The Malory Towers Series - Enid Blyton

There's a nostalgic pleasure in revisiting this series, even though the writing is week. If you haven't read the books, they offer an insight into Britain 80 years ago.

I've had a hankering to revisit the Malory Towers series for a while: I loved the books as a child and thought it would be enjoyable to re-read them as an adult and see what has changed. The original titles were:

First Term at Malory Towers

The Second Form at Malory Towers

Third Year at Malory Towers

In the Fourth at Malory Towers

Upper Fifth at Malory Towers

Last Term at Malory Towers

The books have now been amalgamated into two volumes (books 1 – 3 and books 4 – 6). A contemporary author has also extended the series by writing some new titles with a different set of Blyton's characters at the centre of the narrative.

As you might guess from the similarity of the titles, the books are pretty formulaic. Each begins with Darrell Rivers travelling to the school, and she's a prominent character in every book. They're not just about Darrell though: each story is an ensemble piece. Every year, new girls are introduced and their storylines are followed across one term until each plot is wrapped up at the end of that term. The girls then fade into the background – they move to another school, or they move up a year, or they simply become a minor character in the remaining books in the series.

The novels have some glaring faults that I didn't notice as a child, but which are easily identified as a more sophisticated reader. Blyton's style is workmanlike at best. Those people who criticise JK Rowling and say she can't write should read this series and then compare and contrast – Rowling is years ahead of Blyton. Blyton's characters are pretty flat too. As a rule, they're defined by one or two characteristics, and those descriptions are repeated again and again throughout the series. We're told that Darrell and Mary-Lou develop throughout the story (Darrell learns to control her temper; Mary-Lou overcomes her shyness), but everyone else is almost exactly the same from beginning to end. Sally is mature and sensible as an 11 year old, and even more so at 18; Alicia is smart-tongued and sharp from the off.

However, Blyton's big strength is in keeping the plot engaging. Each chapter unveils a little bit more of the story, and it encourages you to keep reading. There's also some mild humour to the stories, and some of the scenes where girls play tricks on their teachers are very funny (as is the scene where Mam'zelle plays a trick on them). And as an adult, there's the pleasure of remembering certain storylines (I loved book six – there's a scene of peril that impressed itself into my mind).

Reading novels set so long ago (the first book was published in 1946) really highlights the differences in culture between then and now. For instance, having a stiff upper lip and a stoic attitude to events wasn't just a stereotype – the stories make it clear that these are characteristics everyone in society should aim for. Unsympathetic characters are often described as "sensitive", and they're usually weak, silly, self-involved etc. And Darrell approvingly says in the fifth book that a good boarding school "teaches you to stand on your own two feet". It reminded me a bit of Noel Streatfeild's novel I Ordered a Table for Six, where a teenager is told not to shed tears for someone who has been killed by a bomb during World War 2, as it's her duty to keep her spirits up.

There's also a lot of fat-shaming. Gwen is called "Fatty" at one stage, and her classmates monitor her food intake and exercise levels ("You at five tomatoes at tea. I counted."). And we'd probably also see some of the behaviours the girls use to police each other as inappropriate and possibly even as bullying. For example, at one stage, Alicia speaks to the head of the first form about the behaviour of Alicia's cousin, June, and the first formers hold a meeting and decide that they will send June "to Coventry" (i.e. none of them will communicate with June in any way for a week). I think we would probably say now that it should be up to the teachers to determine if June should be punished or not, and the punishment shouldn't be one that's shaming.

I think if you're not reading the books for nostalgia, there's still an interest in reading the books to bring back a sense of the culture as it was 80 years ago. However, be prepared for weak writing.

What I've been reading this week

I finished two audiobooks on the Audrey app – Shatila Stories and Siddhartha. I've drafted posts for both for Instagram, so I'm not going to write about them here, other than to say that both are worth seeking out. Shatila Stories gives a vivid sense of what it's like to be a refugee in a long-term refugee camp, and Siddhartha leaves the reader with plenty to think about.

I started a re-read of When Things Fall Apart: Heart Advice for Difficult Times by Pema Chodron. Chodron is a Buddhist nun, and this book is based on a series of talks she gave over 7 years between 1987 and 1994. It's a book filled with wisdom – if you can absorb everything said in even one chapter of the book and live by it, it would already improve your life, even if you disregarded the book after reading that one chapter. I've never finished the book because there's too much for me to take in, but it's made a big difference to me, and I get something different out of it each time I re-read it.

I also started Ann Schlee's Rhine Journey for a group read organised on Instagram for #SpinsterSeptember. It's a very short book – I read it for about 2 hours yesterday, and I'm already about 2/3rds of the way through it – and it's superb. It's the story of a Victorian spinster, Charlotte, who is on holiday in Germany with her brother and his family. She's just come into some money, and there's the question of where she will live when they return to Britain. Various events on the journey lead Charlotte to reconsider her life and what she wants from it now that she has financial independence. The writing is brilliant. Schlee set out to write that book as though she were actually living in the Victorian era and writing a contemporary novel, and she's so successful that you could imagine it a long-lost classic from the period: if you didn't know that it was published in the eighties, you would never guess it. I'm really looking forward to discussing this with everyone.

I also started an ARC of Small Rain by Garth Greenwell, which will be released on 19 September in the UK. I'm about a third of the way through this and so far, it's also superb, but in a very different style to the Schlee book. An unnamed narrator finds himself in hospital with a serious, unexpected condition (he has a tear in his aorta, and the consequences could be "catastrophic"). The first hundred pages detail his first day in the emergency department, and then the ICU – the sense of chaos, of isolation (he gets sick during 2020), of frantic activity and the attempts to sleep through it, the hovering sense of mortality. There are no paragraph breaks, and no punctuation for speech, which gives the sense of the narrative unrolling at pace. Greenwell's writing style in this book reminds me a little of Javier Marias, one of my favourite authors, so you can see why I'm enjoying it so much.

Hope you have a wonderful week. I'll be back next week with a book about Ireland's housing crisis, Gaffs by Rory Hearne.