The year of the cat

Why have cats suddenly become part of the Zeitgeist? Is it just that, after decades of dog books and the success of Michelle Paver’s Wolf Brother, cat lovers felt that it was their turn? What do cats signify to children? Louisa Young, who wrote the Lionboy trilogy with her daughter Isabelle, using a pseudonym, is often asked why they chose to write about cats not dogs, especially as they don’t have a cat because Isabelle is allergic to them.

“We were drawn to them because cats walk by themselves; they are mysterious and free, whereas you have to feed a dog and take it for walks. They’re better heroic figures. Of course Aslan, the Big Daddy of them all, has raised the profile of big cats recently, but in the beginning we were going to have the hero, Charlie Ashanti, able to speak only to ordinary cats. It was only when we got him involved with a circus that we realised being able to talk to lions would be a fabulous bonus.”

The drugged lions rescued by Charlie get back to Africa in the first two books; but in Lionboy: The Truth (8+), Charlie himself needs rescuing. The lions’ confidence that they would “catch Charlie’s scent, find him, maul his enemies, fly like the wind with him on their backs and then . . . deliver him safely to the boat” is cat adventure at its most buoyant, big- hearted and sunny.

S. F. Said’s Varjak Paw and The Outlaw Varjak Paw are a complete contrast. The hero is a rare Mesopotamian Blue, who, confined with his snobbish conservative family, longs for adventure. When he learns The Way, a mysterious martial arts technique, he little dreams how soon he will need to use it in the big city outside. Said, who went through 17 drafts before getting Varjak Paw published, “would rather watch cats than television”. He grew up with one in a block of flats in London, and thinks the popularity of cat stories is because cats, unlike dogs or ponies, are the only pet available in an increasingly urban existence.

However, he points out: “You don’t have to like cats to like Varjak Paw. At heart it’s about being small in a big world. At the same time, when I do school events and ask children what animal they’d most like to be, a lot want to be cats because of their ability to pass undetected, to see in the dark and to be independent. Varjak’s ancestor tells him that ‘a cat is an idea of freedom made flesh’, and anyone who knows cats knows that you can ‘t tell them what to do. They’re so fiercely themselves.”

To today’s overprotected children, Varjak Paw is the perfect emblem of the joys and dangers of freedom. Beautifully illustrated by Dave McKeen and written in spine-tingling prose, the novels have a suspenseful edginess that children instantly respond to.

Kate Saunders’s Cat and the Stinkwater War (7+) was also developed after the acquisition of three real moggies, that arrived in the wake of her inventing a talking witch’s cat in her best-selling Belfry Witches series. “Unlike dogs, cats behave as if it’s a coincidence that they’re in the same house as you. They’re quite nice in an offhand way, but have a secret life you don’t understand. Their world of feuds and politics is parallel to our own.”

Saunders’s warm, witty novel celebrates the comic side to feline independence. It includes magic — something that is never far away where cats are concerned — and imagining what it would be like to be transformed into a cat. ()

Nick Green’s Cat Kin (10+) takes this a step further as unhappy teenagers acquire the power to walk, jump, fall and sense like cats under the tuition of the mysterious Mrs Powell. Ben and Tiffany go to a self-defence class that turns out to be “pakshi”, a lost art from a time when cats were worshipped as gods. “Curiosity saved the cat many more times than it killed her,” their teacher tells them, and so it proves in a gripping adventure as the children sort out the villains in their own lives and rescue cages full of big cats being milked for a sinister alternative medicine.

Green says: “I realised how well cats chimed with my adolescent characters: independent and needy in equal measure; prickly and nervy yet recklessly bold; sometimes inscrutable; proud yet self-conscious. As people become more lonely, cats are perceived as being admirably able to look after themselves.”

Urban and wild, complex and contradictory: these are the qualities that humans perceive in or project on to cats. As far as children’s literature is concerned, the dog may have had his day.

To buy books at the offer price inc free p&p call 0870 1608080

WHAT’S MORE

SLINKY MALINKI (2+)

by Lynley Dodd

Puffin, £4.99

A deliciously wicked cat gets his come-uppance.

SLOBCAT (3+)

by Paul Geraghty,

Red Fox, £1.50

The secret life of a cat superhero.

THE MOUSEHOLE CAT and CATKIN (4+)

by Antonia Barber

Walker, £4.99 and £5.99

Heroic cats to the rescue.

GOBBOLINO THE WITCH’S CAT (5+)

by Ursula Moray Williams

Kingfisher, £5.99

A magic kitten longs to be ordinary.

CARBONEL (8+)

by Barbara Sleigh

Puffin, £5.99

Enchanting classic about the king of the cats.