Neil Gaimon begins his beautifully black fantasy, ‘Coraline’ (Bloomsbury) with an epigraph from G.K.Chesterton: ‘Fairytales are more than true: not because they tell us that dragons exist, but because they tell us that dragons can be beaten.’ I suspect it was that truth that impelled so many adults to share the Harry Potter spell. And it may be the simple secret behind the current vogue for so-called ‘crossover fiction’ - books written and marketed with adults as well as children in mind.
According to the industry analysts Book Marketing, nearly 50 per cent of ‘Potter genre’ books were bought for adults last year, compared with 29 per cent in 1999. A cynic might say that many of the adults reading J.K.Rowling on trains were literary wannabes realising for the first time there might be money in ‘ kidslit’, and checking out the formula. Others probably made the excuse that they just wanted to see what the fuss was about. But the runaway success of Harry Potter - and of the (perhaps) more outstanding trilogies ‘His Dark Materials’ (Scholastic) and ‘The Wind on Fire’ (Egmont) by Philip Pullman and William Nicholson respectively - demonstrate that the need for narrative is ageless and timeless: a magic art to keep the darkness at bay, as surely as when the cave dwellers told their tales around the fire.
Anybody who read the Chronicles of Narnia as a child, then to a child, will know there is nothing new in the idea that adults and children can enjoy certain books equally. Gulliver’s journey through fantastic lands towards a discovery of the truth about his own kind was read, as Pope said, ‘from the cabinet council to the nursery’. In the seventies Susan Cooper and Alan Garner wrote complex novels in which the skin between worlds of reality and magic shivered and broke, and brave young protaganists faced evil without and within. The work of Ursula le Guin, Russell Hoban and David Almond (to name but three) pushed at boundaries, while adult fiction seemed locked into compartments, from ‘literary’ through ‘romance’ to ‘chicklit’.
‘Coram Boy’ (Egmont) by Jamila Gavin will be admired by anybody who enjoys a powerful, well-crafted historical novel.
What is new is the hype. Five new imprints aimed at mixed age readers will be launched by the end of this year, and writers who have not been associated with younger fiction, like Isabel Allende, are publishing ‘crossover’ titles. Where they will be shelved in bookshops used to strict categories is anybody’s guess
In his book ‘Secret Gardens’ Humphrey Carpenter speculates that the golden age of children’s fiction, after 1860, happened as a result of social factors like smaller families (more time for chidlren) as well as the zietgeist - the loss of religious certainty and search for something to replace it. But the Lewis Carroll and Charles Kingsley imitators were frank about their motivations: Christina Rossetti described her ‘Speaking Likenesses’ (1974) as ‘in the Alice style with an eye to the market.’ This new children’s literature, whilst using ancient tropes like the search for Arcadia (‘The Wind in the Willows’) and the confrontation with evil (‘Peter Pan’), was essentially subversive. Fantasy, folk-tales and fairy stories may involve impossibilities like talking animals and flying children, but they are also profound commentaries on contemporary society and belief.
It’s tempting to see the new clutch of books in the ‘crossover’ genre as subversive too - a move away from the uber-realism which seemed to dominate the children’s market in the nineties: Melvyn Burgess’s ‘Junk’ and Anne Fine’s ‘The Tulip Touch’ being just two examples of bleak contemporary narratives. Dark truths about human behaviour were expressed in too-simple language, whilst sometimes the issue-driven stand against racism, sexism and middle-classism seemed as imprisoning as the didactic children’s tracts of the nineteenth century. At the time Philip Pullman asserted that you cannot ‘ringfence’ children, and I disagreed. Of course we must - in that you wouldn’t give a twelve year old ‘American Psycho’ or a book about Fred West. Human beings can have too much reality and young readers especially require some sort of hope, a promise of redemption.. It is no accident that all the ‘crossover’ titles involve magical quests.
In Pullman’s great trilogy readers are exposed to the nasty underbelly of existence but at one remove, and what remains in the mind is the courage of people and beasts and the enduring nature of goodness and love. William Nicholson’s brilliance is to invoke many layers of literary consciousness, from Exodus, through Homer, to Bunyan to encapsulate the theme of the search for a better place, which invariably requires sacrifice before the dark forces are overcome. These two are the masters; nothing else I have read can approach them - although the two big American titles of the Autumn deal with similar themes and credit C.S.Lewis as an inspiration.
