`The habit of placing works of art in competition with one another, and wrangling as to which is the best, is the habit of the sportsman, not of the enlightened judge of art." Thus George Bernard Shaw, in the context of examining why John Ruskin chose Hard Times as Dickens's "best" novel. And perhaps Shaw was right, our fascination with Booker Prizes and Bisto Awards notwithstanding. When, however, the "works of art" in question are the 270 children's books which over the past ten years this reviewer has discussed in these columns, the temptation to subscribe to the sportsman's habit becomes almost irresistible. From the wide range and diversity of material which the decade has brought, which books retain their original freshness? Which, given a further ten years, will still speak to a new millennium's young? Let us wrangle . . .
The most remarkable development in children's publishing over the period surveyed has been in the genre of the picture book. No longer merely books with pictures, the most sophisticated contemporary examples demonstrate how a combination of text and illustration can create a complexity well beyond what either can offer independently. This complexity is likely to be enhanced when words and pictures emerge from the one consciousness, resulting in a book governed by a single, central perception. Dating originally from 1992, Anthony Browne's Zoo and Raymond Briggs's The Man remain stunning proofs of this in their multi-layered alliance of the verbal and the visual.
Where the emphasis remains more on the single layers of word and picture, two Irish names have been responsible for particularly striking work. The picture book texts written by Martin Waddell encompass numerous themes and moods and are at their best when at their simplest: his 1992 Owl Babies remains the bedtime story of the decade. In terms of illustration, P.J. Lynch's work, as its many awards testify, has rightly gained international recognition. Catkin, first published in 1994, reveals the artist's ability to transform what comes to him by way of text, resulting here in a total reinvigoration of such conventional fairy tale trappings as the changeling child, the ethereal Lord and Lady and the wise old woman.
The work of Waddell and Lynch comprises merely a small portion of Irish children's books of the past few years, taking "Irish" here to indicate books by writers born or resident in Ireland, whether first published here or, less usually, abroad. For a number of Irish publishers children's books now constitute a commercially significant part of their operation, a success which no one begrudges them, provided that matters of quantity and quality are not confused. The quality is there, invariably to be found in books - as with quality books anywhere - which steer clear of formulaic themes and structures and which refuse to patronise their intended readership. Recently, some of the most impressive of this kind of writing has been for teenage readers, a grouping long neglected in Ireland.
The short stories in Ecstasy, the 1996 collection by Re O Laighleis, take us, in the Irish context, into new thematic territories and, more importantly, pay their characters (and, by extension, their readers) the compliment of allowing them to live with the consequences of their own choices: complex circumstances are always seen to defy easy outcomes. Mark O'Sullivan's 1997 novels - White Lies and Angels without Wings - are highly impressive achievements, playing serious games with notions of facts and fictions. The characters in the latter are, indeed, characters: only the reader, as the epigraph reminds us, by the power of imagination can give them wings to fly.
Books such as these provide an immediately recognisable picture (local and universal) of the adolescent years of "waiting, waiting, endless waiting", to quote a character in Joan O'Neill's 1990 mould-breaking Daisy Chain War. For Stephen, in Margrit Cruick shank's Circling the Triangle (1991), the transitional phase becomes "passing through", in another authentic adolescence attempting to make sense of the confusing and contradictory worlds of home, school and social relationships. In yet another striking portrayal of a young man's awareness of the emotional and psychological changes enforced by adolescence, Morgan Llywelyn's Cold Places (1995), the author's spare and pared prose skilfully conveys the sinister developments when 15-year-old David's real and fantasy worlds seem threateningly to merge.
While Irish books for the preteenage reader are much more plentiful than those in the category discussed above, they are also much more mixed in quality. John Quinn's The Summer of Lily and Esme (1991) and Frank Murphy's Lockie and Dadge (1995) are among the highlights, both of them featuring encounters between youth and age and poignantly demonstrating that there need be no opposition here. Mary Beckett's 1995 story, Hannah or Pink Balloons, complete with its wonderful chattering magpies, proves in its quiet, controlled way that the most apparently ordinary events can give rise to memorable writing. So, of course, can the apparently extraordinary, as is shown by Matthew Sweeney's The Snow Vulture (1992), a numbing parable of obsession and malevolence and all the more chilling for being written with elegance and wit.
It is dangerously reductive to categorise any children's novel of merit under an "issues" heading, as if fiction's principal function is to "say" something about a contemporary talking-point. Books "about" bullying or racial prejudice or disability require subtle characterisation and strong narratives out of which the "issues" naturally arise. Robert Cormier's novels rarely fail to meet these requirements, since they tend to start with the assumption that even (perhaps especially) for the young, the world is already a complex and puzzling place, not least because it is controlled by adults. His 1993 work, Tunes for Bears to Dance To, remains one of his best, featuring an 11-year-old hero beginning to see something of the machinations of an adult world and, perhaps of more significance, beginning to understand something of the shadowy recesses within his own nature.
So, pace Mr Shaw, fifteen of the best from an assortment of 270: read, re-read, enjoy and marvel that such diversity can all be part of the literary world which, all too narrowly, we usually refer to as "children's books".
Robert Dunbar's Secret Lands: The Patricia Lynch Collection was published recently