes Rowan Williams who, in a sermon some years ago for the Three Choirs Festival, said: "To listen seriously to music and to perform it are among our most potent ways of learning what it is to live with and before God, learning a service that is a perfect freedom... In this 'obedience' of listening and following, we are stretched and deepened, physically challenged as performers, imaginatively as listeners. The time we have renounced, given up, is given back to us as a time in which we have become more human, more real, even when we can't say what we have learned, only that we have changed."

Being stretched and deepened in this way is certainly our experience as listeners of MacMillan’s works. Michael Capps suggests that MacMillan knows that “music dealing openly and honestly with the Christian tradition will not always be pleasing, safe, or tame”. His music “contends” in that it “produces arguments and embodies alternatives, not only to its many secular substitutes, but also to allegedly Christian options that lack the tang and piquancy of Christian particularity.” As a result, “MacMillan’s music also reveals: it shows us a world of both tranquility and discord that we readily recognize, and allows us to better appreciate that world’s fleeting harmonies”.