Robert Ingpen is Interviewed in The Guardian

Hooked on classics

Robert Ingpen talks to Michelle Pauli about how illustration breathes new life into classic children's literature - and why JK Rowling shouldn't listen to Stephen King

Tuesday August 15, 2006
Guardian Unlimited

"I'm doing Dickens's Christmas Carol at the moment. And I've got him staying with me back in Australia. He was really pissed off that I was coming over to England and he had to stay in Australia."

My conversation with the Hans Christian Andersen award-winning illustrator Robert Ingpen has taken a decidedly surreal turn. "I need him to consult," he continues, "and I'm quite able to have conversations and ask questions of Dickens about the degree to which his ghosts in the Christmas Carol got in the way of a jolly good Christmas story."

The 70-year-old Australian chuckles, but it is clear that when it comes to the classics he takes them very seriously indeed. The writer and/or illustrator of over a hundred books, Dickens's Christmas stories will be the fifth in a series of new editions of classic works he is illustrating - Treasure Island, Peter Pan and the Jungle Book have been published already, with the Wind in the Willows and Dickens still to come.
They are beautiful books with heavy covers and thick parchment pages filled Ingpen's paintings. He designs the whole of the book in each case and the illustrations work as a coherent whole with the story, fully integrated, spreading across pages, and creating a feeling of warmth throughout. Many take up full pages and are stunning evocations of other worlds, combining a level of detail guaranteed to keep children poring over the pages with a light-infused softness reminiscent of the great painters, such as Turner, Goya and Breugel.

It's an approach that seems to tap into the images conjured up by generations of children who have grown up with these much-loved tales.

Ingpen is well aware of the rich visual cargo carried by children's classics, and alive to the challenges this presents. Everybody will have their own particular view of "a character, an event or a place in that story", he says. "I mean, Long John Silver, the pirate in Treasure Island, is a case in point - there can't be many people alive who haven't got their own view of what he looks like."

Sometimes these preconceptions are made to be broken. In 2004 his centenary edition of Peter Pan, published in aid of Great Ormond Street Hospital, was accused of putting rather too much of the street kid into the eternal boy.

"I portrayed [Peter Pan] as a boy of London of the time rather than the fey, rather effeminate creature that has been depicted since the book was written," says Ingpen.

"Barrie didn't write him as effeminate," he continues. "He was a real boy who corresponded to the kids Barrie took into Kensington Gardens and played games with. But, in the intervening time, people have come out and made him into a flaming fairy of all things." Ingpen snorts with disbelief. "You don't get to be a fairy if you can do the things that Peter Pan does. So I kept him as a rough boy who needed a bit of a wash and was fairly vulnerable."

He's also dismissive of Great Ormond Street's decision to commission Geraldine McCaughrean to write a sequel. It's "just wrong," Ingpen sighs. "You will ruin all that has been created over a hundred years with the brilliance of Peter and Wendy and John and Tinkerbell and everything that goes with the magic."

Ingpen is uncompromising in his respect for these old tales, and for the men who created them. He speaks of "the Barries and Kiplings and Stevensons" as if they are old friends, an affection born of his complete immersion in their fictional worlds.

He describes the process of illustrating their works in almost mystical terms, emphasising that there is no formula or recipe that determines what is put in and what gets left out.

"It's a subconscious thing. You sense it. You hear it as you go along," he explains. Sometimes he can see a character or a situation but he can't allow himself to illustrate it because it will "diminish something to do with the story at that stage. And at another point, something you would have preferred not to illustrate screams to be illustrated and you give it what you can even though it might not be your first choice."

"It's an accumulated skill over years of embracing stories and making pictures to tell stories." He smiles: "Pretty simple, but very complex."

Ingpen's childhood, growing up in Geelong in the 1940s, was filled with books and drawing. He studied art and design at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology, but it wasn't until he got a job as a designer with the Commonwealth, Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation in the late 1950s that he began to learn the practical art of storytelling - and the power of old stories.

His role was to communicate science to farmers and fishermen in a simple and accurate way but with an imaginative twist so that they were not "bored to snores", as he puts it. He began to explore the traditional folk tales of the communities he was working within and found that they were the ideal vehicle. Retold with a new twist they could bridge the gap between scientific discoveries and their uses in the real world.

Ingpen employed the same technique while working for the United Nations in Peru in the 1970s. He used a 500-year-old story he had come across, which explained how the water off Peru warmed up, causing the fish to migrate, to explain the El Nino effect to Peruvian fishermen.

Ingpen's time in Peru also inspired the work for which he is best-known in Australia, The Poppykettle Papers. This epic adventure story, which follows five Hairy Peruvian Gnomes as they sail to the promised land in an earthenware pot, was loosely based on 17th-century stories of Peruvians escaping the Spaniards in boats. In a mark of respect unusual for a living author, his home town now holds an annual Poppykettle festival, now in its 25th year, complete with a children's parade which attracts 15,000 marchers.

Despite his high profile, he's not afraid to speak out in defence of children's literature and children's authors, attacking Stephen King and John Irving for pleading with JK Rowling to keep Harry Potter alive.

"That's typical arrogance," he says with utter disdain. "The formula she's used is absolutely brilliant. To interrupt her progress as she concludes that formula with advice to her on how she should finish is an indication that we are getting literature wrong."

Harry Potter's death is "absolutely important if the tradition of Dickens and the whole of our literature is to be maintained," he continues, because of the way it will work "within the psyche and the imagination of the reader".

"We need to understand the tradition of literature somewhat better," he says, "so that the Irvings and other people are not allowed to get away with this kind of nonsense."

Ingpen's frankness is rare enough in the PR-managed world of children's literature. The curmudgeonliness lurking just beneath the surface is leavened with the odd flash of dry whimsy, and the feeling that his fierceness is rooted in a deep sense of personal artistic integrity and his concern that the integrity of stories and their tellers be upheld.

He has little time for an ego-led turn he detects in children's publishing, especially in the field of illustration. "You don't put your head above the parapet and become a personality if you're an illustrator - it's not part of it, it's not possible," he insists. "You are a servant to the story."

Digital technology has opened up huge opportunities for the illustrator, removing many of the graphical problems of the past, but, says Ingpen, the fundamental art of telling a story through words and pictures must remain paramount.

"The intellectual limitations are still to be respected," he continues, "or the book loses traction in the imagination and learning of the reader." Getting a "whizz-bang artist" or a personality illustrator might help a book "sell heaps and heaps, but it doesn't make it a better book."

With children's imagination shaped more and more by television and cinema, the classics need great illustration more than ever, maintains Ingpen. The visual language can "draw them in" and take them to a point where "the narrative and the balladry comes through and hits them so powerfully compared with modern narrative."

"It's the illustrator's position to do that because the words can't be changed, and that's a very special privilege," explains Ingpen. Maybe he is imposing a little on the reader's imagination, but it's all to "give the reader of the book the privilege of getting deeper into the story than they ever have before."

For Ingpen, it is the ability to take the imagination far beyond the words and pictures on the page that makes a classic.

When blind Pew knocks on Admiral Benbow's door in Treasure Island it's "the most scary sound in literature," he says. "It comes as a sound to you by the skill of the writing and the vision of the man. You hear the sound and, if you hear that sound when you're nine years old and you've read it yourself, you'll read forever," he beams with enthusiasm. "It's magic. To be part of illustrating these things and trying to contribute somehow is just brilliant."

Robert Ingpen's children's classics are published by Templar (www.templarpublishing.co.uk)