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!)

Twisted Winter

I’m not afraid of the dark. It’s streetlights I don’t like, especially those glaring orange sodium lights. Have you noticed how strange they make people look, on the street at night? How their faces go pale and bloodless, and their clothes turn a dark, dirty grey, no matter what colour they really are?  Have you noticed how hard it is even to see people properly – because the streetlights make them the same no-colour as everything else - as if they aren’t really there at all, just moving shadows? 

            There’s no such thing as colour. All those bright reds and blues and greens we see in daytime are only wavelengths.  What shows up under the orange streetlights is just as real as what you see in daylight.
           Maybe more real.

So begins my story "DARK", in this new anthology well-received by Amanda Craig in the Times last Saturday as 'a haunting, well-written collection of spooky short stories edited by Catherine Butler'. As you're reading this, I'm heading down to Brighton for the World Fantasy Convention. In the meantime, if you feel like some Hallowe'en tales, here's a look at the contents page.

My favourite may just be Frances Hardinge's beautifully creepy take on the Snow Queen - but then there's Susan Cooper's terrifying costume party, and Frances Thomas's eerie water spirit, and Liz Williams' poignant mix of Egyptian myth and dank English countryside - and Cathy Butler's very odd dog story, and Rhiannon's retelling of the Persephone myth - and - well, see for yourselves.

Happy Hallowe'en!

Black Swans

Every now and then you come across a book that’s just different.  It might be a one-off by an author who puts everything she or he has to say into a single creative burst – or it may be something that stands out from a writer’s other work like a black swan in a white flock.  Especially in the latter case, such books often don’t get the attention they deserve. Perhaps they simply puzzle the author’s faithful followers.  They can’t be categorized.  They come out of nowhere and don’t seem to lead anywhere.  The easiest thing to do is – not to talk about them.

But they tend to be memorable. 

Here are three examples, all fantasies, all written by highly talented and in some cases famous children’s writers – and none of them, I suggest, as well known as they deserve to be. 

A Dark Horn Blowing by Dahlov Ipcar (Macdonald 1978) 

I hope and believe that some of you will have read this book (because so far in my life I have met only one other person who has).  It’s based on an old ballad called The Queen of Elfan’s Nourrice, in which a mortal woman, stolen to be nurse to the Queen of Elfland’s son, laments for her own child from whom she was taken when he was only four nights old: 

I heard a cow low, a bonnie cow low

An’ a cow low down in yon fauld;

Lang, lang will my young son greet

Or his mither take him frae cauld…

Ipcar’s book opens with the sound:

I heard a cow lowing, lowing low on the lea – a mournful sound, full of calling.  It called me as I stood there at the window listening in the warm twilight of October.

Eben said, “Come to bed, Wife.”

But the enchantment is already working.  As her husband falls asleep, Nora steals out into the night, leaving her four day old son wailing in the cradle, down through the wet fields to the shore. 

A cow’s lowing is a sad sound – I had always thought so – but this was more than that.  There were words crying in the sound.  Almost a song:

Come Nora!

Come Nora!

You must come!

You must come with me!

You must come nurse the Erl Prince

In a kingdom low by the sea.

…It was a small man with a horn, standing by a long black boat there at the edge of the tide. But I never knew when it was that I first saw him, or when he first spoke.  The cow’s lowing became the dark horn blowing, and then it was too late…

Full, full of enchantment, this tale – told by various voices – follows the path of Nora, trapped in the Erl Queen’s kingdom, her husband Eben who believes she has drowned, her son Owen, raised by the only woman his father can find to feed him – the witch Bab Magga, and Eelie, the Erl-Prince himself. 

Dahlov Ipcar the author, who was born in 1917, is an artist who has written and illustrated many other books for children.  She currently lives in Maine and is still painting.  You can see examples of her work at her website here.  I don’t believe her other three YA novels are in print, but I would love to read them.

Second of my three examples is Seaward by Susan Cooper (Bodley Head 1983, Puffin 1985)

Though Susan Cooper is best known for ‘The Dark Is Rising’ sequence of YA novels, in my opinion ‘Seaward’ outshines them all.  It’s simply one of the strangest, most haunting fantasies I’ve ever read. 

