Here's another book that's new to me, even though it's been listed by 'Publisher's Weekly' as the best-selling children's paperback of all time. I do wonder how accurate that could be, even for the year 2000, given that no fewer than twenty-two 'Berenstain Bears' books make the list while 'Alice in Wonderland' isn't anywhere to be found. Anyway, it's a well-loved book that's gone through no end of editions and been adapted into an animated film, a live action film, a musical stage play, a video game, an audio drama and probably everything else that a book can be adapted into.

It's easy to see why it's so loved because it nails a notable sweet spot that authors often consider unfindable. From one angle, it's an incredibly simple but effective story that has no intention of outstaying its welcome. A detailed synopsis could be condensed down to ridiculously short length without losing anything crucial, which means that storytellers from the old tradition could tell it and retell it from memory. It certainly feels like something that timeless.

However, from another angle, there's a heck of a lot of depth in play behind that incredibly simple but effective story. Someone who read it—or probably had it read to them—at a very young age would find more meaning a decade later. And a decade after that. And so on. It feels like the sort of book to grow up to, teaching us about life and death and change, but it would continue to find new meaning once we've theoretically grown up and started families and the cycle of life rolls on. Hakuna Matata and all that jazz. I almost feel like I've missed out by only reading it now.

As you might imagine from the title, Charlotte is a spider and she lives in a barn on a farm that's owned by Homer Zuckerman. For the longest time, this book does not appear to be about her. It's about Fern Arable as it starts, the young daughter of John Arable who owns and runs a different farm. When one of his pigs delivers a new litter, he plans on killing the runt because it's small and weak and isn't likely to amount to anything. Fern is horrified and pleads for its life. He gives in, as fathers tend to do, and so she has a pet piglet called Wilbur.

Over time, Wilbur grows from a piglet into a pig and Fern's best friend, but John gives him to the Zuckermans, who are part of his wife's family. Fern can visit, he says, and so she does, frequently, not having the faintest idea that the farmers' intention all along is to fatten Wilbur up and then slaughter him for food. It's what they do. It's the business model. There's no suggestion that Fern is a vegetarian. We soon learn that Wilbur doesn't know that this is what's going to happen either; because, as we switch from the Arables to the Zuckermans, we also switch perspective from human characters to animal ones and they talk amongst themselves.

Interestingly, Fern can understand them, though no other human in the story can. We might take that as imagination in a different story, especially as one of the themes is change and she grows up eventually and moves on with her life, no longer stopping in to see Wilbur like she used to do. I don't think we can do that here, though, because of where the story goes, and where it goes is the discovery that Wilbur's being raised for slaughter and the plan Charlotte comes up with to avoid that seemingly inevitable fate.

At this point, Charlotte takes over and that's telling too. Initially, it's Fern who saves Wilbur, with her little girl pleading. Now, it's up to an adult to do the same thing, even if that adult is a spider. She's older and wiser, relatively speaking, and she's the character who dies, which really shouldn't be a spoiler given that barn spiders have a pretty short lifespan, only a year or two at the most, a lot less than any other species in the book. Even Templeton the rat can expect to live longer than that, maybe twice as long. If Charlotte can save him, Wilbur might live up to twenty years and, of course, we'd hope Fern gets a lot more than that.

And someone had to die, because one of the key themes here is death. Sure, it's a happy uplifting story of an underdog character beating the odds, but the odds in this book are being slaughtered for food. There's imminent death in the first chapter, John Arable taking an axe to his hoghouse, but it's delayed by Fern. It continues to hang over Wilbur, even if he and Fern don't initially realise that, but it's delayed by Charlotte. What Wilbur's gone through tells us that we can delay death in certain circumstances. What Charlotte goes through tells us that we can't delay it forever and it's fine. After all, it's the only thing we all really have in common. We were all born and we'll all die.

What isn't about death is about change, ironically because death is the biggest change of all and that's how it's depicted here. However, there's change in life too and E. B. White manifests that in a bunch of different ways, not least through Fern growing up. She isn't remotely the same person at the end of the book as she is at the beginning and, again, that's fine. Change is inevitable and it doesn't have to be a bad thing, though, of course, that doesn't mean that it has to be a good thing either.

This book's biggest success has to be how deeply it brings these themes home to us, whatever age we happen to be, without us really noticing. These things are just there and we start to take them for granted and then, one day, we grow enough to realise, hey, that's what that meant. That's an impressive feat for a children's book, one that most of them strive for but few achieve. I've clearly been missing out. Now I need to track down 'Stuart Little', White's other world famous book that I have never read. ~~ Hal C F Astell