Y is for YA Lit
What a foolish, presumptuous heading. As if I would know anything about young adult literature, being rather too old, to put in mildly. The problem is I am drawn to the topic precisely because of my fascination with what is available today, compared to what existed back in the past. Of course, I don’t know much about earlier decades either: this is a totally biased view!
It is challenging to remember what I read as a young adult, for two reasons. First, from the age of 12, I was a student in an English grammar school. Such places dole out a considerable quantity of homework, right from the first year, growing quickly from weekday evening study through to all seven days a week. Later in life, I could see it was a winnowing process. Many failed to put in the hours the work required: they might copy from another, or from a previous year’s homework of a friend; they might skimp on doing all the detailed work; or, increasingly, make a marginal effort and live with poor marks. The swots among us laboured on. Our reward was to keep moving up, eventually sixth-formers studying for entrance to university. The other reason is many years of reading have left a lot of past content fuzzy, some beyond recall, with the advantage I can re-read a book I first read a long time ago as if it is new – well, almost!
Prior to getting on grammar school escalator, I had been an avid reader. I buried myself in books most evenings, and often three or four more over a weekend. To start with my list included Enid Blyton’s Secret Seven and Famous Five, Worzel Gummidge, Biggles, Rachel Crompton’s stories about William (loved that boy!), Alice in Wonderland, C S Lewis’ early Narnia books, The Secret Garden, Tom’s Midnight Garden, Swallows and Amazons (and others by Arthur Ransome), Treasure Island, The Coral Island and Paddington’s first adventures, as well as other favourites like Winnie the Pooh and Wind in the Willows. By the time I was ready for senior school I had moved on to Rider Haggard and Bulldog Drummond adventures, and as I wandered around the adult fiction section of the library, I found The Scarlet Pimpernel, some Dickens, Nevil Shute, and big historical stories by Harrison Ainsworth. Amongst all this, one odd item: at some point my mum gave me a Puffin book, The Human Body: I wonder why?
I can recall some of what I read in my teenage and young adult years: The Carpetbaggers, The Catcher in the Rye, Lord of the Flies, Lolita, Lady Chatterley’s Lover, Fahrenheit 451, Doctor Zhivago. I fell in love with many authors: Iris Murdoch, Doris Lessing, Muriel Spark, Margaret Drabble and Françoise Sagan, and also found my way into detective fiction with Agatha Christie, Margery Allingham, John Buchan, Dorothy L Sayers, Michael Innes, John Dickson Carr. Once I was in my final grammar school years, however, such reading was largely abandoned, and I read little fiction (but lots of study-related non-fiction), up until my children were ready for stories!
There is a point to this incomplete, poorly remembered list. Two categories of books dominated my reading: adventures and detective stories. Not much fantasy or science fiction, and then just as a vehicle for adventure. Now, as I look at what is available for a teenager or young adult today, there are genres packed with books that make past choices seem meagre. In fact, I don’t think I would survive if I was a young adult today: so many books to be read, I would give up on serious study and thoughts of university, choosing to spend most of my life in thousands upon thousands of novels. How does any youngster today not just read and read and read?
The landscape is vast, but I see some types of books which, for me, have a particular fascination. For brevity, I am going to spend a little time on a few areas and titles – anyone reading this self-centred blog is encouraged to disagree and add as many categories and titles as he or she would like. This exercise is almost entirely limited to fantasy, as this is a genre that appears to have boomed over the past thirty years, but beware, my knowledge of young adult fantasy available today is severely limited! Within fantasy, and wandering slightly outside it, too, I will concentrate on two thematic strands I love: sagas, and stories exploring difference.
Reluctantly leaving on one side Allice in Wonderland and Alice Through the Looking Glass, both of which are adventures, but not really sagas, my starting point has to be J R R Tolkien and The Hobbit, followed by the three volumes of Lord of the Rings. Immediately, I am in trouble. I’m sure The Hobbit is suitable for 8 years old and up, and Lord of the Rings (LOTR) for a 10 year old. However, when I checked on a website giving advice, while audio versions might work at that age range, it is recommended that LOTR is not attempted until a teenager. Why? The reasons given include it’s complicated; there are lots of characters; the words are complex and unfamiliar; and it is frightening. Am I to believe that young people are so sheltered and such poor readers? I don’t know how old I was when I read these books, nor the age of my children. All I can say is that my 1968 rather dogeared single-volume paperback edition of LOTR is now the jealous possession of one of those children. I am sure she read it when she was quite young.
Lord of the Rings is a saga, a battle against evil. Sometimes described as ‘high fantasy’, it is a powerful account of battles, setbacks, threats and achievements. Part of the hold it has on so many readers is to be found in the foibles of many characters, and the humour in some otherwise demanding moments, especially any involving the much-loved hobbits in the story. It sets a standard that many writers have since aspired to match. From the 1950s, it is contemporaneous with C S Lewis’s sequence of Narnia stories. While Tolkien’s key characters are predominantly male, Lewis gave equally major roles to women. Apart from that, I don’t find much in Lewis’s favour. Tolkien’s story is driving, powerful, and extraordinarily imaginative; Lewis’s series comes off as comparatively pallid stuff, quickly exhausting its original set-up, and, for many, also flavoured with a rather unnecessary, albeit fairly incidental, Christian element.
If there is another series comparable to Lord of the Rings, for me it has to be Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials. Another epic fantasy, now being continued in a second trilogy, The Book of Dust, it is sometimes listed as a young adult series. Just as in the case of LOTR, suggested age ranges are meaningless: these books can be read, and reread, by anyone from early teenage to ninety (and probably older and younger, too). The other difference is that LOTR was around when I was a teenager, but Pullman’s first trilogy appeared between 1995 and 2000. This is my first example of books that have made reading for young people so exciting in recent years.
