Notes on a colouring book

Is this a stroke-of-genius way of engaging young minds, cleverly combining accessibility and playfulness to enlighten a new generation and address the urgent issue of the day?

Or does it represent the transfer of adult anxieties onto the shoulders of those too weak to bear them, and provoke fear in bodies too young to withstand it? Is this a colouring book that helpfully hastens us towards a better world? Or old-world profit-seeking? One does not necessarily exclude the other, of course. And the former may depend on the latter, after all.

But what of the immature psyche’s inability to process strong emotions, and the readiness with which science now tells us they are stored up inside us if we cannot express them, only to erupt like a triggered virus in later life, in sometimes spectacular ways?

What about the sheer mountain face that complex arguments about subtle, important yet disputed questions of the world present to an immature intellect? Isn’t this the very reason we give them colouring books and not broadsheet newspapers and Twitter handles for amusement?

Is it fair to place a problem before a child that they can do nothing whatsoever about because of their age and lack of means? Especially a problem we adults created ourselves. Isn’t that why grown men and women switch off their television screens - the anxiety caused by being shown horrors you can do precisely nothing about, night after night, in what you had supposed to be your ‘leisure time’?

Perhaps the purchaser had in mind to impress the parent, or a clever friend at a dinner party, rather than entertain the child. Or perhaps, standing at the till and pressed for time in a novelty gift shop, with a bottle of wine and some flowers still to be chosen and bought, the giver was glad of all the possibilities the item offered; killing several birds with one colouring book. Does this make the buyer blameworthy?

Perhaps the seriousness of the matter was obscured not by haste but was inevitably camouflaged by the medium and cheerful drawings on the cover - it’s a colouring book, after all. But by making things less obvious, and therefore more likely to be overlooked, camouflage in politics is insidious. Was the designer acting in good faith when he chose this particular means to getting a problem into a family home, and an infant’s mind, and outsourcing its resolution?

What of the illustrator? Was this a passion project? Or a necessary means of income, to permit her the pursuit of the art she always has in mind when she goes to bed, but hasn’t the time for when she wakes up to chores and the needs of her own children?

Was the gender and ethnicity balance displayed on the book mere happenstance, or intended? Or a firm instruction from the publisher and the marketing department? Does it matter anyway, if the intention was good - to change the world for the better? Or should, instead, the value of any intention be judged by its outcome? Famously, the fast lanes to Armageddon were graded, asphalted and steamrollered to smoothness by people who only wanted the best for us.

Publishers naturally need to make money in order to publish books, and without books, changing the world for the better would a lot more difficult. Everyone can agree on that: and we know that those who don’t want change have been known to burn them. So perhaps monetising modern anxieties and risking confusion in a child is an acceptable charge to levy in this instance, so that less easily funded publications for a grown-up reader can be printed. Plus there are the salaries and the overheads and so forth to be taken into consideration. The ink.

But might Magritte say: ‘Ceci n'est pas un livre de coloriage’? And would he be wrong?