I’ve been writing children’s fiction for more than 10 years, and I’d still hesitate to define it; it is a slippery, varied, mercury thing. but I do know, with more certainty than I usually do about anything, what it’s not: it’s not just for kids. when I write, I write for two people, myself, aged 12, and myself, now, and the book has to satisfy two distinct but connected appetites.
My 12-year-old self wanted autonomy, danger, justice, food, and most of all, a kind of dense atmosphere that I could walk into and be sucked into. my adult self wants all those things, and also: acknowledgments of fear, love, failure. So what I try to do when I write (often failing, but trying) is write in as few words as possible the things I most urgently and desperately want children to know and adults to remember.
You are reading: Children’s books for adults
Those of us who write for children are trying to arm them for the life ahead with everything we can find to be true. and perhaps also, secretly, to arm adults against those necessary compromises and heartbreaks that life entails: to remind them that there are and always will be great sustaining truths to which we can return.
When you read a children’s book, you are given the space to read like a child again: to find your way back, back to the time when new discoveries came daily and when the world was colossal, before your imagination was trimmed and neat, as if it were an optional extra. but imagination is not and has never been optional: it is at the heart of everything, allowing us to experience the world from the perspective of others, the precondition of love itself. for that we need books that are specifically written to give the heart and mind a galvanic kick: children’s books. children’s fiction requires distillation; at its best, it presents hope, hunger, joy, fear in its purest and most archetypal forms. think of children’s books as literary vodka.
Above all, children’s fiction spoke to me, and still speaks to me, of hope. the books say: look, this is bravery. this is what generosity looks like. they tell me, through wizards and sexy jesus lions and talking spiders, that this world we live in is a world of people who tell jokes and work and endure. children’s books say: the world is huge. they say: hope counts for something, bravery will matter, ingenuity, empathy, love will matter. these things may or may not be true. I hope they are.
what auden wrote, in an essay on lewis carroll: “there are good books that are only for adults, because their understanding presupposes adult experiences, but there are no good books that are only for children”. he would not suggest that adults read only, or even primarily, children’s fiction. it’s just that there are times in life when it might be the only thing that will work.
five of the best children’s books for adults
the paddington books by michael bond
There is a vivid and obvious lesson in paddington, about shelter. paddington shows up at our door, with nothing to praise himself for other than his existence and his excellent hat, and we must welcome him. we must appreciate him, because he lives – and michael bond tells us, like william blake before him, that all that lives is holy.
but there is more: for the link, I think, the structure is a form of metaphor, and the stories can be read as parables. so each individual paddington story usually has some kind of mishap: for example, paddington drops a sandwich; a man slides over him. disaster! but then the man turns out to be a thief, and the goods stolen from him are spilled at the feet of the bear: triumph! the books tell us that if we walk away we will see that inside every disaster there is a cogwheel that propels us towards potential goodness. Built into the fabric of the stories, however small, is Bond’s colossal central truth: greater than the chaos of the world are his miracles. Paddington asks us to trust, if only for a brief sigh, for the length of the book, in the essential nobility of the world. books are oxygen for those who, like me, doubt.
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his philip pullman dark materials trilogy
Pullman’s fierce heroine, one of the greatest heroines ever written, lyra, a girl of quick wit, extreme loyalty and a loose hand with the truth, travels to the underworld. at first, meeting the harpies who guard the realm of the dead, she lies, she tells them what she thinks they want to hear. the harpies go after her, dive bomb her and scratch her skull with her claws. and so, instead, she tells her own story: about pain, loss, hope and dirt, love and mistakes. the harpies listen. lyra’s partner asks why they didn’t attack, this time: “’because it was true,’ she said without a name. because she told the truth. because it was nutritious. because he was feeding us. because we couldn’t help it. because it was true.’”
the harpies make a deal: if every soul has listened to the world and has a story to tell about it, and tells it truly, they will be led through the darkness to the other side. Rigorous attention, vigilance to the beauty of the world, for Pullman, is what life demands of us. She has that in common with the philosopher Iris Murdoch, another writer I love, who decreed that attention was the cornerstone of love. we must learn, in Pullman’s universe, to look at the world with intense and generous care. we must learn to tell stories, say the books of him, whether it comes naturally or not, because it is the best and sometimes the only way we have to exchange the truth.
where the wild things live by maurice sendak
“but the wild creatures cried out: ‘oh please don’t go, we will eat you, we love you so much!’