After his mother is killed, a boy called Westerly goes travelling seawards through a mysterious world to find his father - while Cally is a girl whose parents, one after the other, have left her, heading west to the sea themselves in a car driven by a mysterious woman with silver hair.  And then Cally begins to hear singing in the empty house… ‘rhythmic waves of melody repeated again and again.’  The voice sounds like her mother’s, but no one else can hear it.

Cally washed, pulled on a shirt and some jeans, went back into her parents’ room – and then all at once the singing was back… changed… to a pattern of hammer-blows, beating at her ears.  Cally wheeled about, her hands up in defence, terrified.

“Ma!  Ma!” 

It was instinctive, a cry for help. Where are you?  I need you, I don’t know what to do, where have you gone?  Ma, Dad, I can’t do without you, you’ve always been here, come back, come back…

On this note of unbearable grief, Cally is propelled, like Alice, through the cheval glass in her mother’s room and into the same world where Westerly is… a world where god-like figures play chess with mortals, where the bones of dead fish call out ‘in a thin high scream shrilling like a cicada’ to warn of danger, a world where Cally and Westerly are befriended by a creature like a silver mosquito three feet high, or pursued by The People who come to life when the sun touches them but change to stone at night:

All round the house, out at the edge of the trees, the massive stone figures had been standing in a silent ominous line. Now the sun was going down, and the shadow of the trees had overtaken them – and where they had stood was a long unbroken barrier of rock.

After many strange adventures, Cally and Westerly follow a path beside a small river leading towards the sea, and the path merges with a stone paved road:

And the road was filled with people, walking.  …There was no sound but the song of the birds and the slow-speaking river, and not one of the figures walking down the road spoke to any other…

Finally, at the sea, under the eternal sweeping beam of a lighthouse, Cally and Westerly come to their journey’s end. It's a moving and wonderful exploration of life, death and grief.

Third on my list is Geraldine McCaughrean’s The Stones Are Hatching (Oxford 1999). McCaughrean is one of Britain’s most original YA writers: she never repeats herself; but I still think this book stands out from the rest of her work.  It’s just… peculiar… in the most inventive and satisfying way. Perhaps there are echoes of Alan Garner – or even more, of William Mayne – but it’s another black swan, all right.  Set in rural England during World War I, while the guns thump and crump just across the Channel in France, young Phelim wakes up one morning to discover that his world is turning upside down. The stove has been pushed against the door - ‘the whole massive, five-door, cast-iron range’ – the kitchen is full of glashans: ‘stark naked men and women about as tall as his waist, shaggy and matted with filth’ – there’s a Black Dog outside, ravening and raging, and the domovoy or house spirit he never knew existed shoves him outside with the information that he – Phelim – is the Jack o’Green who must defeat the Stoor Worm.

It takes Phelim a long time to believe this.  Almost too long.  Not until he’s almost mown down by corn wives:

Phelim swung his sickle.  The wheat hissed, the bearded ears fell against his face making him close his eyes.  Then the curve of the blade clanged against something hollow and metallic and black.

A woman’s rib cage.

No white-clothed beauty this.  At close quarters, he could see the rust-red eyes, the adze-shaped chin, the nose as curved as a bill-hook.  Her long black skirt was pale with dust, but not the shiny black of her iron upper body.  Her long, flue-black, iron breasts had blunted countless sickle blades as she stood amid the wheat, waiting for her victims to blunder into her.  She held a long-handled scythe, but she and her sisters had not come to harvest wheat.

Only the reapers. 

And with Alexia the young Witch, Mad Sweeney the Fool, and the ever-cheery Obby Oss, Phelim reluctantly sets out to deal with the Worm which the guns of France are gradually awakening from its age-old sleep. 

What perhaps all these books have in common is an almost hallucinatory quality, a vision of the world as an unsettling, startling, ever-changing place full of unexpected grotesqueries, dangers and beauties.  Do read them.  They will enrich your life.

“Only those few black swans I must except, who behold death without dread, and the grave without fear, and embrace both as necessary guides to endless glory…”

Sir Walter Raleigh