Crossover books –  novels that appeal to adults as much as they do to children – are the publishing phenomenon of the past decade. JK Rowling, Philip Pullman, Lian Hearn and Mark Haddon are all stars of a genre often published with two different covers but successful in both markets.

There has always been a continual exchange between the world of child and adult literature. The authors of Sleeping Beauty, the Arabian Nights and the Grimms’ Tales did not have infants in mind when they were originally collected or composed. Equally, many children’s classics, such as Gulliver’s Travels, were originally intended for adults, and children were expected to understand and enjoy novels by Dickens and Robert Louis Stevenson.

Children’s literature became a special genre in the early nineteenth century, but Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, or Ursula le Guin’s Earthsea trilogy, the earliest modern crossover books, have many familiar features. On the one hand, they used the tropes of fairy-tales (magic wands, fabled creatures and prophecies) on the other, their heroes were more experienced and less innocent than those of a children’s novel. Tolkien’s is a world in which torture, genetic experiment, dismemberment and wanton cruelty are rife. Even if good triumphs at the end, it involves sacrifices from which the protagonists (including the child-like hobbits) will never recover.

Ursula le Guin’s hero is equally poised between the child and the adult. Ged is “mageborn”, a proud, wilful boy with a great gift which he abuses. Prone to envy and anger, he unleashes a Shadow on his world from the land of the Dead, which hunts him until he realises that he can only defeat it by speaking its true name. The name, inevitably, is his own. Only then can he become a true man. Many, though not all, crossover novels feature magic, and its popularity may be due to the realisation that magic realism, so popular in the 1980s, was much sillier than outright fantasy.  

Cross-over fiction usually features protagonists who are on the cusp between childhood and maturity, inhabiting both worlds. Harry Potter starts off as an 11-year-old about to go to secondary school, but grows a year older (and wiser) in each book, which is correspondingly darker. Philip Pullman’s Will and Lyra, as the new Adam and Eve, ultimately fall in love and lose their virginity to each other.  Mark Haddon’s Christopher in The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time is unusually intelligent but handicapped by autism. Meg Rosoff’s teenaged Daisy swaps anorexia for incest, and Lian Hearn’s Japanese hero Takeo, bent on avenging his murdered mother, falls passionately in love with the exquisite Kaede, the murderer’s bride, whom he must rescue in Across the Nightingale Floor.
 
The advent of sex into children’s books may seem like a loss of innocence (and typically presages the loss of magic), but is done with tact and skill in  crossover novels. It has always been around (see Rumer Godden’s The Peacock Spring, Dodie Smith’s I Capture the Castle) as an essential ingredient, but modern versions acknowledge sex as a source of joy as well as irrevocable change. It reminds adults of the strength and purity of first love, and informs children of its potential for pain. Crossover books allow readers a double vision – into the past for adults, and into the future for children. They give adults the consolations of children’s literature, but also give children a taste of the gravity and responsibility of adulthood.

Crossover books can, like Rowling’s, be largely comfort-reads but others, such as Pullman’s His Dark Materials, are far more intellectually challenging. Like le Guin, Haddon and Hearn, Pullman writes with an exceptional beauty of style. He uses theories about quantum physics, and probably introduced many adults to the concept of dark matter and the multiverse (though the latter had already been explored by children’s authors such as Diana Wynne-Jones). Mark Haddon’s hero understands complex mathematics better than human emotion. Lyra’s parents experience complex passions for each other which adult readers enjoy and children feel flattered in gaining some apprehension of.  

Of course, many adults don’t read crossover books to find out about sex – they have quite enough of this in their own fiction – or science, but to recapture the vigour and enchantment of a world in which the fantastic is given equal weight with the real. Rowling captured the sheer fertility of a child’s informed imagination just as Nesbit, Dahl and CS Lewis did before her, by thinking through the logical consequences of what magic and mythical creatures would entail. The typical children’s novel cuts them off from adults; Rowling’s children are involved with them. Mark Haddon’s narrator responds differently to adults because of his disability, and therefore achieves things an ordinary child would not. Making the magical mundane and the mundane magical is crucial to this new genre.

It is the power of story-telling which, however, lies at the heart of the cross-over novel’s rise. For most of the past century the narrative grasp of literary novelists has been lost in a welter of social minutiae, obsession with sex and the elevation of literary style as the hall-mark of substance. In other words, literature became dull. Good children’s literature is by definition well-written, for the attention-span of children does not allow for authorial self-indulgence, but it stayed true to the need to grip and entertain. Crossover fiction allows a much bigger, broader canvas for friendship, courage, self-sacrifice, evil and loyalty to come into violent conflict, much as it does with children’s literature. What it risks is the subtler rewards of more demanding, less plot-driven fiction ever becoming palatable to the next generation of readers. The experience of reading novels by, say, Tolstoy, Henry James or George Eliot is qualitatively different from reading about Hogwarts, Middle Earth or medieval Japan. Feeding the towering fantasy life of adults has possibly endangered this kind of writing (and reading) by its commercial and critical success - but it may also be reviving it from the bottom up. Only time will tell.    

Copyright Amanda Craig 2006

Amanda Craig is the author of five adult novels, and is the children’s critic of The Times. Her website, which includes many recommended children’s titles, is www.amandacraig.com.