Tigers and Poodles and Birds, Oh My!

t’s March 2003. An ad in the Toronto Globe and Mail brings me up short. “Kids love Pi too!” reads the heading. It isn’t a typo. There’s a picture of a boy smiling as he reads Life of Pi, Yann Martel’s Booker Prize-winning novel. There are endorsements from three young readers. “Richard Parker is my favourite character,” says a twelve-year-old. “Life of Pi is the first book I’ve ever read through twice,” claims a fifteen-year-old. Winston Rosser, age thirteen, says: “This is a terrific book in which Pi wrestles with religion as much as with a 450-pound Royal Bengal tiger. It is eye-opening, original and fun.”

Winston Rosser is absolutely right, but I’m a little stunned to hear this from a thirteen-year-old. Wasn’t he confused by the shifting viewpoint? Or by a tiger named Richard Parker? What about the fact that it takes a hundred pages to get Pi good and shipwrecked? There’s a lot of talk about religion and zoos in part one — absorbing stuff and very funny, to be sure, but to a teenager? And even when the adventure truly begins, when sixteen-year-old Pi is at sea in a lifeboat with Richard Parker, isn’t there a long stretch in the doldrums?

Two months later. I’m in England, and another ad leaps off the book pages, this time in the Guardian: a full-page promotion for Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time. The blurbs are what arrest my attention. Ian McEwan writes: “Mark Haddon’s portrayal of an emotionally dissociated mind is a superb achievement. He is a wise and bleakly funny writer with rare gifts of empathy.” Oliver Sacks agrees: “A delightful and brilliant book . . . Mark Haddon shows great insight into the autistic mind.”

Curious indeed. The blurbists are both writers I admire greatly, but surely they are from entirely different worlds. Then I notice that the book is being published simultaneously in the U.K. in two editions. Curiouser and curiouser. Jonathan Cape is publishing an adult edition; Random House is bringing out a children’s edition — under the imprint of David Fickling, the editor of Philip Pullman’s breathtaking His Dark Materials trilogy. What more do I need to know? I pick up a copy of the novel at Heathrow and devour it on the flight home. (It’s a great deal tastier than the chicken and infinitely more entertaining than the in-flight movie.) It’s the adult version; the children’s edition wasn’t in the airport bookstore. I’m far too taken by the story and by the extraordinary voice of the fifteen-year-old protagonist to think of what, if anything, Fickling will do about the language in the children’s edition. In truth, it was only upon rereading the book in the context of writing this article that I really even noticed it at all. The swearing, I mean. More on that later.

I can’t claim to have seen any ads for Sonya Hartnett’s novel Of a Boy, though it received a great deal of newspaper coverage in her native land. Unfortunately, there hasn’t been quite the same kind of attention in British or North American newspapers. That’s because, outside of Australia, the book is called What the Birds See and is marketed as a children’s novel. The original publisher, Penguin Group Australia, didn’t think of it as a children’s book. They brought it out as an adult title, and as such it won and was shortlisted for all kinds of prizes, including the prestigious Age Book of the Year Award.

So, three crossover books, each occupying a slightly different position in the outer rings of the juvenile market: one as a promotional afterthought, one as a co-publication, and one that has been, in a sense, co-opted from the adult market. In North America, only Hartnett’s book is likely to receive much press in the kids’ lit ghetto. Martel and Haddon have garnered rave reviews and sold exceedingly well. But they are less likely to come to the attention of those among us who take pleasure in putting great books into the hands of children. Addressing that oversight is the purpose of this article — partially, at least. But I am also interested in the walls that marketing inadvertently creates, the problem of targeting a readership that, while obviously convenient, is quite often restrictive, if not proscriptive. It can be argued, justifiably, that children will discover the books they want to read regardless of where those books are shelved. Kids don’t really care much about reviews; word of mouth is the ultimate marketing tool. Think of this article, then, as one reader shouting over the wall to another, “Hey, take a look at this!”

But wait a minute, you say. There are already plenty of books for kids out there. Why would one need to look beyond what is recommended in the children’s literature review journals? Well, here’s a pretty good reason: these three books are splendid. Each is unique, thought-provoking, eminently readable. The language is gripping and not restrictively highbrow. Sex is not an issue in any of the titles (if that’s an issue). There is some violence, but it is never wanton. In short, these are books that recommend themselves for young readers in all kinds of ways.

