Looking for Enid: The Mysterious and Inventive Life of Enid Blyton by Duncan McLaren
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
This is possibly the strangest and yet, maybe, one of the most brilliant biographies of an author I’ve ever read. It’s an approach that I don’t think would have worked for anybody but Enid Blyton and so, perhaps, the unorthodoxy of Looking For Enid was always destined to work when its subject was such a furiously unorthodox figure herself.
Looking For Enid sets out to discover the truth behind the myth. Enid Blyton for me has always been one of those authors who controlled her brand. Image was all, irrespective of that which went on behind the scenes. The most immediate example of this is her utobiography, The Story Of My Life which still remains one of the most audaciously artificial texts I have ever read. Enid didn’t – doesn’t – give away her truth easily.
Yet Enid Blyton is an author we all know, and much of that’s due to the cultural shorthands that now, rightfully or wrongfully, surround her name. A ferociously readable writer, possessed of an almost Sisyphean urge to write, she produced bluntly workmanlike narratives that often denied elegance but could be read. Undoubtedly, those narratives are also often coloured of problematic social, gender and ethical characteristics, and I don’t deny nor seek to excuse that. I’m not a fan of Blyton (though I’ll fight the corner for Malory Towers and St Clare’s to be considered as expressions of feminine potential within a society designed to not recognise such), but I do find both the author and the reach her work still has upon British children’s literature utterly fascinating. I’d never heard of Looking For Enid and so was intrigued to see what
Looking For Enid visits locations connected with Blyton; Beaconsfield, Beckenham and Bourne End, with a sort of madly ecccentric metafictive fanfiction element in which the Five Find-Outers attempt to solve the mystery of Enid Blyton’s lost books and in which McLaren slightly Mary-Sue’s himself into the role of Fatty. Along the way, you learn perhaps a little bit too much about uteruses (seriously) and McLaren’s sex life (honestly) and a lot to do with carp (I’m not making any of this up). There’s a lot of Freudian-esque reading into the subtext of Blyton’s work, which, to be frank, always makes me slightly jaded. You look hard enough, you can read a phallus into everything.
Plus the uterus business, really.
But I’m still giving this four stars, and that comes from a recognition of this book’s mad brilliance. It’s infuriating, yes, and could do with stepping away from the socratic exposition that McLaren does tend to engage in with his partner, but it’s sort of fabulous and vividly unique. I don’t think I’ve ever read a book like this that is so – madly honest – about what it’s like to be a fan, and to love something, and to also just want to find out more. Looking For Enid certainly concludes by finding her; I’m not sure that it’s my Enid, but I do know that the ride towards that point is kind of unforgettable. Mad, weird, totally bizarre, and a bit super odd at points, but also, sort of brilliant.
Daisy May Johnson 