The Crossover Novel

Contemporary Children's Fiction and Its Adult Readership

Rachel Falconer

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2008
• Topic: Literature
• eBook ISBN:
  9781135865009
• Subtopic: Literary Collections
• Index: Literature

"Highly recommended" by Choice

While crossover books such as Rowling's Harry Potter series have enjoyed enormous sales and media attention, critical analysis of crossover fiction has not kept pace with the growing popularity of this new category of writing and reading. Falconer remedies this lack with close readings of six major British works of crossover fiction, and a wide-ranging analysis of the social and cultural implications of the global crossover phenomenon. A uniquely in-depth study of the crossover novel, Falconer engages with a ground-breaking range of sources, from primary texts, to child and adult reader responses, to cultural and critical theory.

Chapter One
Kiddults at Large

Children’s fiction has always crossed over to different age-groups in the sense that, historically, it has nearly always been written and published by adults, and purchased by adults for children. Before the invention of a distinct market for children’s literature in the mid-eighteenth century, adult texts regularly crossed to child readerships. Such crossings were often facilitated by adaptation, abridgement and illustration. Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress (1678), Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719) and Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1726) were adapted for children very soon after they were first published for adults, and they have retained their place amongst children’s books until the present day. Adult fiction has not ceased to cross over to child readers, and nineteenth-century realist fiction by Charles Dickens, George Eliot, the Brontës and Jane Austen, for example, can all be found shelved in the older children’s sections of bookshops and libraries today. But traffic moving in the other direction, from child to adult readers, is historically much more unusual, and the sheer scale of the flow of traffic in this direction which took place in the millennial decade is unprecedented in British publishing history.

The Ghost of Crossovers Past

This is not to say that child-to-adult crossover has no historical precedent at all, however. On the contrary, there is a strong tradition of children’s literature being adopted by adult readers in Britain. Children’s nonsense, magic and fantasy fiction, by writers such as Hilaire Belloc, Edward Lear, A.A. Milne, Beatrix Potter, Kenneth Grahame, Lewis Carroll, Roald Dahl, C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien, have long attracted a broad spectrum of readers, and this existing horizon of expectation has helped pave the way for the more recent, meteoric rise of the so-named crossover novel in Britain. is sense of lineage is reflected in the frequent mentions of Dahl, Lewis and Tolkien in reviews of Rowling, Pullman and other contemporary children’s authors. But the tendency to hybridise the categories of child and adult fiction can be found much earlier than in these earlier twentieth-century classics. It is present, for instance, in British Romantic writers, themselves influenced by the theories of Locke and Rousseau concerning ideas of childhood and education.¹ Sometimes this interest in childhood produced new kinds of writing for children, such as Charles and Mary Lamb’s stories for children; elsewhere it produced writing of or about childhood, as in William Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Experience (1789). Mary Wollstonecraft and William Godwin wrote both for and about children. Many Romantic writers aimed to produce a childlike language, which they defined as simple, direct and natural, as part of a broader aim to revolutionise poetic discourse.

In the Victorian period, George MacDonald’s At the Back of the North Wind (1871) and The Princess and the Goblin (1872), and Charles Kingsley’s The Water-Babies (1863) were considered to be works of serious, literary fiction, which though published for children could also be appreciated by adults. MacDonald in particular was (and still is) praised by adult readers for his luminous, visionary prose.² Christina Rossetti’s sexually suggestive fable ‘Goblin Market’ (1862) was given to children to read, but published with her poems for adult readers.³ Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865) and Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There (1871) were famously written for a real child, Alice Liddell, and her sisters, but even the dedicatory poem sounds elegiac, as if it the little girl were already lost (i.e., too grown-up) for the author:

Alice! A childish story take, And, with a gentle hand, Lay it where Childhood’s dreams are twined In Memory’s mystic band,^4

The book sold well from the first, but reviews of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland were mixed. Some found it delightfully appropriate for a young reader, others deemed it unsuitable for children, and still others commented on its crossover appeal:

It is most amusingly written, and a child, when once the tale has been commenced, will long to hear the whole of this wondrous narrative. (The Press, 1865)

We fancy that any child might be more puzzled than enchanted by this stiff, over-wrought story. (The Athenaeum, 1865)

This is the book for little folks, and big folks who take it home to their little folks will find themselves reading more than they intended, and laughing more than they had any right to expect. (The Spectator, 1865)

A delightful book for children—or, for the matter of that, for grown-up people, provided they have wisdom and sympathy enough to enjoy a piece of downright hearty drollery and fanciful humour. (The London Review, 1865)⁵

And thus began the complicated reception history of these two novels, which have haunted the space between ‘Childhood’s dreams’ and ‘Memory’s mystic band’ ever since.

