It is bad enough when we learn that Santa Claus doesn’t exist. But later in life there comes another trauma, deeper still: when we discover that the beloved books of our childhood were in fact thinly veiled political theses, laden with economic metaphors and turgid intellectual ideas. My youngest child is not yet two. How long will it be until some clever clogs blunders into the nursery and tells her that The Wonderful Wizard of Oz must be read as an allegorical representation of the debate surrounding late 19th-century US monetary policy — or that The Very Hungry Caterpillar is an ode to Karl Marx?
Fierce Bad Rabbits sells itself as ‘an eye-opening journey through our best-loved picture books’ — a prospect some readers might, like me, resist. ‘Sometimes a tiger is just a tiger,’ as Judith Kerr protested when it was suggested that The Tiger Who Came to Tea was a story about the Gestapo. But this turns out to be a gem of a book, which turned all my reservations upside down. Clare Pollard has published five volumes of poetry, in which children’s literature is a recurrent theme. (Her latest collection, Incarnation, is described by one critic as a meditation on ‘fairy tales and news headlines and horrors’.) The idea for Fierce Bad Rabbits came to her when, as a new parent, she started revisiting the books she’d read as a child. A challenge arose: ‘Before I passed these stories on, shouldn’t I interrogate them a bit more thoroughly?’
One of the first in the dock is Beatrix Potter. Much has been made of the balance between sentiment and savagery in Potter’s work. (As old Mrs Rabbit warns her children about visiting Mr McGregor’s garden: ‘Your father had an accident there; he was put in a pie by Mrs McGregor.’)
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