Kids, of course, read a fair amount of adult genre fiction: romance, horror, science fiction, and mystery. The books above are literary, but they are not literary in the way that, say, Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections or Jane Hamilton’s The Book of Ruth are literary. They are not about cleverness or style or voice or decorative surface tensions — the shimmer and glow of the language itself. To be sure, each of these books is extremely clever and stylistically daring, but never at the expense of story. In an Ann Beattie plot, an ice-cube tray might be the most exciting thing that happens. Things are always happening in Pi, Dog, and Birds.

Margaret Atwood called Life of Pi “a boys’ adventure for grownups.” It wasn’t meant as a backhanded compliment, but in a telephone conversation Yann Martel seemed to bristle slightly at the comment. Those critics who have not liked the book have, apparently, attacked the boyishness of the story, the exotic setting, how very much goes on. In their eyes, apparently, this facet of the book makes it somehow less worthy than the kitchen-sink reality that is the stock-in-trade of so much mainstream adult fare.

Bill Thomas, the editor in chief of Doubleday’s adult trade division, had this to say concerning the decision to bring out The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time as an adult title in the U.S. “I certainly do not think the book is inappropriate for younger readers,” he wrote, “but it is an extremely intricate literary novel and only the most precocious of them would be able to read it on the level of the author’s intent.”

As a writer for both adults and children, I find that I have myriad intentions, conscious and otherwise, that flower and transform as I write. I doubt any reader picks up on all of them. Reading, in any case, is not a science. I’m quite sure that Michael Jordan gets a lot more out of watching a basketball game than does the average youngster. Kids seem to enjoy basketball anyway, even if they are not precocious enough to grasp all the intricacies of the game.

Curious Incident takes place primarily in Swindon, Wiltshire. Hardly the high seas. But, as Christopher Boone, the protagonist, reminds the reader, Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson stopped at Swindon station in The Boscombe Valley Mystery. Curious Incident reads like a first-class detective thriller but with a great deal more humor and style. It is a mystery on many levels.

Out walking at midnight, as is his wont, Christopher finds Mrs. Shears’s poodle with a pitchfork sticking through it. “I decided that the dog was probably killed with the fork because I could not see any other wounds in the dog and I do not think you would stick a garden fork into a dog after it had died for some reason, like cancer, for example, or a road accident. But I could not be certain about this.”

Christopher is not trying to be funny. His seeming detachment is a manifestation of Asperger’s syndrome, a form of autism. He is very smart when it comes to logic and deduction and not smart at all when it comes to understanding human beings. He has, therefore, the wherewithal to solve the mystery of the dead poodle but, unfortunately, not the sense to realize where his detecting is leading him.

As far as setting goes, What the Birds See is the least out-of-the-ordinary of the three books. Christopher in Curious Incident does venture out of the relative safety of his neighborhood and makes a terrifying journey to London. Adrian, the protagonist of What the Birds See, never leaves the unnamed suburb wherein he lives his utterly circumscribed life. But, having said that, this book is anything but prosaic. And the suburb in which he lives seems anything but safe. Part of what makes the story so compelling is that the novel is figured against a terrible kidnapping that has taken place not far from Adrian’s house. Three children have been snatched while going for ice cream. That story, played out on the television, in the newspapers, and in the classroom, pervades Adrian’s own story. There is a sense of imminence, of gathering storm clouds. There is, in any case, a whole lot of what John Gardner calls profluence; the story is always clipping along.

In addition to a plot that knows where it’s heading, we tend to think that the sturdiness of the central character is critical in a book that a young reader is likely to find appealing. Sixteen-year-old Pi, fifteen-year-old Christopher, and nine-year-old Adrian are among the most remarkable protagonists to leap out of the pages of any novel I’ve read in years. Each boy is at once real and fresh, entirely believable, and, at the same time, not like anyone we know.

At the risk of being provocative, I have a hunch that part of the reason these books might be enjoyed by kids is precisely because they weren’t written for kids. “I write for someone who is intelligent or curious,” says Yann Martel. “A mind connected to a heart. My reader is me.” “I wrote [Curious Incident] for myself, as most writers do (or should),” says Mark Haddon. “I write to entertain clever people,” says Sonya Hartnett. “If I’m bored, others will be too . . . and I don’t care if the ‘others’ are nine or ninety years old.”

