Riding the Waves to Eternity: Hangin’ with the Cosmic Surfer

envelope icon      sao instagram icon

Age Appropriate

Feb 4, 2022 | Books, Writing

There was a thread doing the rounds on Twitter a couple of days ago that caught my eye. It was this one:


There were over 3000 responses and this was mine:


I’ve been thinking about it on and off since that reply, particularly three things that rankled when I read them in the original thread. The first was the notion of kids being allowed to read certain things, or not; the second was the suggestion that ‘no one was paying any attention to kids from 81-93; and the third was the notion of age inappropriate books. This all ties up with some of my thoughts on ‘YA’ books and writing and also with my own memories of what I was reading in the early 1970s and what my daughters read as they grew up.

Cards on the table, I am deeply suspicious of, and uncomfortable with, where the idea of YA books is going: it seems to me that what was once a marketing category has, somewhere along the line, morphed into a genre, or pseudo-genre, imbued with all sorts of unstated assumptions and presumptions. For the most part, I find these to be of a kind with the assumptions/presumptions that promote saccharine-coated Disney versions of Grimms’s Fairy Tales over the originals. There is a very American, middle-class notion of childhood deeply embedded in there. There is a similar, though not identical, dynamic in the UK. I think I’ve noted before somewhere that I’m suspicious of decisions on what constitutes ‘good’ children’s books being taken by adults (including writers, agents, publishers and critics) on the basis of what adults think kids should be reading rather than what kids actually read. I know I’m exaggerating here, somewhat, to land the point.

Broadly speaking, I don’t like the idea of age inappropriate books, except in the obvious senses of language and concepts beyond the experience and critical capacity of the child on an individual basis. Dostoevsky is age-inappropriate because the writing is too complex for children (although the core of his stories often isn’t). My experience is that children and teens will read what interests them: if they don’t understand it or if it doesn’t engage them, they’ll ignore it, or skip the bits they don’t understand. Far from ‘allowing’ things to be read, there is, in practice, no way to stop books and stories being read if the reader’s imagination or intellect (or both) is captured. If they are not read in the home, they will be read somewhere else.

My assumption as a parent was that, just as I found that Xaviera Hollander book (at a church jumble-sale), my kids, too, would encounter material irrespective of any attempt by me to ‘allow’ it – which, in this context, really means prohibit it – or to act as a gatekeeper.

Far from not paying attention to what my kids read, I paid a lot of attention to it, and made sure I was on hand to talk about any themes in the books if needed. What I wanted was for the girls to grow to be able to read and evaluate things for themselves. And they did, and do. Having said that, when reading out loud at bedtime, I concede that I did abridge the text sometimes. The two I remember are (i) reading the whole of The Lord of the Rings but skipping all the elven songs and poems; and (ii) editing Norman Hunter’s The Incredible Adventures of Professor Branestawm, first published in 1933 and later published by Puffin as a children’s book, for sexism and misogyny.

In my own case, I remember reading a lot of Agatha Christie for a while, and Ian Fleming, discovering Dad’s collection of Dennis Wheatley novels, then reading Asimov and the wider science fiction collection at our local library. I also read a lot of Greek mythology in my early years at high school, thanks to the town’s main library. With regard to the Wheatley, btw, I recently revisited a couple and had no problem with the narratives as such, but did have a problem with misogyny, racism, snobbery and ‘robust’ attitudes to workers’ rights and labour issues. I remember Papillon and Alastair Maclean, and Eerie comics as well as Airfix magazine. To the best of my recollection. Mum and Dad were happy simply to let me read – widely and voraciously. I also remember Saturday-morning matinées at East Kilbride Cinema, where we all, I think without exception, preferred Tom and Jerry and the anarchic brutality of Warner Brothers’ cartoons to the mimsy morality tales that came out of Disney.

Finally, just before Christmas, I read a profile of Giovanni Rose in the Guardian (you can find it here.) I don’t want to put words into his mouth when he clearly can articulate his thoughts for himself, but it does seem to me that the writing/literature that would engage a young teen in his circumstances is very different from the dreams of the White middle-class literati. That writing must begin with acknowledging lived experience.

***

On which subject, I’ve sent the manuscripts of my two novels, The Raven and the Hart and The Magpie Rhyme for a sensitivity read with a focus on one of the lead characters in both books, who is Black. Why? you might ask. Is this evidence of excessive ‘wokeness’?

No.

Were I to write a police procedural or a hospital drama, I’d take care to ensure that my police procedure and descriptions of ‘canteen culture’ were accurate (like Ben Aaronovitch’s Rivers of London sequence) and that my doctors knew the difference between a femur and a fibula. My character Constance is a 19-year-old Black girl from Swindon; I am a 62-year-old White man in Scotland. I need to bridge that gap and a sensitivity read lets me know what’s right, what’s wrong, and what else I might consider as I approach a completed draft of the novels. Giovanni Rose’s poem, and David Harewood’s Maybe I Don’t Belong Here are recent reminders of the gap to be bridged.