Sex and the Famous Five

Generations of readers of Enid Blyton’s Famous Five series have enjoyed the books without having to contemplate the erotic properties of the canine member of the quintet. After reading Nicholas Royle’s one-of-a-kind fantasia on Blyton and David Bowie, they may never be able to do so again. Royle writes confidently that ‘the most obvious route to thinking about sex in the Famous Five books is Timmy the dog’. Once this bombshell has been absorbed, he knocks the reader down again by writing: ‘Timmy is a big dog. He is a big-tongued dog. He must have had a huge donger too.’

The idea behind David Bowie, Enid Blyton and the Sun Machine first occurred to its author during the first 2020 lockdown. He was, by his own admission, drinking too much through boredom and frustration and listening to his favourite Bowie songs every night, as well as reading Blyton’s books to his young son. Out of this unlikely juxtaposition came the idea to write this encomium to Bowie and Blyton, structured mainly as a series of lectures delivered to an imaginary audience and revolving around the image of the ‘sun machine’, an all-conquering orb which Bowie sang about in his 1969 single ‘Memory of a Free Festival’. There are digressions aplenty, how-ever. Royle tackles everything from his disdain for Michael Gove and his unhappiness at the decline of teaching standards in universities to his affectionate but distant relationship with his father. It is in keeping with the book’s often priapic tone that Royle suggests, of his mother: ‘I never got the sense that the phallus much excited her.’

Royle thanks his editor Matthew Frost in the acknowledgements, but this book seems to have been spewed forth into the world untouched by the hand of a publisher.