As Haddon says, a good writer writes for himself. A good children’s author is no different in this regard. But then a good children’s author is going to be edited by a children’s editor. None of the titles above has received that particular brand of editing that is visited upon books for children. There are limits imposed on the field of children’s books, whether we wish to believe it or not. Yes, we pride ourselves on the grittiness of contemporary young adult literature, and we have some reason to be proud. We are liberal-hearted. We do not shy away from taboo themes or bad language. We publish bravely in the face of intolerance from illiterate zealots. But if there are not restrictions on what we publish as children’s literature, there are certainly assumptions.

Language is often a concern, whatever anyone tells you. Well, there is not a worrisome word in Life of Pi, unless you consider the following worrisome: frugivorous, durian, tiffins, oestrous, ordnance, and commensal. A child will not likely know such words. Neither did I. But there aren’t that many hard words in Pi, and, as is often the case with a good writer, context explains most of them. In my experience, “difficult” literary books are often self-consciously so. Martel has far too much going for him here to waste time with lexical fanfare. His writing, while intelligent and worldly, is never self-indulgent. Life of Pi is a lot easier to read than Treasure Island.

In What the Birds See there is the problem of “foreign terminology.” Something is tombola-sized; grass clags in wads to Adrian’s shoes; somebody has a gooby stomach. The same is true in Curious Incident, what with jumpers and sellotape and people having rows and losing their rag. Children, I think, have less trouble with this kind of thing than some adults do. That’s because children know that their vocabulary is far from complete. Kids meet new words every day; a few more are not an unbearable hardship. But unfamiliar words and syntax are not usually what we are referring to when we talk about the problem of language in a children’s book. We are talking, of course, about cussing. In YA fiction it is generally understood nowadays that, for the sake of verisimilitude, swearing is difficult to avoid. Moderation is the key — that’s our watchword. And the swearing shouldn’t be gratuitous.

“Do you want to read about life or do you want to read about something else?” Mark Haddon asks rhetorically in an e-mail. He elucidates. “Kids of eleven can see/hear everything on television. Everything. Why should books pretend that this isn’t the case? If a book offends you, you can put it down. And doing so is a damn sight easier than turning off your favorite soap opera.”

It’s hardly a new argument. But what is interesting about Curious Incident is that the swearing only ever comes from the mouths of adults. What’s more, it is often gratuitous, just as swearing in the real world tends to be.

Christopher never swears. Swearing, as an embellishment of speech, probably wouldn’t make any sense to him. He doesn’t like lies, metaphors, or jokes, either. He doesn’t understand them. Swearing, one suspects, would be illogical to a mind like his.

Taking a cue from the list-minded protagonist, let me annotate the problem. There are five words that might raise the eyebrow of the delicate reader; they are used in one form or another a total of forty times, to which can be added eight incidences of the Lord’s name being taken in vain. You would find far more examples of coarse language in one of the relatively tame romantic mysteries of Elizabeth George. And yet I don’t think a librarian would think twice about handing an Elizabeth George to a young reader with a penchant for mysteries. In any case, to think that this book might be withheld from a young reader because of a sprinkling of salty words seems ludicrous.

David Fickling noted in an e-mail: “Every young reader knows that swearing happens in the world . . . . in [Curious Incident] the swearing shows that the adults with whom Christopher interacts are NOT in control. And that gives the book much of its sense of truth and sense of humor too.”

It is for that reason that Fickling decided that the text of the book he published would be identical to the adult version. “It is high time,” he said, “that we allowed that young readers can tell the difference between actual swearing and reading about swearing. We seem to have no trouble understanding that they can read about killing, murder and death.”

The only word in Curious Incident that might raise eyebrows — and it is used only once — is cunt. Its use is completely gratuitous. It is not said out of anger, nor is it a slur aimed at anyone. It is said in passing by a traveler on a train. This is important. It is precisely the kind of usage that a children’s book editor would recommend deleting. And that, I feel, would be a mistake. Haddon explains: “Most teenage fiction has an invisible ring of safety built into it. However sticky situations get, however dark the material, little signals here and there give off the message that this is ‘only’ a kids’ book. Don’t worry. Nothing too bad will happen. Things will come right in the end. I didn’t want that ring of safety. And the swearing is one of the signals in Curious Incident that it isn’t there. I wanted the reader genuinely not to know whether something really, really bad might happen.”

