Booky Ooky!

Peter Pan in Scarlet / Geraldine McCaughrean
Margaret K. McElderry Books, 2006 - 1416918086 (hardcover)

I’m not going to spend a lot of time with this review because, while I found Peter Pan in Scarlet assuredly pleasant and charming, it didn’t leave me with much to say. I read this for the Once Upon a Time reading challenge.

In 2004, the Great Ormond Street Hospital, to whom J.M. Barrie had donated the rights to Peter Pan so they could benefit from all the royalties, decided to commission a sequel to the story to raise money for their cause. Interested authors submitted plot synopses and sample chapters, and out of around 200 contestants, Geraldine McCaughrean was selected to undertake this daunting task.

There are many ways in which an author can botch a job like this: trying too hard to imitate his style and caricaturing Barrie’s world, straying too far from his vision, subverting the themes of the original, or so many others. After reading just 20 pages of Peter Pan in Scarlet, I breathed a sigh of relief that McCaughrean was clearly not going to make these mistakes, yet as I read the book, I felt a gnawing dissatisfaction, not borne from the story itself, but from the spectre of Peter Pan the original.

The plot is easy to sum up. Wendy and the Lost Boys are grown and working their adult careers, as detailed in the epilogue of Barrie’s novel. But they start having dreams of Neverland. Objects from place start appearing in their bedrooms. Somehow, this means that something is horribly wrong, so they decide to return to Neverland and investigate. Inducing a baby to laugh, they create the fairy Fireflyer. And apparently, they reason correctly that putting on their children’s clothes will make them children themselves, so they do so and fly back. Neverland has changed. It’s autumn (not good in a land of eternal summer), the lagoon is a mess, the mermaids are skeletons. Unpleasant. They meet with a bunch of little adventures, Captain Hook as a sort of living dead man who can’t keep himself together, imaginary dragons, some warring fairy factions. The whole thing becomes a bit unfocused, and I felt like this wasn’t really Neverland at all. There was just too much.

The novel tells a fine story, but one of the largest themes is all about “the clothes make the man,” illustrated through Wendy and the Boys’ transformations through clothing as well as Peter wearing Captain Hook’s scarlet jacket throughout the book and slowly turning into him. The problem is that a) it’s way heavy-handed and b) it doesn’t make any sense. Sure, it was taken from a little paragraph in Barrie’s book, but the thing is, nobody believes in anything like that. The clothes make the man? Well, no, the man makes the man. Peter’s becoming the brash, arrogant and callous Hook (honestly, I saw little change as Peter, in case you haven’t noticed, is kind of a dick) just because he’s wearing a coat?

The other disappointing thing about this book is something that eluded me. I couldn’t describe it, and I still can’t, but it is stated perfectly in this review from The Guardian, which is just spot on in my opinion. To quote:

Perhaps the most satisfactory side effect of this brilliant failure of a book is that it sends one curiously back to the original (the one safe way of returning to Neverland) and it is then that one sees exactly what is awry and why any sequel is a doomed enterprise. It is JM Barrie’s strangeness that makes Peter Pan the book it is. The writing is often offhand, irritable, unpredictable. It is a voice no one could parody (and it would be a mistake to try). Yet without it, you are lost. Hardest of all to reproduce is JM Barrie’s ambivalent attitude to his characters, his mixed messages about them. He had a way of making us insecure about who - and how - to love.

A repeated phrase from Barrie’s novel sticks firmly in my mind and informs my entire reading of the his story. It is the phrase with which he ends the book: “… and thus it will go on, so long as children are gay and innocent and heartless.” It was this — the cynicism, the dismissal of love and motherhood, the careless way children can be so hurtful — that was missing from McCaughrean’s work. Still, I find it difficult to make my meaning clear. If you care to know more about this book, I highly recommend the Guardian article.

And so, Peter Pan in Scarlet was a bold endeavor, one into which McCaughrean leaped bravely with a strong voice to back her up. Alas, the result falls a little flat. I don’t hold this against McCaughrean, though. As it happens, I have a huge amount of respect for the work she’s done, and she’s now an author I wish to know. I believe the problem here lies that the story of Peter, Wendy and Neverland is one that resists an honest sequel. This author did admirable work.

More info:

• Peter Pan in Scarlet Official Homepage
• Wikipedia site
• Geraldine McCaughrean’s official site

Other reviews:

• The Guardian (the one I like best)
• Kidsreads.com
• Another from The Guardian