| From
the July/August 2001 issue of The Horn Book Magazine
Editorial
Bring Out Your Dead
 hen
the Entertainment Weekly reporter called to find out what
I thought of HarperCollins’s plans to “continue”
C. S. Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia with books commissioned
from other (that is to say, living) writers, my only thought was
to decide which fish in this barrel to shoot first. Let’s
see: Lewis must be rolling over in his grave, publishers will do
anything for money, Screwtape has reserved a special spot in Hell
for the hacks who involve themselves in this project. Easy targets
— until you start to look at the situation from the point
of view of the fish. I stopped fretting about my display of critical
invective and started instead to worry about what this kind of cloning-by-corporation
means for children’s books.
Other fish in the same pickle as Lewis’s
Lucy, Peter, and Aslan include Ezra Jack Keats’s Peter and
Willie, now stars of their own Viking easy-to-read series by Anastasia
Suen and Allan Eitzen; H. A. and Margret Rey’s Curious George,
up to all kinds of merchandising mischief at Houghton Mifflin; and
spymistress Harriet M. Welsch, whose further exploits are currently
in development at Random House. In each case, a popular children’s
book character created by a now-dead author is having his or her
“brand” extended through new authorized titles, although
authorization seems an odd word choice to describe a practice
in which the actual author cannot be reached for comment. Simon
Adley, managing director of the C. S. Lewis Company, explained the
strategy (and inadvertently gave the game away) to the New York
Times: “The whole children’s market is geared toward
anything new. You can only keep rejacketing something a certain
number of times, and in the end you have to produce something new.”
Yes, Mr. Adley, you do. But you haven’t.
I confess I can’t even quite find the ka-ching!
factor in either the Lewis books or Harriet the Spy. The
Curious George books, yes — morally reprehensible but financially
attractive. (Although don’t you think it’s funny that
Houghton Mifflin is taking the high ground over its publication
of Alice Randall’s Margaret Mitchell parody, The Wind
Done Gone, while simultaneously attempting to deprive the punk
rock group Furious George of its name?) But it’s not as if
the world has been holding its breath for a new chronicle of Narnia
or has been lying awake nights wondering whether Harriet and Janie
happily went on to run a successful covert arms dealership out of
their Park Slope brownstone. The Narnia chronicles are finished
and self-contained, as Lewis intended, and, in the case of Louise
Fitzhugh’s Harriet, the two sequels, The Long
Secret and Sport, written by the author herself, pale
beside the original book. One supposes, then, that the publishers
are counting on the Narnia and Harriet names to stimulate demand
for these faux-new titles, a business gambit directed at the sorriest
fish of all in this barrel, children and their anxious parents.
If C. S. Lewis’s hopes held true, he currently has better
things to think about than The Lion, the Witch and the War Chest
— or whatever these continuations turn out to be (HarperCollins
is dangling the names of such writers as Diana Wynne Jones and Geraldine
McCaughrean, but this would be but meretriciousness piled upon artistic
fraud.) Mingling high-culture literary appeal with mass-market brand
loyalty is a formula designed to undermine what made these books
stand out in the first place: that there was nothing else like them,
that they promised a journey — into a wardrobe, into the heart
of a ferociously honest young girl — on a whole new path.
You might be old enough to remember the fear when
Harriet the Spy came out that children all over America
would start spy clubs in their heroine’s honor. And, bless
their souls, they did. The best books don’t need sequels;
their immortality is achieved by giving readers the desire and the
resources to continue the story in their own imaginations. Here’s
a piece of advice that may not be in the best interest of publishers
but is very much in yours: if you really enjoyed a book, read it
again.
And for the publishers, here’s a piece of
advice from Harriet’s perspicacious Ole Golly: “No more
nonsense.”
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