![]() ![]() Having this variety of voices and texts did seem to give energy to a book which had been, as I say, unspeakably horrible, but it did make it more complicated. ![]() ![]() First there would be a battle between her voice and the voice of the boy, then a 6-year-old voice would take over in a diary (so one saw this grand educational project only from the point of view of the guinea pig), then the narrative would leap to voice of the 11-year-old, when he was about to start his quest. ![]() (By "unspeakable" I mean that the word "horrible" does not convey how tedious it was, how interminably the pages of opinionating seemed to go on.) The way to fix this, I thought, was a) to place her principles in constant conflict with the reality of the small child and b) to have her attempts at a reasoned master narrative broken up by the incessant interruptions of the Infant Phenomenon. So - oh God, oh God, oh God - in early drafts there were endless pages of Sibylla editorializing. On the other hand, various radical decisions that shaped the story (to raise a child according to the precepts of J S Mill and Yo Yo Ma, to allow the child to leave school after one month) seemed to need some explanation. ![]()
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