It’s said you can divide the world into cat people and dog people. If so, then cat people are making a comeback in children’s fiction after years of dominance by faithful hounds and their close cousins, wolves. Cats have sunk low since their elegant peak as Dr. Seuss’s The Cat in the Hat, Kathleen Hale’s classic Orlando and Disney’s 1960s cartoon, The Aristocats. Most often seen since as evil white Persians being stroked on the laps of villains, they became full-blown bad guys in the film Cats & Dogs; even Puss in Boots in Shrek 2 is a coward and a con-artist. This month, however, sees the publication of the final instalment of Zizou Corder’s best-selling trilogy, Lionboy (Puffin), hot on the heels of SF Said’s Smarties prize-winning series about the fighting cat Varjak Paw (David Fickling), Kate Saunders’s Cat (Macmillan) and the Stinkwater War, the hugely popular Warrior Cats series by Erin Hunter (HarperCollins) and Cat Kin (Lulu Press), an excellent debut by Nick Green. All examine different, and positive, aspects of cats: their nobility, their fighting prowess, their mysterious secret lives and their almost magical ability to climb, jump and survive.

But why have cats suddenly become part of the zeitgeist? Is it just that, after decades of dog books and the success of Michelle Paver’s Wolf Brother, cat-lovers felt it was their turn? What do cats signify to children? Louisa Young, who wrote the Lionboy trilogy pseudonymously with her daughter Isabelle, says she is often asked why they chose to write about cats rather than dogs – especially as they don’t have a cat of their own because Isabelle is allergic to them.

“I think we were drawn to them because cats walk by themselves; they are mysterious and free, whereas you have to feed a dog and take it for walks. They’re better heroic figures. Of course Aslan, the Big Daddy of them all, has raised the profile of big cats recently, but in the beginning we were going to have the hero, Charlie Ashanti, only able to speak to ordinary cats. It was only when we got him involved with a circus we realised that being able to talk to lions would be a fabulous bonus.”

The drugged lions rescued by Charlie get back to Africa in the first two books; but in Lionboy: The Truth (8+), it’s Charlie himself who needs rescuing. The lions’ confidence that they would “catch Charlie’s scent, find him, maul his enemies, fly like the wind with him on their backs and then…deliver him safely to the boat” is a cat adventure at its most buoyant, big-hearted and sunny.

SF Said’s Varjak Paw and The Outlaw Varjak Paw are in complete contrast. Here, the hero is a rare Mesopotamian Blue, who, confined with his snobbish conservative family, longs for adventure. When he learns The Way, a mysterious martial arts fighting technique, he little dreams how soon he is going to need to put it to use in the big dark city outside. The author, who went through 17 drafts before getting Varjak Paw published, “would rather watch cats than television.” SF Said grew up with one in a block of flats in London, and thinks the increased popularity of cat stories is due to cats, unlike dogs or ponies, being the only pet possible in our increasaingly urban existence. However, as he points out,
“ You don’t have to like cats to like Varjak Paw. At heart it’s about being small in a big world. At the same time, when I do school events and ask children what animal they’d most like to be, a lot want to be cats because of their ability to pass undetected, to see in the dark and to be independent. Varjak’s ancestor tells him “a cat is an idea of freedom made flesh”, and anyone who knows cats knows that you can’t tell them what to do. They’re so fiercely themselves.”

To today’s over-protected, over-monitored children, Varjak Paw is the perfect emblem of the joys and dangers of freedom. Beautifully illustrated by Dave McKeen and written in spine-tingling prose, the Varjak Paw novels have a vivid, suspenseful edginess to them that 8+ children instantly respond to. Like Paul Gallico’s lost classic, Jennie, they arise from years of observing how real cats behave.

Kate Saunders’s Cat & the Stinkwater War (7+) also developed after the acquisition of three real moggies, which arrived in the wake of the author inventing a talking witch’s cat in her best-selling Belfry Witches series.

“Unlike dogs, cats behave as if it’s a coincidence they’re in the same house as you. They’re quite nice in an off-hand way, but have a secret life you don’t understand. Their world of feuds and politics is parallel to our own, and they are always busy at it.”

Like Inga Moore’s Six Dinner Sid and Posy Simmonds’s Fred, Saunders celebrates the closely observed comic side to feline independence. Her warm, witty novel includes magic – something that is never far away where cats are concerned -imagining what it would be like to be transformed into a cat. Nick Green’s Cat Kin (!0+) takes this a step further as his unhappy teenagers acquire the power of walking, jumping, falling and sensing like cats under the tuition of the mysterious Mrs Powell. Ben and Tiffany go to what they think is a self-defence class; it turns out to be instruction in “pashki” a lost art from a time when cats were worshipped as gods. “Curiosity saved the cat many more times than it killed her,” their teacher tells them, and so it proves in a genuinely gripping adventure as the children, having practised jumping from tree to tree on Hampstead Heath, sort out the villains in their own lives and rescue cages full of big cats being milked for a sinister alternative medicine. Green says,

“I realised how well cats chimed with my adolescent characters: independent and needy in equal measure; prickly and nervy yet recklessly bold; sometimes inscrutable; proud yet self-conscious. As people become more lonely, cats are perceived as being admirably able to look after themselves.”

Urban and wild, complex and contradictory : it is these qualities that humans perceive or project onto cats. Love them or loathe them, as far as children’s literature is concerned, it looks as if the dog may have had his day.

Also Enjoy:
Lynley Dodd, Slinky Malinki, 2+ A deliciously wicked cat gets his come-uppance.
Paul Geraghty, Slobcat. 3+ The secret life of a cat superhero.
Antonia Barber, The Mousehole Cat/ Catkin 4+ Heroic cats to the rescue!
Gobbolino the Witch’s Cat, Ursula Moray Williams 5+. A magic kitten longs to be ordinary.
Carbonel, Barbara Sleigh, 8+ Enchanting classic about the king of the cats.

The Times, February 2006