Untwisted by Paul Jennings (Old Barn Books, 2021)
Paul Jennings' writing always wins.
Having spent the majority of my teaching career working with older junior children, every one of those classes has had me read at least one Jennings story to them. It's usually Spaghetti Pig Out (which works particularly well straight after lunch) or The Strap Box Flyer (which usually ends up with me staring out after the last line is read at a sea of completely shocked faces), though, truth be told, many of the tales from the 'Un-' books have been massively enjoyed. Being the curious type of reader, I've often wondered what makes them so good and also so loved: Immediacy - yes. A plain-talking prose style with often clear-cut sentence structure - yes. Surprising twists - ohhhhh, yes! But ultimately, I can't work out what it is exactly. Jennings is a kind of magician and as with the best of magic tricks, you want to know how he did it whilst at the same time keen to leave the actual mechanics in a kind of mysterious haze.
Then along came Untwisted. This unique hybrid of a memoir-writing guide - like all those short stories - kept me entertained and completely transfixed throughout: although this is not a book for children, the same clarity and affective qualities of his writing for younger readers is there still. In short vignettes that dart back and forth from his earliest memories to just a few years ago, Jennings spins the yarns that share very similar, equally incredible scenarios with his fiction - a house that is cut in two and transported to the middle of nowhere being just one of these! The storytelling has that companionable tone that you might easily mistake for listening to an old friend telling you a story in the pub. The reading of this book becomes compulsive: like all good tales, you can't wait to discover how it all turns out.
But there is so much more to this book. As a Writer-Teacher, I kept getting distracted by the fascinating insights into Jennings' development as a writer and his generous - almost throwaway - gems of writing wisdom:
"A children’s author has fewer words to choose from than one who writes for adults, and these words need to be relatively simple."
It sounds maybe obvious, but when placed in the context of Jennings' own life-stories we see where his approach really comes from. When he was at school, his class was asked to write on a given subject. What Jennings ended up writing was particularly short (ahem!) - but clearly incisive, as his teacher declared:
"Jennings has answered the question as well as anyone else but he has done it in half the number of words."
These kinds of stories about the learning of his craft shows how closely life and writing are interwoven. Important lessons (but maybe not the one the teacher intended!) were learned from direct experience: words matter; meaning matters; clarity matters.
Later he writes:
"My feeling is that children’s authors need to be able to put themselves into the world of kids and know what fears, hopes and experiences they face."
Again, it perhaps appears that this should of course be the case, but the overall impression of the whole book is that Jennings is showing us how life and writing are the one and the same. So the act of writing becomes the act of sharing, a yearning for connection through words between writer and reader. Jennings, whose life has been devoted strongly to the power of reading and in particular to those children who struggle, has created in Untwisted a testament to that very central importance that reading and writing has in all of our lives. It's more than just words.
Of course, reading Untwisted added more than a little to my enjoyment of the conjuring trick that is this writer's particular genius; but more than that, I came away more deeply appreciating what reading and writing can do. Jennings reveals that the life of his stories are absolutely 'the stories of his life' - just as our own, surely, are to each of us.
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Untwisted is published on 3rd June 2021. With grateful thanks to Ruth Huddleston of Old Barn Books who provided me with a proof and the photos (taken from the book) for this blog.