Less ambiguously, Carroll’s The Hunting of the Snark (1876), like Lear’s Book of Nonsense published thirty years earlier, appealed instantly and equally to child and adult readers. As well as producing works for ‘the nursery’ (i.e., for younger children), the Victorians also segregated books by gender and these gender-specific books tended to cross fluidly between child and adult readerships. Thus Charlotte M. Yonge’s domestic novels were read by girls and women, while adventure novels by G.A. Henty, Rudyard Kipling and Robert Louis Stevenson were read by boys and men. Brian Alderson argues that the ‘real secret’ of the popularity of Stevenson’s Treasure Island (1882) and other adventure novels was ‘not that boys delighted in tales meant for men, like Robinson Crusoe,… but that men, Victorian men, were eager for tales meant for boys.’ (295) Similarly, Rider Haggard’s King Solomon’s Mines (1885), one of the many Victorian adventure novels being re-edited for twenty-first century crossover audiences, was originally dedicated ‘to all the big and little boys who read it.’ (296) In the same period, Jules Verne’s scientific fantasies were being published, serially and in translation, in The Boy’s Own Paper, a journal which, from its inception in 1879, attracted a readership of ‘big and little boys.’ In the late twentieth century, ‘chick lit’ novels such as Helen Fielding’s Bridget Jones’s Diary proved equally gender-specific but age-neutral, although (despite the labelling) ‘lad lit’ such as Nick Hornby’s About a Boy were less successful in excluding female readers.

At the beginning of the twentieth century, J.M. Barrie’s Peter Pan idealised a separate world of childhood adventure and magic, first in the form of a play (1904) and then revised and expanded as a novel (1928). This composite work has arguably had more influence on the subsequent history of children’s literature than any other work besides Carroll’s Alice books. But as Jacqueline Rose and other critics have shown, Neverland was always an adult projection of childhood, in whose very separateness adults were passionately invested.⁶ With Geraldine McCaughrean’s officially nominated sequel, Peter Pan in Scarlet (2006), we may measure our distance from this early twentieth-century credo, the belief in a puer eternus reigning princelike over a separate and eternal realm of childhood. Peter Pan in Scarlet begins with a strange series of scenes in which Wendy and the Lost Boys, now grown into adults, squeeze themselves into children’s clothes in order to become children again, as they were in Barrie’s play/novel. Once they have successfully metamorphosed, their task is to rescue Peter, who is slowly being destroyed by the seepage of time into Neverland. This continuation of the Peter Pan myth reveals the twenty-first century adult’s investment in the idea of aging as a reversible process, and of childhood and adulthood being metamorphic, rather than fixed, states of being. But if Barrie’s strict prohibition against adults entering Neverland has been overturned, paradoxically we continue to believe in the myth of eternal childhood; the difference is that now we think that adults as well as children have right of access to this world of eternal play. McCaughrean’s novel reproduces this contemporary investment in the Peter Pan myth in order, finally, to deconstruct it. Although in a jauntily upbeat Afterword, McCaughrean describes ‘Neverland heal[ing] up just like that’, she also firmly closes the door to her kiddult protagonists. Wendy and the Lost Boys have grown into adults again, and this time they are glad to be leaving Peter and returning home. Moreover, it is only by remembering his adult training as a doctor that Curly is able to operate on Peter, and remove the mysterious splinter that had been slowing killing the eternal boy. So as it turns out, the safety of Neverland depends on adults learning to value themselves as adults.

