World Book Day 2011

Books have shaped my life, as reader, writer, collector, lover, and it's impossible to let World Book Day pass without contributing something.

The aim of the event is to encourage children to read, perhaps even to write (I sent my first manuscript to Frederick Warne Ltd at the age of seven) and so I have thought deeply about which book I knew as a child which went on to inform my adult life as well. The answer would have to be Homer's Odyssey, which I was introduced to at the age of eleven and read in an abridged children's edition, probably the one published by Dent at that time. My imagination was swept away by the colourful intensity of the story, of the courage and strength of the hero battling his way back home through every type of danger, both natural and supernatural.

Such a story as this represents the classic "hero's journey" to which modern thinkers like Joseph Campbell and Carl Gustav Jung attached such importance as allegories, even psychic frameworks, of our personal development. But as a child, of course, you know nothing of this. You drink deeply on the images, the passions, the suspense, as the elemental gods strive between themselves either to destroy you or to lift you up and bring you home safely. Life and death, loyalty and betrayal, kindness and cruelty, love and hatred, all of these are present, all of them dimensions of being which you are destined to pass through in your time on earth, and some of which, even as a child, you already recognise. It was probably the shape given to my mind and imagination by Odysseus' adventures which led me to cast myself on the ocean, both figuratively and literally, at numerous times of my life. A book such as this, if the child absorbs it psychically, will help that youngster to be a survivor through the challenges, pain and hardship, as well as the risk-taking, that lie ahead as we grow into maturity.

I see no deficiency in introducing a child to an abridged version or re-telling to launch them on this path. One that I can recommend, partly because I happened to edit it myself, is the version called Homer's Odyssey by Isabel Wyatt (Floris Books, Edinburgh, 2009) which came to me as an unpublished typescript among papers found after her death. Isabel Wyatt was a wonderful storyteller with a deep sensitivity to the classical mode of epic narrative, and her style gently reflects the sounds and rhythms of an older age. Let a child into this world and they will begin their own hero's journey.