What is YA fiction?

Here, in order from the left, are Delia Sherman, Susan Cooper, Garth Nix,  Neil Gaiman (at the back, heading towards his seat), Will Hill and Holly Black, taking part in a panel at the World Fantasy Conference 2013, which as you probably know was held in Brighton over last weekend.  What they were discussing provoked a good deal of passionate comment from the audience, both agreement and disagreement – most of which remained pretty much inaudible, as for some unknown reason the massive conference hall floor was not provided with roving mikes.

The subject under discussion was:  "The Next Generation:  Are All the Best Genre Books Now YA?" and the explanation ran: "Over the past decade the young adult market has seen a huge boom in genre titles and readers, in no small way helped by the Harry Potter series, The Hunger Games and the works of Philip Pullman and Neil Gaiman. What has caused this surge amongst younger readers, and can it be used to keep them reading into adulthood?" However, as these things tend to do, the discussion veered away into a conversation about the nature of YA fiction: what it is and what it isn't, and what makes it what it is.

So when is a book YA?  It's not easy to say.  Perhaps it's simply when the protagonist is a teenager or young adult.  So does that make 'The Catcher in the Rye' a YA book?  Discuss... But is 'To Kill a Mocking Bird' a children's book, just because Scout, the point of view character, is a child? Clearly not: so it's not as straightforward as that.

Moreover, is YA fiction a new phenomenon?  Other members of the panel were in broad agreement with Neil Gaiman when he said - I paraphrase - that YA is a new genre, and that in his youth and that of most of us, we sprang from reading children's books straight into adult fiction, especially genre fiction. Teenagers were not especially catered for.

Deep in discussion - CJ Busby and Elizabeth Wein; Kathleen Jennings listening behind

Some of the people sitting around me wanted to question or at least qualify this - but it's difficult to make a nuanced point while effectively yelling from the fifteenth row.  Elizabeth Wein, sitting behind me, pointed out that maybe the perceived absence of YA fiction in the 60's and 70's is more about categorisation than actual fact. She pointed to books such as KM Peyton's Flambards series (in which the heroine grows up, elopes, marries, is widowed, remarries twice, has a child, loses a child...), Rosemary Sutcliff's historical novels, published as children's books, but always with young adult heroes - and Ursula K Le Guin's Earthsea novels in which the main characters start out as young adults and eventually even grow old.

So if ‘Young Adult’ is a new category, maybe this is only true in the sense that the idea been newly created: the books were always there.  

Of course Neil Gaiman is correct to say that we also moved into ‘adult’ genre fiction.  Of course we did – to Agatha Christie and Dorothy Sayers, John Buchan, Isaac Asimov, Arthur C Clarke, Jack Schaeffer, Georgette Heyer.  But what about Alan Garner’s ‘The Owl Service’?  Is that a children's book?  Is ‘Red Shift’? What about TH White’s ‘The Once and Future King’? Also available were many non-genre (for want of a better word) novels which were both accessible and attractive to teenage readers and which dealt specifically, many of them, with the pains and challenges of growing up:  Rumer Godden’s ‘The Greengage Summer’, Dodie Smith’s ‘I Capture the Castle’, Jane Gardam’s ‘A Long Way From Verona’, and ‘Bilgewater’, and ‘The Summer After the Funeral’. Some of these were labelled adult books, some children’s: for better or worse, all would be marketed as YA today.  Labels or no labels, they existed.   

These were the books I pulled off my parents’ shelves, or found for myself in the libraries as I – never left children’s books behind, I never stopped reading them – but as I hacked my own paths through the uncharted jungle that lay beyond the children’s shelves.

Elizabeth Goudge’s novels are a case in point. She may be best known today for her children’s novel ‘The Little White Horse’, which JK Rowling’s praise probably helped back into print.  It is indeed a lovely book, and so are her other children’s novels, especially my favourite, ‘Linnets and Valerians’- but she was, in the main, a writer of adult novels. At age 14, I found depth and complexity in her adult fiction – a thoughtfulness, a slower narrative pace, a concern for the difficulties of relationships, and a delight in abstract concepts of philosophy and religion which opened my horizons. There were nearly always children in these books, but the children interacted with adults and their concerns in an un-children’s-book-like way. Goudge wrote of terror and horror and mental illness. The sensitive child Ben, in ‘The Bird in the Tree’, is haunted by a sketchbook he has found which contains pictures of dead and decomposing bodies. He becomes terribly afraid of death for himself and for those he loves – but he doesn’t tell, or not for a long time. The story is not about Ben, but about a love affair between his mother Nadine and his cousin David, which threatens to break up his parents’ marriage and split his family. Ben and his brother and sister are not in control, but they are still affected by the actions of the adults in their lives.

