This is a wonderful piece. My stepson is from Serbia, and I will never forget how he learned to speak English while he was entranced with Thomas the Tank Engine, inventing stories as he played with his Thomas the Tank Engine toys, first in Serbian, then in a gibberish of Serbian and English with the English coming more and more to the fore, finally in English that I could understand. I never thought it odd that the anachronistic steam engines were the good characters and Diesel was a villain, but objectively speaking, it is. But it didn’t turn Miroslav into a Luddite or the millions of other children who read the stories. As Sam says, every generation of children needs its folk tales. Realist fiction can wait.
This is a wonderful piece. My stepson is from Serbia, and I will never forget how he learned to speak English while he was entranced with Thomas the Tank Engine, inventing stories as he played with his Thomas the Tank Engine toys, first in Serbian, then in a gibberish of Serbian and English with the English coming more and more to the fore, finally in English that I could understand. I never thought it odd that the anachronistic steam engines were the good characters and Diesel was a villain, but objectively speaking, it is. But it didn’t turn Miroslav into a Luddite or the millions of other children who read the stories. As Sam says, every generation of children needs its folk tales. Realist fiction can wait.