Clive Barker’s ‘Abarat’ (HarperCollins - September) and Michael Chabon’s ‘Summerland (Collins - November) are about the transformation of ordinary American children into heroes who can face down inventive equivalents of Lord Voldemort. They share key characteristics: the juxtapostion of worlds, invention of fantastical hybrid creatures, a feisty female heroine with a dusfunctional family, tests and quests, and so on. Chabon uses baseball as an original metaphor for the whole, but this may be too much for a non-American audience. Barker presents ‘Abarat’ (with his own ilustrations) as the first book of a series, and so cheats rather by letting his narratuve tail off rather, in a way that Rowling, Pullman and Nicholson do not. Both are imaginative tours de force and deserve to be huge hits.
In these novels personal pain is externalised as the Journey which will test endurance. Barker’s Candy is from a loveless home, Chabron’s Ethan is grieving for his dead mother - and Isabel Allende’s Alex is desperately worried about a mother who is terminally ill. The first volume of a proposed trilogy, ‘City of the Beasts’ (Flamingo - October) takes the young hero on a journey into the Amazonian jungle with his eccentric aunt in search of a lost tribe and a mythic race of beasts. Although the evil in the novel is human rather than cosmic, the magical element is vital, as Alex and his new friend Nadia (the boy-girl element recurs in ‘crossover’ titles) scale the impossible heights of legend, to enable Alex to return with a magic ingedient which just might help his mother live. As you would expect, this is a thrilling, perceptive and uplifting read which raises many questions about the power of belief.
If Allende’s ‘other’ world is richly exotic, Lian Hearn’s is even more so. Again the first volume in a proposed series, ‘Across the Nightingale Floor’ (Macmillan) is set in a mythical, feudal Japanese land, dominated by warring clans. Against this savage backdrop two teenagers find their destiny in a doomed love. Every day we are exposed to a multiplicy of horror through the media, and fantasy fiction like this provides a means of coming to terms with the inevitabilty of suffering in a setting so far away it cannot be too threatening. The transformation of the hero Takeo from clumsy loner to warrior with magic powers, and of the heroine Kaede from victim to courageous woman can only be an inspiration, expecially to teenagers, whilst the narrative drive is neverthless towards acceptance of our fate: ‘So the world went, and humankind lived on it as best they could, between the darkness and the light’.
With briliant economy Neil Gaimon’s ‘Coraline’ unites most of the themes of all the books mentioned. The little girl - benignly neglected by her workaholic parents- makes her journey down a secret corridor behind a locked door in their old house, and discovers a parallel world, seductive at first (as badness often is) but then terrifyingly evil. Coraline’s quest is to save her own parents and the souls of some lost children from the witch-like ‘other mother’, and to do so she must be as brave and inventive as any hero or heroine in myth. I shoud add that compassion is one of Coraline’s driving forces, and equally important in all these titles: the fact that ugly, lost, imprisoned creatures awaken pity in the protagonist is a reminder that this literature provides as much a moral education as any overtly realistic text.
Why enter another world? The better to understand this one. Bruno Bettelheim argues that fairytales help children emotionally by helping them adjust to real life, with all its threats, disappointments, sorrows. But this search for meaning has no age limit. Making five series of ‘Devout Sceptics’ over the years for BBC Radio 4 leads me to conclude that the need for the numinous is as strong as ever in a secular age, whilst creative ideas of God and good can be a consolation in the face of pain and loss.
Deep down we all yearn to travel through the mirror or the wardrobe to the land where the Bong Tree grows, and know that if we clap loudly to say we believe in fairies, then Tinkerbell will not die. Captain Hook/Satan/Voldemort/Coyote/Carrion the Lord of Midnight (call him what you will) is always lurking behind the door, and might even bring about the end of the world by cutting down the rain forests. But the joyful message that by faith and fortitude evil can be vanquished and that heroism lurks within the most ordinary of people is the alternative to hatred, rage, greed and cruelty. It is the greatest story ever told - and we all need to keep turning the pages.
