The Penguin Blog

The Railway Child(ren)

The only thing better than the books that come with this job are the trips that come with the books that come with this job. Last night, my three-year-old daughter and I headed over the river to Waterloo for their marvellous production of The Railway Children (read it! Here! Or here! Or even here!). Imagine my joy on realising that the whole thing is staged on the old Eurostar platforms! CUE FLASHBACKS. Most of the signage is still there, but the escalators are boarded over, the walkways don't move and the passageways are empty. Yes. That's right. Post-apocalyptic heaven.

I was in total delights. I kept saying things like, "When I was little, back before this world changed so much, this was how we used to get to the city called 'Pa-ris'", but she wasn't buying it and just asked why the moving walkways weren't moving. I told her she was a ridiculous child of the twenty-first century and she should use her legs while we still had them (before the robot overlords confiscated all limbs). With the appropriate scene set (sort of) we stepped back in time to the early twentieth century ("Are we having a picnic?" "No, they're props." "What's a prop?" "Oh man, this is going to take some time.") and to a traverse stage dressed so marvellously, I started crying. Hurray! I've finally turned into my mother.

It was the first time my daughter had been to the theatre (I know, and her a south west London kid, too) so I was nervous that she'd spend the performance kicking the seat in front with boredom or stage-whispering questions to me at ten-second intervals. Then the cast came out and waved to us all (yup, crying again, this time at their lovely costumes) and the play began. I'm sure you all know it - siblings, railways, best station master EVER, Russian writers, awesome feminist mother, some prisons, some children-in-nausea-inducing danger, ending to make all the adults cry. (Yeah, you know what that link is. And I am in no way crying again after watching it.)

Highlights included: a boy in the row behind us explaining to his sister that when the train travelled past Leeds, the family was going "to the Poorhouse"; Roberta's birthday song; the fact that my daughter didn't say a single word for the two-hour run time. Come on, tough parenting! I knew it would pay off eventually.

If anyone finds themself in the Waterloo area and fancies both a terrifying glimpse into the future when the relics of human civilization are echoing wastelands, and a wonderful children's evening at the theatre, I couldn't recommend this more.

Sam the Copywriter

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Why we published Tiger, Tiger

It isn't a comfortable book to read, and it's precisely because it isn't that it can be both heart-breaking and inspiring.

The first time I read Tiger, Tiger, a memoir by Margaux Fragoso about her childhood and relationship with a man forty-four years her senior, I was thinking about whether we should look to acquire and publish the book. Later that day I found myself walking home still engrossed by Margaux's writing. I couldn't shake her voice, her story, from my mind. It was heart-stopping: absorbing and complex, subtle and disturbing. The voice - Margaux's voice - and her experiences inhabited me, not only while I was reading but for a long time after.

When Margaux was seven she met Peter. They were friends, soul mates and lovers. Peter was fifty-one. They had a relationship for fifteen years. In the Prologue, Margaux asks us to “picture a girl of seven or so, who loves red gumballs that come from gumball machines but leaves behind the blues and greens … a child who fears her father and dislikes puzzles (boring!); a child who likes dogs and rabbits and iguanas and Italian ices … a child who hates to go home (ever) because Peter’s house is like a zoo, and most of all because Peter is fun, Peter is just like her”.  One of Tiger, Tiger's noticeable traits is the lack of filtering of experience: when Margaux is seven, the reader is seven too. It’s hard to read how this girl, afraid of her father and drawn to Peter because he seems to offer the love and stability that is lacking at home, works to create their friendship. It makes his slow, stealthy betrayal of this desire to be loved harder to bear. And it helps Margaux Fragoso show exactly how Peter can create a world that only he and Margaux inhabit, a world secured by layers of silence, a world that Peter describes as a healthy one. As Margaux grows older, she begins to realise that this world is not a wonderful secret after all, but a shameful one. And the reader realises too. 

Since we published Tiger, Tiger there have been many responses, from readers and critics, psychologists and interviewers. Whether positive or negative, they are all responses to Fragoso's voice: its ability to sit under the skin, to place the complexities of the relationship between victim and abuser emotionally inside the reader. For one reviewer, this ability is its greatest fault: "the fact that [Fragoso] is talented makes this book almost as troubling as its awful subject matter ... it pushes the horror onto the reader, who is forced to conjure up all the shame and revulsion that is missing in the text."

But perhaps this is Margaux Fragoso's greatest strength. Tiger, Tiger exposes the power of shame.

We feel shame when we know we've done something dishonourable, or when something dishonourable has been done to us. Shame keeps people silent. Tiger, Tiger is full of discussions of shame and honour. Margaux's father is almost obsessively concerned with his reputation, with supposed slights from family members and employers. Peter is at pains to convince Margaux that it's the outside world that's at fault, that their "love" is pure, but the world can't accept it. Margaux, when she begins to make friends at high school, is acutely aware of how her experience sets her apart, but not with the longed-for cachet of cool that is every teenager's dream. Sometimes Margaux's world seems a conspiracy of silence: what is happening to Margaux is too shameful for anyone to bear, and so it is left alone. Perhaps Tiger, Tiger shows us that shame is a paedophile's weapon, and that it is in the very act of writing that Margaux Fragoso is freeing not only herself but the reader, speaking as one reviewer said, in a voice that is 'loud and it is beautiful'. It is not the 'dismal, lowering read' that it was for others, but a redemptive, inspiring one: it triumphs over what it recounts.

Perhaps this is why I continue, a year and a half after I first read it, to hear the voice in my head, to feel the need to work through its meanings. It is certainly its honesty, its force, that made it necessary and important for many at Penguin to support the book. Hasn't Margaux's voice been controlled enough without needing to be controlled now? Because isn't this the point of literature, to inspire and challenge us, to expand our empathy?

 

Helen Conford
Editorial Director, Penguin Press

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Remember that by posting a comment you are agreeing to the website Terms of Use. If you consider any content on this site to be inappropriate, please report it to Penguin Books by emailing reportabuse@penguin.co.uk

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