“and max said, ‘no!’
“the wild things roared their terrible roars, gnashed their terrible teeth, rolled their terrible eyes and showed their terrible claws, but max got into his private boat and waved goodbye.”
There are as many interpretations of where the wild things are as there are people who’ve read it, and it means something very different when you’re 30 than it did when you were three. I think it’s about the ferocity of love; how we devour each other, and are devoured.
It’s also about, I think, the sheer strangeness of the world. Max returns home to find that his dinner was “still hot”. according to sendak, his editors wanted him to cut or change that line, because it was impossible, or at least to edit it, to a more believable one, “and it was still hot”. in an interview, he said, “‘warm’ doesn’t burn your tongue. there is something dangerous in ‘hot’… hot is the trouble you can get into. but i won the world is, after all, rampantly strange. kids deserve books that are kids too.
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a dog and her child by eva ibbotson
In a world that values a pose of exhausted knowledge, children’s fiction indulges in the simple pose of wonder. eva ibbotson fled vienna in 1934 after hitler outlawed his mother’s handwriting; her work is filled with unabashed wonder at the mere fact of existence. into a dog and his son, Hal, a boy with everything he could want except love and care, she frees five dogs from the cruel easy pet agency. he, his friend pippa and the little sea of dogs run to his grandparents’ house.
Along the way, each dog finds the place where he can be himself; the Pekingese li-chee, who once protected the monks’ temples, lying at the feet of a girl in a foster home; Francine the Poodle, a natural comedian, performing in a traveling circus. it is a story about finding your place and your people; not to stop or hesitate until you find them.
It is also, like many of ibbotson’s books, a shot in the cross in an increasingly consumerist world; Hal’s parents shower it with merchandise, “a gift pack from Hamley’s and another from Harrods… but in the whole house there was nothing that was alive.” it is a strong attack on the acquisition tide that threatens to sink us; to keep your neck above him, the book tells us, you must find something alive to love, be it beast or man, and grab hold of it with both hands. stay close, because the world will be cold, frenetic and plastic, and only together we will make it.
peter panby jm barrie
i love peter pan for being completely himself, not a watered down version of some other adult thing. it offers us his own challenging logic, for neverland is the place of the free experiment of the imagination. “Of course, never-never lands vary a lot. john’s, for example, had a pond with flamingos flying over it that john was shooting at, while michael, who was very small, had a flamingo with ponds flying over it”. and i love peter himself: peter is joy but he is also a threat: he is the id and the ego, the danger of being kidnapped by desire, he is dark and capricious. he is bread.
barrie would argue that adults can’t go to neverland. she writes: “on these magical shores, the children who play are forever beaching their boats. we too have been there; We can still hear the sound of the waves, though we won’t be landing anymore. We adults, Barrie tells us, cannot go back to that same reckless and carefree imagination. I disagree: I believe that books evoke within us the wild and rogue parts of ourselves. I think with the help of barrie, and with those who came before and after him, we can sail back to those shores.
There could be another lesson, too. Captain Hook, whose first name is James, is a former Etonian. Barrie writes: “He had been to a famous public school; and the traditions of him still clung to him like garments, with which, indeed, they greatly concern themselves … still clung in the walk of him to the distinguished loafer of the school.” hook, in his last moments, thinks back to his childhood: on “the playing fields of old… or watching the wall game from a famous wall.” In Barrie’s stage version of the story, it’s even more explicit: Hook’s last words are “floreat etona” or “may eton prosper”, the school’s motto.
James Hook has been told he deserves it all, and when he doesn’t get it, he tries to bring destruction to Neverland, hoping it will rise from its chaos. he has elaborate hair, “dressed in long locks” and “was never more sinister than when he was more educated, which is probably the truest proof of breeding”. beware, the book tells us, pantomimic old Etonians with unruly hair, who value good form above truth, and who would seek to rule.
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