Funny, how rereading a book means turning the page back to an earlier self. Not funny ha-ha, I admit. But the art that has great significance to us is not necessarily either great or significant, and this week I was intrigued as to whether my childhood favourite had stood the test of time.
Mister God, This Is Anna (1974) portrays the relationship between a young man and a precocious foundling in London’s East End in the years preceding the second world war. It’s a vivid world of trams and barrow boys, cafe-frequenting matelots, street philosophers circling braziers by night, and sex workers described as the most beautiful women in the world. Working class, vibrant and kind, it still feels like a fairytale with no villains. The pared back, yet voluptuous line drawings of illustrator William Papas had stuck in my head too, and these came tumbling back with familiarity. I remembered the author’s name being a single word, Fynn – a pseudonym for author Sydney Hopkins – but I didn’t know what that was as a child. It felt appropriately simple for the book, as if it had always been.
Mister God is a religious book, there’s no way around that. Perhaps that will put some readers off, though it’s worth noting how aggressively defiant of unscientific dogma it is. Anna, the found child, is an instinctive theologian with a boundless curiosity for physics, biology and mathematics. Much of the book describes her ad hoc science experiments involving magic lanterns, slide rules, voltmeters, revolving paddles in bathtubs and belts with buzzers riveted to them. Fynn portrays himself as a perpetually foxed comic foil to Anna’s pint-sized Socrates. She asks many questions, rejecting his conventional answers and drawing them toward a fuller sense of God’s nature. Sounds nauseating, I know. But while the book has much sentiment, it is also dark. The problems of evil and suffering are addressed head on. “Fynn, Mister God doesn’t love us,” Anna will announce calmly; the reduction of God to a cosy, understandable entity is given short shrift. Through impishness, profundity.
It is not a modern book. Culturally, we’re now more interested in earliest life for its possibilities of trauma. Anna is a dirty child, discovered at night by a 16-year-old boy, who adopts her into a house of various itinerants, where she stays for years. This odd couple frequently share a bed, naked, and wander the streets at night. The book is neither sensitive to nor interested in the possibly disturbing aspects of this unusual relationship, which I found completely refreshing. It did strike an eerily relevant chord for today, however, when describing the social anxiety of impending war: “The rules of ‘four sticks’ chalked up on the wall had been covered over with the regulations for the blackout. We were being instructed in the rules of a new game.”
Aside from any spiritual implications, I remember the book’s emphasis on thinking for oneself, which I have tried latterly to hang on to, even at the risk of sounding like an idiot, or – more usually – proving myself one. As children, we thrive by thinking for ourselves. As adults, we’re cursed with sophistication. We recycle ideas, parade breadth of learning, are paralysed by the thought of being wrong. We call this sophistication cultural capital, which seems to me a good term because it is a currency: a system of value rather than the thing of value.
I was looking forward to revisiting a particular section, which once had a powerful effect on me: a description of a broken-off iron railing, which, when properly attended to, appears to be a rainbow, crystalline mountain range. Anna has a powerful reaction to it, too – or rather, to the obliviousness of the public, rushing by. “They don’t see it. They don’t see it,” she wails, and the realisation leads her into mourning. Reading it decades later, I still found it moving. The passage strikes at a truth not often acknowledged. Many, maybe most, people will be blind to the beauty you see, to the particular meaning that orients you in the world. It’s painful; but it doesn’t lessen the beauty, or undo that meaning.
The railing returns, to play a poignant role at the story’s conclusion. This is a sad story, from one point of view: one of neglect, poverty, innocence lost. But that’s only one way of looking. In hindsight, I was able to develop a kind of emotional double vision after spending time with Anna and Fynn. A bittersweet sense of what life is about, a mature capacity that makes the mess bearable. It’s not really a children’s book, though at the time I thought it was. It certainly felt meant for me. I suppose the books that imprint on us are the ones that contain just enough of the adult world to nudge the bigger door open.
