ADULT VS CHILDREN’S FICTION – LECTURE, KEATS HOUSE OCTOBER 2006

Since JK Rowling became a world-wide phenomenon, children’s literature has become one of the few growth areas in publishing. Hardly a month goes by in which some new author is not announced to have made their first million by being signed up for a children’s novel. Many of these have, like Michelle Paver or Philip Kerr, tried their hands at adult fiction, and some, like Helen Dunmore and Andy McNab, are already successful authors of it. Some, like Madonna, Paul McCartney and Ricky Gervais presumably want to join a fashionable new field. For all, the appeal of becoming as rich as Rowling must count as a considerable attraction.

For me, as a children’s book reviewer, it is a nightmare. Getting 100 books a week through the post, 95 of which are complete rubbish, is horrifying. Far too much is being published. This whole culture of reading rests upon the growing point of a child’s mind. If a child learns to associate reading with boredom, with stupidity and worst of all with school, then libraries and bookshops and publishing will die. It only takes one bad book to turn a child off reading and onto the hundred and one other forms of entertainment that will have them mindlessly pressing buttons. People who pump out dross are the enemies of this culture, and I’m afraid I’d like to put Madonna and McCartney on a big pile of their wretched books, and set fire to it.

Reading is a creative act. It’s how we learn not just the nuts and bolts of language – like Alan Bennett, I loathe people who go on about loving words – but that we have what is infinitely more precious, an imagination. By developing an imagination I don’t just mean believing in magic or parallel worlds or God. Imagining what it may be like to be someone else, with different ideas and aspirations is what makes us the opposite of terrorists and torturers. It is what makes us not necessarily better, but more fully human than those who lack this capacity.

I grew up in a particularly bookish household – first in Primrose Hill, which had a wonderful children’s library, now sadly depleted – and then in Italy, where children’s books were expensive and precious. Without television, they were my chief source of entertainment, so much so that I spent all my pocket money on them, and have them still. I am interested in children’s fiction because basically, I never stopped reading it. Even when I began to write for adults, I would turn to children’s fiction as something that would unfailingly return me, feeling refreshed and stronger, to my true self.

This is one of the chief differences between adult fiction and children’s fiction. The sense of what Proust called “le moi profond” – the profound self – lies at the heart of all literature. Great adult literature reaches out to that profound self by showing you how it exists in others, by making you feel less alone – but I believe that it is children’s literature that helps create this self in the first place.

Fairytales, which were not originally written for children or indeed written at all, were probably the first kind of literature to help us do this. However, children’s novels make the Everyman of fairytales real and individual to a child. They are children to whom bad things happen, and go on happening until children resolve some of their problems. People tend to think that children’s literature is sunny and happy to the point of being silly, but the real thing – whether they are picture-books like Babar or Where The Wild Things Are, or fiction like the Narnia books or His Dark Materials is full of darkness and disaster. It’s true that some of the loveliest picture books, ones like Orlando the Marmalade Cat or Shirley Hughes’s Lucy and Tom books, don’t do more than celebrate a happy child’s world. We need them as visions of paradise. But then, the shadows come in fast and thick.

The great children’s books address death (something adult fiction rarely does) or what is more frightening for a child, being lost or separated from their source of comfort – whether this is a mother or a teddy. They show children battling monsters, and in some cases not coming back from the strange new places they travel to. From Peter Pan onwards, childhood is celebrated within children’s literature as a time outside time, into which death can’t enter – but they know that it’s beating at the gates, or waiting under their bed. Learning to live with fear is the single biggest struggle of a human being’s life, and as every parent knows, it begins before a child is two.

Adult novels often begin or end with a death, yet the dreadfulness of bereavement is something we turn away from as adults. People like to have it locked up in another fairy-tale form called the detective novel, or the thriller. Mostly, we prefer to pretend it doesn’t exist at all. Children’s novels look at both unblinkingly. We know just how awful it is for Diggory in CS Lewis’s The Magician’s Nephew because his mother is dying, just as we know what makes the baby elephant Babar run away from the hunter that shoots his mother. We know what will happen to Peter Rabbit if he’s caught by Mr. McGregor. We are made to live through the consequences of Sara Crewe’s foolish father dying in A Little Princess, and we know that Harry Potter’s Uncle and Aunt are far worse than his magical enemy, Voldemort. We have always known that outside the school gates, and sometimes within them, there are people as violent and predatory as Roald Dahl’s witches, but it’s only within the last decade that child abuse has come to the forefront of public consciousness.