Is this is what makes ‘The Bird in the Tree’ adult fiction? This lack of centrality for the child or teenage characters? What we now term YA fiction places the young person in the focus of the action, in the learning, decision-making centre. So Cassandra in ‘I Capture the Castle’ grows and learns, watches and experiences, and makes in the end the wise and sad decision not to accept an offer of love which is largely pity. But the boy Leo, in LP Hartley’s ‘The Go-Between’, although the point-of-view character, is on the edge of the action.  He doesn't understand what he's doing. Like Scout in To Kill a Mockingbird, he needs his adult self to narrate, to mediate, to understand, to explain. The child Leo has a minor part in adult lives. He is collateral damage, manipulated and used.  

Finally, the panel and I think the floor agreed with Holly Black that the perennial attraction of Young Adult fiction - whether it was first published with that tag or not - is its freshness of perception.  When adult fiction deals with childhood and adolescence, it tends to concentrate on loss of innocence, on damage and disillusion. YA fiction  is all about rites of passage - first love, first kiss, first independence - and the thrills and spills of growing up.


(There's another look on this from Saxey at lightningbook, who was also in the Brighton audience!)

Magick

 
Magick happens.
Or at least I think it can.

Magick can happen when a bunch of friends get together to do something lovely for another friend.  And that's what's happening here.


When I lived in the States, one of the most touching things from time to time would be a fundraising event, often very local, to help someone in need.  Perhaps someone needed expensive medical treatment, uncovered by insurance.  Once, my children came home to tell me a schoolfriend's house had burned down overnight and the family was living in a trailer - this, in winter, with temperatures way below zero. There can be all kinds of reasons.  Sometimes it's not necessary to detail them, and this is one of those sometimes.

But right now I'd like to direct you all to a site dedicated to raising a bit of magick for a friend of mine, wonderful editor, writer and artist Terri Windling.  I know that many of you lovely people who visit 'Steel Thistles' are interested in fantasy, folklore, and magic of all sorts.  So please do go and visit this on-line auction, Magick4Terri, where you can bid for signed artwork, signed books and all sorts of other things by people like Holly Black, Brian and Wendy Froud, Elizabeth Hand, Cassandra Clare, Jane Yolen, Tamora Pierce and Charles Vess - to name but a few.  What a wonderful Christmas present any of these could be!

My own contribution to the auction is pictured above, so if anyone fancies a signed set of the hardcover US edition of my Troll trilogy, that's there too.

IF there were dreams to sell,
What would you buy?
Some cost a passing bell;
Some a light sigh,
That shakes from Life’s fresh crown
Only a rose-leaf down.
If there were dreams to sell,
Merry and sad to tell,
And the crier rung the bell,
What would you buy?

Here there ARE dreams to sell!  Do go and take a look, and I hope you get lucky and buy some...





Quotation from: 'Dream Pedlary' by Thomas Lovell Beddoes

Fairies and Faeries

Never mind vampires. Think urban faeries. American faeries. They have attitude and they are dangerous. Think streetwise fashion, romance with a distinct sado-masochistic streak, think doomed love. Think of weird little sprites doing unspeakable things to each other in corners, teenage heroines sacrificing themselves to save beautiful young men doomed to hell, or to release young summer kings from winter’s eternal grip. Think of titles like Tithe by Holly Black, Wicked Lovely by Melissa Marr, City of Bones by Cassandra Clare.

I love traditional fairytales, but by an oddity of the English language, fairies as such seldom figure in them. Even in the French tales of Charles Perrault and Madame D’Aulnoy, still less in Grimm’s Märchen, there are almost no fairies in fairytales at all. Far more often the stories turn upon the natural wickedness of men and women (as in The Juniper Tree), on witches (Hansel and Gretel, Jorinda and Jorindel), dwarfs (Strong Hans), mysterious old men or women met on the road (The Tinder Box), wise or magical animals, (The Goose Girl, The White Snake) haunted houses (The Boy who Didn’t Know Fear), Death, the Devil, Christ and St Peter.

It might have been better to call these stories folk-tales, but collections for children persist in calling them fairytales, probably because of the influence of Andrew Lang’s marvellous coloured fairy books. When you encounter a fairy in one of Lang’s tales, she is no diminutive flower-sprite, but an adult-sized, powerful woman – either good, with a Latinate name like Graciosa or Preciosa, or evil, with a name like Malefice or Perfidia. Her powers revolve around blessing or cursing cradles, and interfering in marriages. There are no male fairies at all.

