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!)

Magical Classics: ‘The Strange Journeys of Colonel Polders’ by Lord Dunsany

This is the first of a series by me and a number of guests about magical never-to-be-forgotten books. The idea is to celebrate some wonderful older fantasy titles - with a wide definition of fantasy!  Some will be familiar, others I hope will be unfamiliar (so we can go and search them out!) The series is called 'Magical Classics' and there are only two criteria: each title will be at least 50 years old and it will have meant much to the person who has chosen it. Here is my opening piece, and I hope you will forgive a little autobiography...

Simpson's Cat - by Bill Wild

When I was about sixteen, we moved to a small village in Yorkshire, to live in a wonderfully rambling house with twenty rooms, three staircases and no electricity.  In winter, frost coated the insides of delicate windowpanes scrawled with the diamond-engraved names of previous inhabitants.  We couldn't afford to heat the house properly - indeed, apart from open fires, I don't suppose anyone had ever tried.  Draughts whistled under the doors, and the only warm place was the kitchen. 

In summer, the doors and windows stood open to let cats in, and stray bees, and the sounds of sheep bleating and curlews calling.  One day I brought my pony into the stone-flagged living room.  One night a bat flew into my bedroom through the open window and whirled around and around before finding its way out again.  Outside in the dark, I could hear the beck flowing quietly down the dale to join the Aire, and owls shrieking in the trees.

I was at that happy age when one is almost independent, yet with few responsibilities.  I was writing stories, about which I was blissfully uncritical.  And I could spend nearly all the rest of my time reading.  One day I borrowed from Skipton Public Library (yes, it’s still there) a drab, insignificant-looking little black cloth-bound book called ‘The Strange Journeys of Colonel Polders’ by Lord Dunsany, published in 1950.

I can’t remember now whether this was the first book by Lord Dunsany that I had read.  I may have already come across his full length fairytale ‘The King of Elfland’s Daughter’ (to which Neil Gaiman pays graceful tribute in ‘Stardust’).  At any rate, ‘The Strange Journeys of Colonel Polders’ turned out to be something quite different: difficult to categorise: not your average fantasy at all.  I read it, adored it, borrowed and re-borrowed it, and then one day it disappeared.  I never saw it in the library again. Perhaps it had been stolen by some less scrupulous fan.  And it was only a few years ago, decades later, that I finally tracked down another copy.   (Thank you, abebooks.com!)

It begins in that most Edwardian of settings, a gentleman’s club.  The eponymous hero, Colonel Polders, objects to the election of a new member, Pundit Sinadryana, ‘on the grounds that he was by several thousand miles outside the circle that was intended by the original founders…’  The colonel is stiff, racist, conservative, and aggressively disbelieving of the Pundit’s claim to possess the power of transmigration, to send a spirit travelling ‘to other lives’. 

“I should like to see you do it,” said the colonel…

“I will show you,” said Pundit Sinadryana.  And after what the colonel had just said it was difficult for him to decline the invitation; much as he wished to do so, not from any fear of the adventure, but because he did not like Pundit Sinadryana.

            “When?” said the colonel.

            “Tonight, if you like,” said the Pundit.

The experiment is tried.  The Pundit burns various powders, and chants a spell ‘low and musical right into the colonel’s face, of which we heard no clear word, nor did we wish to… “Well”, said the colonel, “I don’t seem to be doing much travelling.”’ 

But the next moment he falls asleep.  And shortly after that he’s snoring.  And when, moments later, he wakes up: ‘he stood up at once and walked out of the room without saying a word.’

By Janet's Foss - by Bill Wild

It’s left to the narrator and his friends, with the aid of many a glass of Malmsey wine and many a cigar, to coax from Colonel Polders the stories of the lives he has lived during the space of those few moments.  The poor colonel has been a fish, a fox, a dog, a moth, a pig, an eel, a tiger.  He has been a cat, a butterfly, a flea, a goose: a bat, an antelope and a mouse. At the end of each life, the colonel has died in his animal form, only to be reincarnated in the next.  In each life he has experienced sensory revelations, which of course are lost to him now he has returned to his own body.  And he recounts his experiences with a mixture of rapture and resentment at ‘that damned fellow Sinadryana’, that is both lyrical and extremely funny.  As a pig, he explains:

           

“…I couldn’t see very well what was going on, because of the high walls of the sty, but fortunately I had a very wet nose.”

            “A very wet nose?” exclaimed Charlie Meakin.

            “Yes,” said the colonel.  “One cannot smell anything without a good wide area that is always damp… No, it is very ample life that is led by a pig.”

As a fox, he lies in his earth waiting for evening, when he can hunt:

“And it is a curious thing, and you may possibly not believe me, but I waited without impatience.  One can hardly imagine waiting two or three hours for one’s dinner when one is hungry, without any impatience whatever.  But such was the case.

            “I lay there just enjoying the sound of the wind going by, and the quality of the air that I breathed, and the rounded shape of the smoothed earth where I was lying, which was so exactly suited to my needs…  A fern grew at the edge of the earth, and whenever the wind blew, it waved over across my view of the sky.  I watched it doing that while the sky’s colour changed slowly; and I felt no impatience with time.”

And as a hummingbird hawk-moth, he beats against a window:

“The glory of that light…was calling to me with music as well as beauty.  I darted towards it, and there was no barrier, no window I mean: nothing between me and that unearthly light glowing amongst melodies and irresistible calls.”

            “And it was a candle?” asked Charlie Meakin. 

           

“The Strange Journeys of Colonel Polders’ is a supremely happy book that celebrates the marvellous diversity of life.  Dunsany writes as though he knows himself what it’s like to be an eel or a moth or a pig.  I don’t suppose for a moment that a book like this could be published today.  It breaks all structural rules. There is only the slightest of plots, with one little twist at the end to round things off.  The book is barely more than a linked series of short pieces.  But in this case, for me, it doesn’t matter.  It’s the journeys that count, along with the semi-comical insights of the poor colonel, forever exiled from the abundant delights he has known. 

For years and years, while the book was lost to me, I remembered the image of the Colonel as a fox curled in his lair, watching ‘the white light at the end of that long earth turn to a glowing blue…’ 

I read this story at a golden age, and for me it is a golden book.

Moonlight in the Dale - by Bill Wild

All artwork by  Bill Wild (1903-1983) whom I knew. He lived and worked for many years in Malhamdale. Copyright: St Michael the Archangel, Kirkby Malham.