The Island of Adventure

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I know I'm dating myself here, but kids haven't changed much. Dinners (and breakfast and lunch) are immensely important to the young, and one of the key moments in all the Adventure books always concerns them stumbling over a cache of tinned foods that will (phew!) tide them over until help comes. This time I read them in German and in English and compare them chapter for chapter to find the differences in the German translation. Fortunately I have old versions of these books in German and in English (I bought all 8 books in English on my first trip to the UK in 1981 at Foyle's in London). Later versions were often modernized to make them politically correct (which I hate as that's not what I remember reading when I was a child).

The stories show the four children off on their own, discovering and solving mysteries without much adult assistance. Although the publication dates span a decade, Blyton reportedly wrote each of the novels in less than a week. I was very pleasantly surprised, on re-reading The Island of Adventure. Yes, the plot is thin, and the characters, while well-sketched, still essentially simplistic. But it's fun - who does't love a good secret tunnel? In particular, it's rather better written than I was expecting, and better than it needed to be, with surprising depth and sympathy even in peripheral characters: I can see why this felt real to me in a way that more overtly childish books did not. While the prose, and in particular the dialogue, are inevitably dated, they're more 'pleasantly old-fashioned' than 'incomprehensible' or 'ridiculous'.

I got the boxed set for Christmas when I was 40, I read them again. Again when I was 50 and yes, I'll read them again someday. According to the Index Translationum, Blyton was the fifth most popular author in the world in 2007, coming after Lenin but ahead of Shakespeare. A film based on the book was released in the United Kingdom in 1982. It was directed by Anthony Squire and stars Norman Bowler as Bill, Wilfrid Brambell as Uncle Jocelyn and Eleanor Summerfield as Aunt Polly. [1] There was also a New Zealand television series, in which the first episode is based on The Island of Adventure. Blyton was a prolific author of children's books, who penned an estimated 800 books over about 40 years. Her stories were often either children's adventure and mystery stories, or fantasies involving magic. Notable series include: The Famous Five, The Secret Seven, The Five Find-Outers, Noddy, The Wishing Chair, Mallory Towers, and St. Clare's.

Following the events in The Ship of Adventure, Bill marries Mrs Mannering and adopts all the children as his own. The children call him Bill Smugs due to the fact that he introduced himself under that alias on their first adventure. I have to admit that Enid Blyton is one of my guilty pleasures in-between reading novels, (auto)biographies and non-fiction books on WW II.To be honest, it wasn't reading, it was sharing the adventures with the characters, they did get into some predicaments, ones we all dreamed about getting into ourselves as kids in real life! And then there's the casual racism. There's some genuine room for debate on Blyton's intentions in this regard; by the end, much of what seems at first to be casual racism from Blyton is revealed to have been Blyton's assumption of, and attempting manipulation of, the reader's own casual racism; and so I'd be reluctant to start burning effigies purely on the evidence of this book.