Another assumption that is made editorially in books for young readers is that the narrative should not stray too far from the central story. That is to say, it should be diverting in the whole but not in its constituent parts. And yet one of the great pleasures of Life of Pi is the plethora of information about survival at sea, the fascinating habits of tigers, or the differences among various religions. The doldrums I had recalled from my first reading turned out to be nothing of the sort upon a second reading. Pi’s lifeboat is becalmed at one point, but the story never is.

In Curious Incident, our protagonist spends whole chapters discussing intriguing mathematical problems, difficulties one might encounter in deep space, dilemmas about the nature of perception. This isn’t merely diversionary, it’s downright didactic. There’s even an appendix! No good fiction for children is supposed to be didactic, is it? The thing is, listening to Christopher dilate on a favorite topic is wonderful. His enthusiasm is charming and funny, whether you understand much of what he’s going on about or not.

I sometimes think that this fear children’s publishers have about books that go off on a tangent is based on an imagined target-reader with the attention span of a gnat. “Show, don’t tell,” children’s writers are told, relentlessly. “Keep the images flying; don’t refer to an incident, take us there.” On one level this is undeniably true. But when the writer is very, very good, when the voice is spot on and the story deeply engaging, it’s great to be told a thing or two or three. It’s like when you meet a person with a beautiful voice and you don’t really care what he says as long as he keeps talking. Imagine a children’s editor writing to the author of Pride and Prejudice: “Jane, Jane, Jane! How many times must I tell you, show don’t tell!”

It’s widely believed in the world of children’s fiction that the point of view should be limited, whether the book is written in the first person or the third person. Seldom does one encounter an omniscient narrator anymore in books for young readers. Kids don’t like it, apparently. Kids, we are told, want to see all the events unfold through the eyes of the central character — someone around their own age, someone to whom they can relate.

For the most part, Pi is written in the voice of the protagonist, as is Curious Incident. The same is not true of What the Birds See. Sonya Hartnett leaps into the minds of several of her characters, notably Beattie, Adrian’s grandmother (or Grandmonster, as he sometimes thinks of her). Martha Brooks does much the same thing in her YA novel True Confessions of a Heartless Girl, but it is far from common in books for young readers. There is this underlying belief that a kid just won’t be interested in what a sixty-year-old thinks. Well, no, not if she is morbidly preoccupied with degenerative cartilage or mutual funds or what to do about a stain on a doily. But if we learn that Beattie has thoughts and dreams and demons of her own, and if we learn that she loves Adrian and wouldn’t hurt him for the world but that she is frustrated and temperamental and seldom shows him the affection she feels, that “much of what is best in her is warped on the voyage from within to without,” then surely we have learned a lot that we could not possibly have seen solely through Adrian’s eyes. We learn objectivity. And we are going to need objectivity to try to come to grips with what happens in this story. (Or in life, for that matter.)

Undoubtedly, there are things in these three books that will be beyond a young reader. Let us say, then, that each of these titles is a deep pool. You can dog-paddle across the top quite safely and have a fine time. Or you can dive as deep as your lungs can take you. The twelve-year-old who loved Pi mostly liked the tiger. He says: “The author knows all about how tigers behave in certain situations. I learned a whole lot about tigers.”

In a conversation I had with Yann Martel, he said that Pi was in some ways a religious fable. It was also a discussion of ideas, a meeting place, an agora. I like that, especially. In the agora there are merchants selling many things, and each customer is drawn to what he needs or, perhaps, what sparkles the brightest in his eyes. And there will always be the curious customer, young or old, who is drawn irresistibly to the mysterious stall in the farthest comer where the man keeps some growling creature in a cage.

Mark Haddon says in an e-mail: “As for the ideal reader . . . . I try not to think of such a person. If a book is any good it hopefully gets read by very different people in very different ways. (In fact, I think that is one of the defining marks of a good novel — its ambiguity, the number of different, often contradictory responses it can provoke.)” He goes on to talk about readers who have wept reading Curious Incident and others who have found it hilarious.

Just so. It’s categories that fox us.

