Some of these characters also show up in her novels for adults. I don’t know to what extent L’Engle indicted age ranges for her own books, but I’m thinking of things like Certain Women and Wasp that include mature sexual themes that for me, clearly, make them books for adults and not for children. The main characters are all adults, and they often deal with mundane grown-up issues that would bore most kids to tears.
:eek:
A Wizard of Earthsea is a great example. In the first book, the protagonist (Ged) is a brash teenager. In the last book (at least, the last that I’ve read), he’s a very old man. The first book is much more intended for children; the latter is very much an adult’s book. Not because of graphic content: quite the contrary. Its concepts are very abstract, and there’s a deep sadness to it that I think would be hard for a child to understand. Indeed, I suspect that when I reread it as an old man it’ll be far more powerful to me.
Daniel
Well, it’s not literature, but if you count “The 400 Blows” as a kid’s film, then Antoine Doinel could count – he grew over the course of five or six films, and AFAIK, the later films definitely weren’t kids films.
David Balfour from Robert Louis Stevenson’s “Kidnapped” might also count – “Kidnapped” is a great adventure of a kid’s book, but I’ve heard that the sequel, “Catriona” is a more adult-minded romance. Haven’t read it though, so I can’t guarantee.
I knew I hadn’t imagined this: one Frederic Tuten wrote a {presumably authorised} adult novel about boy reporter Tintin, that perennial kids’ comic hero, entitled Tintin In The New World : “Claudia slowly draws down Tintin’s boxer shorts, leaving them heaped around his ankles.” Phwooar!
However, if the ghastly prose is anything to go by, it seems to be the worst kind of pomo revisionist up-its-arse claptrap: “What wrong and what wrongdoer”, Tintin continued sadly, “are there left to stalk when now I know I would need to stalk the tracks of every living human, for all are guilty, even as they sleep, guilty of mischief done or yet to be done? The human womb breeds human monsters, sucking eel mouths of desire and wilfulness.”
To which I can only respond “Billions of bilious blue blistering barnacles in ten thousand thundering typhoons!”
Catriona definitely wouldn’t appeal to the average teenage boy reader of Kidnapped, but might appeal to the average teenage girl reader of Kidnapped. It’s a romance, with hardly any swash in its buckle, and spends an inordinate amount of time working out David’s emotional relationship to Catriona. I mean, really! where’s the excitement in that?!?
(and no, before anyone starts speculating, it’s a late Victorian romance, so not even any nudge-nudge-wink-wink going on. David and Catriona share a set of rooms at one point, in a perfectly chaste way.)
WHAT.
My faith in humanity has just been utterly and completely destroyed.
Of course, most of the fairytales we’re familiar with now are redacted versions, sanitized in the Victorian era so that they were suitable for children. The old original tales are bloody, sexy, violent, nasty, great stories. Carter’s retellings are much closer to the orignals in feel.
Appalling, isn’t it? What I can’t figure out is how he ever got permission from the copyright holders - Herge’s estate, presumably - to take a big steaming shit all over their beloved characters. My childhood has just been sullied.
This sounds like a cool idea for a genre of fanfic - that’s not pornographic.
I would LOVE to read “Ramona Quimby, Age 28” or “Encyclopedia Brown: CSI”
You are slipping, mate: Volume Two of Moore and O’Neill’s The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen features cameo appearances, in the guise of Doctor Moreau’s beast-men, of Puss in Boots, Mole, Rat, Toad and Badger from The Wind in the Willows, and none other than Rupert the Bear. It’s worth the price of admission just to see the freak-out weird Kevin O’Neill draw Rupert, a much-loved English children’s character.
Even more children’s characters and settings - Narnia, Alice, Noddy, Doctor Doolittle, and far too many others to mention by name - are referenced in the appendix to Volume 2, which is mind-boggling in its breadth: the universe the principal characters inhabit seems to be composed of every fictional work ever written, all deftly interwoven, and Moore seems to have read them all. The man’s a bloody genius.
Good idea, but unfortunately Mr. Brown is no longer with us.
“The case of Encyclopedia Brown’s Mangled Corpse”–snerk!
(FWIW, it’s pretty clear that the murderer is the reporter. He tries to throw suspicion onto Meany with the false quote about the north pole and penguins, but earlier in the story he refers to Brown’s expert testimony about a peacock’s egg. Brown would never have offered such testimony: peahens lay eggs, not peacocks. The reporter is clearly hiding something!)
Daniel
T H White’s “The Once & Future King” usually appears in one volume.
But the first of four sections was also published separately as “The Sword & The Stone.” It recounted Merlin’s education of the young Arthur & is a children’s book–for kids who don’t mind a bit of allegory & some slightly creaky whimsy. (This adult doesn’t mind either in this setting.)
In the following three sections, Arthur grows from young man to aging king. The style & content are much more adult.