THEY ALL LIVED HAPPILY EVER AFTER…AND THEN THEY DIED


When I first heard The Happy Ending Foundation mentioned, in a brief aside saying they were planning an airport protest at the arrival of Lemony Snicket for an “Unfortunate Events…” book tour of the UK, I took them to be an invention of the Snicket camp, a piece of promotional American-gothic tomfoolery to go with the neatly designed books and the fanciful pen name. The notion that such a group could actually exist seemed preposterous. But unless Lemony’s publicist has persuaded a considerable slice of the British media, not to mention former children’s laureate Michael Morpurgo, to play along with the wheeze, it seems the group are real. And they really do want to ban children’s books with unhappy endings. Not only that, but they are apparently planning a series of “Bad Book Bonfires” for the offending volumes later this month. It must be true, I read about it in one of those free papers you find littered about the London Underground. The newspaper named Marcus Pfister’s Milo and the Magical Stones as an example of a book the Foundation want banned (I don’t know this book, but presumably all does not end well for the protagonist). The next day I heard Peter Allan interviewing Michael Morpurgo on the subject on Radio 5. Morpurgo delivered a thoughtful riposte to the Foundation, saying he understood their aim, that children should be happy, but countered that this could not be achieved by lying to them about the true nature of the world. As for me, I’m still not entirely sure that this isn’t all one big and rather subversive advertising campaign. After all, it’s brought the works of at least three authors to my attention over the last couple of days. And it’s hard to believe any group would organise something as offensive as a book burning heedless of the parallels with Nazi Germany and the like, which such activities always conjure up. The title of this entry, by the way, is apparently what used to go through the mind of Radio 5 presenter Peter Allan as a child, whenever he encountered the classic fairy tale ending “happily ever after”!