“What age is this book for?” the concerned parent asks, and most children’s writers shudder. Nobody asks an adult writer such a question. Who wants to be pigeon-holed? I personally want to scream, “This book is only for children born in August!”

Sonya Hartnett’s experience nicely addresses the pigeon-holing problem. In 1993, Penguin Australia brought out her first novel, Wilful Blue, as a YA title. Six books later, they published Thursday’s Child as an adult title. “There was market confusion,” Hartnett writes. “Booksellers stocked it with my other books, in the YA section in the dungeon of the store.” The confusion, however, didn’t stop Penguin from publishing Of a Boy as an adult work.

Julie Watts from Penguin Australia says: “The difficulty for writers of Sonya’s caliber, who really ought not to be categorized at all, is that booksellers and book buyers do need guidance, and so we have this wretched business of having to pitch [and] package books to clearly indicate the audience.” Watts goes on to say that although they brought out Thursday’s Child under their adult imprint, “complete with orange spine,” they also tried to have it both ways. “Sonya had a following in the YA area and she is frequently shortlisted for various YA awards. So we entered Thursday’s Child for these awards . . . [and] the book was seen as another in her usual YA genre, and so we closed the door to a wider audience.”

Bill Thomas at Doubleday was canny enough to see that this might be the problem if Curious Incident was published as both a YA and an adult title. “In the U.S. market,” Thomas writes, “a literary novel depends on reviews in mainstream papers and periodicals to garner an adult market, and we had some concerns that a simultaneous YA publication would send a confused signal to reviewers.” David Fickling did not feel this would pose any problem in the U.K. What’s more, by having two distinct editions, the book could potentially claim two points of sale within the same bookstore.

In a superficial way, What the Birds See could be considered the most adultlike of the three titles. It is the only one that does not have a happy ending. It is, for all its profluence, something of a still life. (One might morbidly call it a not-coming-of-age story.) It is a piece of magical realism, densely patterned and intense, featuring a far-from-heroic protagonist. Adrian does not end up getting his mother back or acquiring a pet dog who loves him for who he is, as does Christopher in Curious Incident. Nor does Adrian wash up on the shore of a new world, as does Pi Patel, where he is nursed back to health and goes on to lead a happy, fulfilled life. He ends up escaping the world, in which he feels so unloved, in the only way that opens up for him.

I am quite certain that there are many children’s book mavens who would feel the same way about What the Birds See as Bill Thomas does about Curious Incident with regards to a young reader. It may be appropriate, but it would not likely be appreciated for its intricacies. Meanwhile, the children’s literature listservs buzzed this past winter with chat about Curious Incident. And what was the concern of its many fans? That it was ineligible for the Printz Award because it was not published specifically for young adults.

It is confusing, the whole business. Mark Haddon, however, is thrilled to have two editions of the book out in the U.K. “It comes down to this one fact,” he says. “You can write the most fantastic teenage novel with the most universal appeal and package it in the coolest, most adult cover possible . . . and when the book reaches the shop someone has to decide which department to put it in. [An] insurmountable problem at present. Two editions skirts it completely.”

Which leaves us where?

The world of the passionate reader is one of serendipitous connections, of leaps across genres, across age groups. It starts at a young age. I loved the Hardy Boys mysteries, which led me, in a way, to James Bond. That in turn led me, at sixteen, to John le Carre’s The Spy Who Came In from the Cold. My daughter leaped from Baby-Sitters Club books to Philippa Pearce’s The Way to Sattin Shore, to Jane Austen, to Carol Shields in only a couple of years. Anyone reading this article is likely a person who delights in putting books in the path of avid young readers. It’s worth looking, sometimes, a little farther afield. Worth scaling those walls — the ones that marketing and our own limiting assumptions create — to see what’s on the other side. After all, the whole idea is to find the right book for the right reader. I have spoken to serious children’s book lovers who liked Hartnett’s Thursday’s Child but felt quite adamantly that it was not a book for children. They’re right. Not all children. Maybe only the child who has far to go.

Tim Wynne-Jones has written a few dozen books for adults and children, the latest of which is Ned Mouse Breaks Away (Groundwood). A new novel, A Thief in the House of Memory (Kroupa/Farrar), is due out next spring. He is on the faculty at Vermont College’s M.FA Program in Writing for Children and Young Adults.