THE Archbishop of Canterbury has defended the work of a children’s author jailed for 2½ years for sexually abusing his young girl fans.

Rowan Williams said that although his view of William Mayne had changed since the court case, this would not stop him recommending his work, in particular A Game of Dark, which he read as a child.

“Yes, it would colour me if I read it now, knowing what has happened,” Williams said. “Yet a writer is not the sum of his activities. We would be in trouble with a lot of authors if their lives were what we judged.”

Mayne, 77, has written nearly 100 children’s books, but throughout the 1960s and 1970s used his fame to lure young fans to his homes in Yorkshire and London where he molested them. Last May he admitted carrying out 11 indecent assaults on six girls aged between eight and 16.

A Game of Dark is a fantasy novel about an inarticulate boy whose father is dying and who has an emotionally cold mother. Williams, who has a son and a daughter aged nine and 17, described it as “very dark” but “an extraordinary novel”.

The archbishop, in an interview conducted in front of an audience at The Sunday Times Oxford Literary Festival on Friday, said he found the book powerful because it is about the difficulties of growing up and self-image.

Last night children’s charities criticised the archbishop’s comments. “I’m shocked anyone would say we should be non-judgmental about the works of a man who has abused children and I am particularly appalled that this is coming from a man of God,” said Michele Elliott, director of Kidscape, a child safety group who is herself a children’s author.

“I wouldn’t touch his (Mayne’s) books with a barge pole. Books are the sum of you as a person. To divorce the writings of an author from the author himself is impossible.”

Williams’s comments were, however, defended by Claire Tomalin, who has written books about Samuel Pepys and Charles Dickens. “I don’t think I could name any writer about whom I know anything who hasn’t done something immoral or disgusting or unpleasant. If we were to stop reading books by people who were less than perfect morally, we wouldn’t be left with any books.”

There are numerous figures from the literary and arts worlds whose reputations have survived crime and scandal. Oscar Wilde, the Victorian writer, was jailed for two years for gross indecency.

Caravaggio, the Italian painter, was forced to flee Rome in the 1600s after being accused of murder. And in 1977, Roman Polanski, the film director, admitted having sex with an underage girl and now refuses to travel to America for fear of arrest.

Mayne’s reputation, by contrast, has yet to recover from the court case, before which he was a highly respected writer. In 1993, he won the Guardian Children’s Fiction Award and was described in one review as “the most original good writer for young people in our time”.

His crimes came to light after a woman approached police in 1999. According to two of his victims, Mayne told them the sexual assaults were “only what girls want”.

It was unclear this weekend whether Mayne has yet been released from jail.

After the case, Mayne’s work fell from favour. Charles Nettleton, managing director at Hodder children’s books, said the publisher had decided not to release a new Mayne novel but added that this was only partly because of the abuse case. “Before the conviction we were struggling to make a (commercial) success of him,” he said.

Williams takes a particular interest in children’s literature. Although he expresses some concern about issues such as sex in contemporary children’s books he is against any attempts to “censor” this. “My hackles rise at the thought,” he said.

He did acknowledge concern, however, about what he called “the pace of books” where they address issues of sexuality. “Books which are also outside the emotions of children are not appropriate,” he added. He called on both authors and editors to show common sense.

Williams reserved some of his greatest praise for Philip Pullman, author of His Dark Materials, despite the writer’s strongly anti-clerical stance.

“What Pullman writes is very moving, very powerful and yet sometimes very wrong. But his books drive you back to your own beliefs,” he said.

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