In her next book, JK Rowling’s trainee wizard Harry Potter will discover that ‘girls are quite interesting’
Stephen Moss
There was no sex in the books I read as a child – and I rather liked it that way. Would William have thought of kissing Violet Elizabeth Bott? Did Julian harbour fantasies about George (or even Dick)? Did Biggles have a crush on Ginger? Of course not. Sex had no place in classic children’s fiction (ignore gay readings of Wind in the Willows); books were an escape from hormonal confusion, not an illustration of the dangers and delights that lay ahead.
How times have changed. JK Rowling, discussing the next instalment in her bestselling Harry Potter series, said recently that sex is about to enter her young hero’s life. “He’s 14 now and has started to realise that girls are quite interesting. I tend to think that if someone is sufficiently engaged in one of the books, he’s not going to be too disappointed if, at some point, his hero holds hands with a little girl.”
Perhaps, but where will it all end? One wave of the wand, and anything could happen. Rowling has also promised there will be a death in the new book, evidently seeing herself as something of a taboo-breaker. The sequence was conceived as a seven-volume series and her intention from the start has been to let her hero get older, unlike, say, William who never aged across the 50 years and 39 books in which Richmal Crompton followed his adventures.
Some critics, notably Philip Hensher, have dismissed this as a device to hook young readers – Harry growing up with his audience and acting as a kind of magical mirror of their own lives. But the author has convincingly presented it as a means of making a moral point: Harry, the young wizard, has to make his way in the world, prepare to confront the fallen angel who killed his parents, and lose his innocence along the way.
“Harry does grow up,” Rowling said. “In book four the hormones are going to kick in. I don’t want him stuck in a state of permanent pre-pubescence like poor Julian in the Famous Five books. And the struggle between good and evil will intensify: there will be deaths. I’ve thought long and hard about this – I’m well aware of younger readers – but evil is not something you can deal with lightly. There are consequences, there are victims. Children always ask if Harry will get his parents back, but some things, even in the magical world, are irreversible.”
The contrast with Enid Blyton is stark. “Children’s books should be morally sound,” she wrote in 1949. “I am out to inculcate decent thinking, loyalty, honesty, kindliness and all the things children should be taught.” Such sentiments are patronising and irksome yet, oddly, her deathless (and sexless) prose remains hugely popular. The artificiality of her world – predictable, sealed off, with adults treated as a different species – has its own appeal to young readers.
Rowling has a difficult trick to pull off: her books sell primarily to a pre- pubescent audience, mainly eight to 12- year-olds, for whom sex is another country. It is highly unlikely that she will introduce lashings of the stuff, in the way that the American author Judy Blume does for a teenage audience, or attempt to confront the darker side of life (drugs, arson, murder) as writers such as Robert Cormier, Melvin Burgess and Anne Fine have.
Whatever the publicists whipping up interest ahead of publication in July may suggest, her series will remain more fable than soap opera, nearer Narnia than Neighbours. The confusion over what a children’s book should be – whether it should be escapist, as classic children’s fiction has generally been, or confront “reality”, as it often does nowadays – reflects the fact that writing for children and young adults is now split in a way that was never previously the case. Teenage fiction is a post-war invention – Beverly Cleary’s Fifteen, published in 1956, is generally reckoned to have been the first of the genre – and is now seen as a way of introducing young readers to adult themes.
When Melvin Burgess’s award-winning book, Junk, was attacked in 1997, he claimed a purpose for the book no less moral than Blyton’s: “Junk admits a basic truth about drugs, which is that they make you feel good. If it didn’t, every young reader would recognise it at once as a pack of lies. It also contains some horrifying detail about heroin addiction, because heroin addiction is horrifying. And it contains, I hope, many shades in between. There is no glamour here. The hope is that by the end, the reader will be better equipped to recognise and deal with the decisions and problems ahead.”
That defence did not satisfy his critics. “I don’t think it’s right to encourage children to read about all these very depressing aspects of life,” said Nick Seaton, chairman of the Campaign for Real Education, a parents’ lobby group. “It’s no wonder children feel depressed about life and that suicide rates among young people are going up.”
Burgess had the better of the argument, not least because it emerged that Seaton had not actually read the book but had been invited to respond by newspapers anxious to provoke controversy.
It is clearly the case that 14- to 16- year-olds, exposed to drugs in their daily lives and on television, should be able to read and understand responsible books about the subject. It becomes more complicated with younger children, and complaints last year about Louise Rennison’s prize-winning book, Angus, Thongs and Full-Frontal Snogging, seemed better founded. Aimed at nine- to 11- year-olds, it took the form of a diary written by a fictional 14-year-old and dealt with lesbianism, incest and the art of kissing. All legitimate subjects, but perhaps not for 10-year-olds.
Before the advent of teenage fiction, there was a clear division between children’s writing and adult books, and at 13 or 14 readers would abandon the eternal summers of Blyton and Arthur Ransome for the more bracing weather of Charles Dickens or Jane Austen, en route to the storms of contemporary fiction.
Children’s books did not offer their readers moral puzzles or seek to impose responsibilities on them; good and evil were sharply separated; relationships had little meaning and were defined by the adventures of the protagonists. These were worlds which sought to confirm and protect the innocence of children, and they were often created by middle-aged writers – Lewis Carroll, CS Lewis, Blyton – whose lives were characterised by sexual or emotional repression. Sex was dangerous, relationships demanding, the world beyond the wardrobe frightening.
Yet we should be aware of the artifice without dismissing the art. Rennison countered criticism of her book by invoking television. “Secrecy is the most destructive tool for children. If you try and hide issues from them, damage in the longer term will be greater. East-Enders deals with issues which are far more complicated than the ones I deal with in my book, yet there doesn’t seem to be the same outcry about children being allowed to watch a programme like that.”
But soaps are obsessed by sex and relationships, by the need for love, to the exclusion of almost everything else. EastEnders’s Albert Square is as doctrinaire and cock-eyed as Narnia. Sex can be much more boring than sorcery, as Harry Potter may discover.