Children’s novels are written in simpler language, and often direct our emotional responses by means of commenting on them or even addressing us – but that does not make them simple. Even if they enjoy the traditional happy ending, they ask us to consider how we ourselves would act in the worst situations.

I think this is one of the most important things literature can ask individuals. As soon as you begin to ask, What If?, all kinds of things become possible to imagine, and perhaps to realise, or anticipate. It’s the favourite question that science fiction asks, and such a good one that many real-life inventions, from satellites to mobile phones, were inspired by it, but it’s also the favourite question of novelists everywhere.

The problem I find with too much literary fiction is that the kind of questions it asks tend not to be all that interesting. We all know that novels about adultery in Hampstead are dead – even if adultery, presumably, is not – but it seems to be a flourishing genre if set, say, in Brick Lane. The What ifs? of literary fiction tend to be preoccupied with romance to a degree that should really shame serious writers. Illicit love affairs were once useful tropes because such novels could raise questions about female emancipation through this method; they are still useful to writers from cultures where women continue to be oppressed but the subject is an exhausted one in the West.

I don’t think it’s a coincidence that all the books short-listed for the Booker this year shared the theme of how we become the people that we are. This is a much better question to ask. Some did this by having a child protagonist, like Edward St Aubyn and MJ Hyland, and some by having an adult ponder their past, like Sarah Water’s The Night Watch, and the winner Kiran Desai. Adult fiction tends to look backwards, tracing the origins of an event or a choice, whereas children’s fiction always looks to the future – to what a child can become, and how it can forge a soul capable of withstanding shocks and calamities. They make us aspire to be more than what we are, to become fully human in a way that people can only be once they are conscious of moral choice, and they also console us when we fail with the hope that one day, things will be different.

It is these very shocks and calamities which also, of course, make a children’s book so much more fun. Unlike adults, children are not expected to tolerate 50 pages of boredom in the hope of coming across something that might vaguely resemble a plot. A child’s book begins with a bang. Something thrilling and unexpected has to happen within the first chapter – and preferably, the first page – and then it has to keep on going, gripping the child with jaws of steel. In the days when children read the Bible for entertainment, they often had to wait a long time to get this feeling. Modern children, who are used to computer games and special effects, want it now.

That can lead to cheap thrills but there are a dozen or so authors, like Anthony Horowitz, Joan Aiken, Philip Pullman, Lian Hearn and Cressida Cowell who know exactly how to hook a child and keep them hooked until the last page is encountered with regret. In one of the major new series of our time, Michelle Paver’s Chronicles of Ancient Darkness, you know from the very first page that the hero, a Stone Age boy called Torak, is fighting for his life against a huge bear that has just killed his father and left him an orphan in the woods. He has to survive everything, and does so not only through wit, luck and courage but because of the bond between himself and a starving Wolf-cub. You love Torak from the moment you start reading – just as you love Lyra in His Dark Materials, or Mowgli in The Jungle Book or the three Railway Children.

Falling in love with heroes and heroines is something you rarely do with adult fiction, and another reason to cherish children’s. There was a lot of sneering when The Lord of the Rings was chosen as the nation’s favourite on a programme called The Big Read. Although it’s possible people just stop reading when grown-up, I think it’s likely that children’s books, rather than adult ones are what remain with us as part of the profound self. Even if you find hobbits unbearably twee, Tolkien’s heroes are right up there with Beowulf and Horrid Henry and Lyra as the stuff we need, and feed off in the way we don’t, say, Anna Karenina or the Great Gatsby. I recently took part in a BBC series on the romantic novel, and was asked who my favourite heroine was. I chose Elizabeth Bennet, but if I’d been talking about all fiction, it would probably have been Mary in The Secret Garden – the ugly, contrary, obstinate child who achieves the miracle of getting another, utterly despairing and abandoned child, to want to live.

I am not of course saying that all children’s novels are superior to adult ones. They belong to different audiences, and address different kinds of question. Children’s novels have the inestimable advantage of reaching virgin minds, minds that have never before encountered the devices and expectations of experience. But also, modern children’s authors must compete for attention with the greatest of their kind, whereas modern adult authors are what people read when they’ve either read classics or found they lack the stamina for them. At present, I find there are at least two children’s books a week that I long to draw to public attention; I am lucky if I encounter that number in adult fiction each year. Far from being the easiest kind of books to write well, children’s are the most difficult; and yet, such is the phenomenal flowering of children’s literature that time and again I see the most urgent, pressing problems of our time – What is your tribe? What makes us good? What kind of world are we making, and how will we survive it? – addressed by it. No wonder we treasure them so, and no wonder their authors are at last reaping the earthly riches they deserve.