Lang himself was a vigorous folklorist. The Grimm brothers were only a part of the great revival of interest in traditional tales that took place as an offshoot of the romantic movement and of nascent nationalism, right through the 19th century and into the 20th. Selkies stirred in the Outer Hebrides. Undines drew themselves sinuously out of German rivers. The Neckan sang mournfully on Scandinavian cliffs. Baba Yaga flew through the Russian woods in her pestle and mortar to light down at her skull-bedecked garden gate, and the Sidhe went riding from Knocknarea and over the grave of Clooth-na-bare. (However you pronounce it, it sounds wonderful.) Some of these tales, especially the Celtic ones, filtered through to children, who might read about the Children of Dana, fated to spend their lives as wild swans. The Irish always knew the dangerous side of the fairies. William Allingham’s ‘Up the Aery Mountain, Down the Rushy Glen’ with its ‘Wee folk, good folk, Trooping all together, Green jacket, red cap, And white owl’s feather’ may fleetingly sound to modern ears like Disney’s dwarfs. But Allingham knew the connection of the fairies with loss and death:

They stole little Bridget
For seven years long,
And when she came down again
Her friends were all gone.

They took her lightly back,
Between the night and morrow,
They thought she was fast asleep,
But she was dead from sorrow.

Scottish J.M. Barrie’s ‘Peter Pan’ may include Tinkerbell, but his second take on a supernaturally extended youth is an eerie play about a girl lost to the fairies, ‘Mary Rose’; and it doesn’t have a happy ending.

Despite all this, back in the first half of the 20th century, fairies in children’s books were almost synonymous with an idealised childhood – especially girlhood. Think of the Cottesloe fairies and the Flower Fairies. They were fragile little creatures who lived under toadstools and wore bluebell hats; they died if you disbelieved in them; they painted the tips of daisies pink; above all they were helpful: not for nothing did Lady Baden-Powell name her girl scout movement ‘The Brownies’ (after an earlier name ‘The Rosebuds’ proved unpopular with girls). Brownies were thought of as helpful domestic spirits, and the traditional names for the Brownie ‘sixes’ – at least when I joined briefly in the 1960’s – were Pixies, Elves, Leprechauns, Gnomes, Fairies and Sprites. Racism was rife – who wanted to be a gnome? – there were badges for feminine tasks such as knitting, sewing, and baking buns, and I left after a few weeks, partly because I did not believe I would ever learn to skip a hundred times backwards.

Then, in the 1960’s Alan Garner burst upon the scene, raiding Celtic and Norse legends and throwing the booty together in the most electrifying way in his first two books The Weirdstone of Brisingamen and the Moon of Gomrath – in which two contemporary and quite pedestrian children (who might easily in other hands have seen fairies at the bottom of the garden) are hurled into a maelstrom of ancient magic, moon goddesses, shapeless terrors and hints of deeper legends, deeper worlds. Children’s literature was changed forever.

No fairy, of course, would get a look-in to any of Garner’s books; but it’s worth noting that no faeries get in either. The male supernaturals are wizards, a few rather stiff and chilly male elves, and dwarves. The females – Angharad Goldenhand and her obverse the Morrigan – are variants of the triple moon goddess or witch queen. But Garner released a rush of legend and folklore into children’s and young adult fiction. And fairies in folklore have always been connected with sex as well as death:

‘Harp and carp, Thomas,’ she said
‘Harp and carp along with me,
And if you dare to kiss my lips.
Sure of your body I will be.’

So Thomas the Rhymer kissed the Queen of Elphame under the Eildon Tree and rode away with her through the river of blood into elfland. Wild Edric lost his fairy wife and rides for ever on the Shropshire hills (pictured above) with his Hunt, searching for her. Fairy wives often symbolize the dead. (I modelled parts of my book ‘Dark Angels’ on some of these legends.) As for the sexy, beautiful, dangerous male faeries of the modern teen novels, with their nod to James Fraser’s dying god the Corn King, what about the Irish ‘Love-Talker’, a beautiful fairy youth who waylays young girls in the gloaming and makes them so love-sick for him that they pine away and die?


I can’t begin to say all I want to say about fairies and faeries in a short (or even a rather long) blog post. But fairies, faeries, elves, whatever you like to call them, symbolise the supernatural Other in all its manifestations: the threat of illness, bereavement and death as well as the lure of love and beauty. That’s surely why in the 16th century the ‘high’fairies were rationalised into two ‘courts’: the ‘Seelie Court’ and the ‘Unseelie Court’, representing their benevolent and harmful aspects. Love and death, beauty and cruelty, good and evil – the European faerie culture is rich and complex. No wonder so many modern fantasy writers want to plunder it.