In the 1940s, Tolkien began writing The Lord of the Rings, a trilogy which began as a sequel to his children’s story, The Hobbit (1937). By the time it was published in 1954–55, however, The Lord of the Rings had developed into an epic fantasy for adult readers. Within ten years of its publication, Tolkien had attracted a cult following which spanned older child and adult, male and female readers in Britain and North America. It has remained one of the most popular works of fiction produced in the twentieth century. Although somewhat dwarfed by the enduring success of The Lord of the Rings, Richard Adams’s Watership Down (1972) should not be overlooked as an important example of twentieth-century crossover fiction avant la lettre. Like Carroll’s tales of Alice underground and Tolkien’s tales of hobbits and goblins, Watership Down grew out of stories told to children, but the finished novel is an epic work that draws richly on Biblical and classical myth and literature (Exodus; Aeschylus; Virgil’s Aeneid; and Joseph Campbell’s study of myth, The Hero with a Thousand Faces) as well as the author’s own military experiences in the Second World War. While published as a children’s book, it was also read by millions of adults, and reputedly influenced George Lucas in developing the storyline of that colossus of crossover films, Star Wars.⁷ In a lighter vein, Douglas Adams’s The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy was first broadcast on BBC Radio 4, in 1978, and on TV, Doctor Who attracted another cult following, while the enormously prolific Terry Pratchett published his first Discworld novel, The Colour of Magic, in 1983. Such comic science fiction fantasies, like the boys’ adventure stories of a century earlier, seemed to pass effortlessly across age categories, and indeed continue to do so, to the present day. Doctor Who was revived both on film and in a 2005 TV series.

The first thing that distinguishes the present millennial situation from this historical context, however, is the sheer volume and diversity of children’s fiction crossing from child to adult audiences. The second major difference is that, due to the volume of traffic passing across once distinct publishing markets, crossover fiction has helped to change the map of mainstream literary culture in Britain, altering previous boundaries not only between children’s and adult-, but also between literary and popular fiction, as well as print fiction and the film industry. Even within the popular genre of fantasy, there has been a much greater diversity of subgenres crossing to adult readers than heretofore, ranging from best-selling stories of magic for younger children like Eoin Colfer’s Artemis Fowl series and Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events to high fantasy, such as Anthony Horowitz’s Alex Rider and The Power of Five, Garth Nix’s Old Kingdom, G.P. Taylor’s Shadowmancer and William Nicholson’s The Wind on Fire.

Realist fiction has a much more limited history of crossing from child to adult readerships in Britain, though again there are notable precedents, especially from the mid-twentieth century. Examples of social realist novels as well as realist dystopias for young adults that were, and are still, widely read by adults include George Orwell’s Animal Farm (1945) and 1984 (1949), J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye (1951), William Golding’s Lord of the Flies (1954) and Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird (1960). But in recent years, realist children’s fiction has begun to appear on adult best-seller lists with some regularity, with examples ranging from Mark Haddon’s Curious Incident to Markus Zusak’s The Book Thief, a novel ‘narrated by Death’ about a young girl in Nazi Germany, which became a New York Times best seller. Documentary narrative such as Bernard Hare’s Urban Grimshaw and the Shed Crew; realist fiction about street children such as Elizabeth Laird’s The Garbage King;and school and family stories such as Polly Shulman’s delightful homage to Jane Austen, Enthusiasm; Linda Newberry’s Sisterland; and Rachel Klein’s The Moth Diaries were all marketed as crossover fiction, with Klein’s most strikingly described as a novel for ‘15-to 25-year-old’ readers. Perhaps most distinctively, the hybrid fantasy/magic-realist novel crossed in large numbers from young adult to adult readerships. Amongst these generically hybrid crossover novels are Malorie Blackman’s Noughts and Crosses series, David Almond’s The Fire-Eaters and Helen Oyeyemi’s The Icarus Girl.

Hogwarts Express to Fame and Fortune

But unquestionably, what kick-started the millennial crossover phenomenon was the unforeseen popularity of J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series with adult readers. Rowling proved to publishers and retailers that children’s fiction could be big business, equally as lucrative as popular adult fiction and more so. By 2007, Rowling had broken practically every sales record in publishing history. To mention just a few of the landmarks: In 2000, Rowling’s fourth volume, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, took sales of the series to over forty million in two hundred countries, with translations into forty languages. The fifth volume, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, became an Amazon.com bestseller six months before it was even published in June 2003. The sixth, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, broke records as the fastest selling book in history, selling nine million copies on its first day in...

Table of contents

• Children’s Literature and Culture
• Contents
• Series Editor’s Foreword
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Chapter One Kiddults at Large
• Chapter Two Harry Potter, Lightness and Death
• Chapter Three Coming of Age in a Fantasy World: Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials
• Chapter Four Seeing Things Big: Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time
• Chapter Five Adolescence and Abjection: Geraldine McCaughrean’s The White Darkness
• Chapter Six The Search for Roots: David Almond’s Clay
• Chapter Seven Rereading Childhood Books: C.S. Lewis’s The Silver Chair
• Conclusion Crossing Thresholds of Time
• Notes
• Selected Bibliography
• Index