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Arthur Ransome
It is important to start this by saying this is a book with so much personal meaning and importance to me that I may be overly blinded to flaws of the book.
I was read this quite young and the whole series became somewhat talismanic to my family. We would go on holiday to the Lake District in the summer and find the places which had inspired this series. We later did the same in Norfolk. I think what made me love the series was the adventure and the storytelling involved. The Swallows and Amazons were always creating stories of the world around them and their adventures are, in some ways, replicable because they are usually adventures of imagination. If, like me, you can't sail, you can still imagine yourself exploring, mapmaking, following trails and living on an island. This sense of children able to use their imagination to gain ownership of their world is incredibly empowering. The careful descriptions of lots of the practical parts of having an adventure only further the idea that this is an adventure you could have.
Something often mentioned along these lines is that these are very middle class adventures in a time more permissive of risk. While there is a certain truth to that, the key role of imagination makes it a story I think everyone can relate to. For children having similar adventures updated for the modern day, where characters reference Swallows and Amazons in a similar way to its references to Robinson Crusoe, I would highly recommend Julia Jones' Strong Winds series for teenagers.
I love the intertextual references, often explicit and accessible for young readers. The Swallows and Amazons were children who read and loved stories and that is what made them have so much fun, giving them the imagination to enrich their surroundings. This often inspired me to read new things too, through Darien I found Keats and Chapman's Homer. This imaginative use of what they read also highlights some of the problems of stereotypes in fiction, they are clearly influenced by many stories which depict outsiders as savages and this sometimes filters into their stories. They do this without prejudice, they are friendly to the 'savages' and never really see them as savage but as people playing a role in their imaginations.
The books also give a range of good female role models, Titty was always my favourite of the Swallows and Nancy Blackett is full of joyful, confident exuberance. The rich and careful desciptions make the book a joy to read, I particularly like the dipper. They give such a strong sense of love for a place that they made it easy for me to fall in love with the Lake District, the place I am always most excited to go to. Arthur Ransome did the drawings for books himself, I particularly like the little flags and boats that appear throughout the text. The art has a nice simplicity that makes it feel like it comes from the notebooks of the Swallows and Amazons.
The impact a single book can have is magical. This is one of the books that made me love reading and certainly one that made me love walking and exploring. Because of it I often sing Spanish Ladies when leaving a place and feel a part of the world the Swallows and Amazons create.
Written by Jack
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