If I want to contrast now with back in the 1960s, I should observe that there were some other great sagas written in between that period and the 1990s. Perhaps not as well-known as LOTR, two stand out. The first is Susan Cooper’s series, The Dark is Rising. This has a particular fascination for older readers, as the books draw on Arthurian legends and other historical myths and fictions. They are compelling for younger readers too, with a male hero but with many other key roles for women. They were published between 1965 and 1997, around the same time (in 1968, but right up to 2001 for the last volume) as Ursula le Guin’s Earthsea Trilogy was released. All of these series could be described as ‘hard edge’ fantasy: set in other worlds, but their very identifiable characters face dangers, disaster and deaths in close to familiar settings. So they should. If fiction, and especially fantasy, is to help us understand our world through imaginative situations, it is all the more necessary they also highlight the dark side of people, the ways they behave, and the things they do to others, their good and their bad motivations and characteristics.
For me, the explosion in YA fantasy (accessible for young adults and older) began in the 1990s. Philip Pullman’s Dark Materials came out at the same time as another series, this time written by an Australian author, Garth Nix. His ‘old kingdom’ series started in 1995, with Sabriel, the first few gripping pages introduce us to a dead baby that comes back to life and a schoolchild who can save dying rabbits! The series has continued to 2016 when the fifth book, Goldenhand was published. Once again, we confront evil, death, failure, weakness and determination. I might add I like the way in which it is women who seem to have all the best – or should I say the most important – roles. High fantasy? I am not certain I really know that that terminology means.
Sagas tend to have an end point: return the ring, destroy the forces of evil, restore the equilibrium of the world. However, other fantasy novels address smaller scale themes, with ongoing and unresolvable enemies, offering a backdrop for more human issues to be addressed. A perfect example, for me, comes with Tamora Pierce, with five series of stories set in Tortall and some nearby countries, and another three series set in and around the land of Emelan. She first published The Song of the Lioness, between 1983 and 1988, featuring Alanna, a young woman determined to break the gender barrier and become a knight. Her story is compelling. Alanna grips our attention as she confronts the emotional and physical problems of puberty and adolescence, all the while pretending to be male. A young woman’s journey, yet one with which any reader could identify. My friends know I love another of Pierce’s series, The Immortals, also centred around a young woman, and her struggles with magic, fear, and the emotional challenges of growing up. Enough on Tamora Pierce (can there ever be enough of her books?): stealing from Renée Zellweger, she had me at page 10 of Wild Magic.
There are several other fantasy series that have captured many readers, some of which resonate with a younger audience. One of these is J K Rowling’s collection of Harry Potter books (1997-2007). If anything, the first few in the series are clearly pre- or early-teen, more adventurous than really overwhelmingly dark at the beginning. Any child couldn’t help loving the first book, with flying motorbikes, wizards, and an orphan forced to live under the stairs. However, things change as Harry gets older: it is as if the books move into later teenage years as Harry does. Some suggest Rowling is not as good a writer as a Tolkien or Pullman. Possibly not, but I can’t see it matters. The books are very good, and they have entranced young children across the globe. Not just entranced them, but helped them on the path to adulthood, especially those that have read the books rather than relying on the cinematic version of the stories.
I imagine many readers easily identify with Harry or Hermione, but other adventure stories do the same. Panem is full of heroes, especially young women. This, of course, is the location for the dystopian Hunger Games trilogy by Suzanne Collins. Katniss Everdeen battles against a dictatorship, set in a half-familiar future world: scary science fiction. However, Katniss is a complex character, brave in many ways, but we also realise that she is as much a victim of events as triumphant. While the film version brushes up her heroic character, the novels make it clear she can never play much more than important but ancillary role, often not even understanding what is happening or how she is being used. A brilliant plot for a YA novel, it is sadly realistic. She shares some characteristics with Bella in Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight saga, a witness as well as an actor in a thrilling and suitably dangerous tale. I must be a sucker for YA novels aimed at young women, as this was another story that quickly had me in its hold: it’s the latest series I’ve been re-reading, just after finishing Gath Nix’s collection a second time!
Earlier I mentioned the explosion of brilliant fantasy books in the last twenty years. I could add Leigh Bardugo, Patrick Rothfuss (please finish book 3 before I die!!), Sabaa Tahir, and so many more who have appeared in the last twenty years. How do I find out about these books? My youngest daughter suggests titles, (but she bears no responsibility for my choices or any of these comments). Most recently she introduced me to S A Chakraborty, so now I am impatiently waiting for the third book in that trilogy, another set of absolutely outstanding novels.
So many books, but now I want to go down a different path. Back in 1982 I read The Haunting by Margaret Mahy, winning the Carnegie Medal. Two years later, The Changeover, her second Carnegie Medal winner. At the time, I felt they were extraordinary. In The Changeover, living in a familiar and normal small town, Laura Chant is the daughter of a single mother, often left to look after her younger brother She’s somewhat lonely, with little time taken up with other teenagers. We are whisked into a world of danger, witches, and events going out of control, but there’s a clue in the subtitle, A Supernatural Romance. The story is a framework to illuminate and help understand a teenager experiencing the dramas of puberty, going from child to woman.
Here is a world of books that didn’t seem to exist in my childhood. I had to read adult novels to catch up, and when I was young, a lot passed me by. Margaret Mahy was in the vanguard of an extraordinary group of writers who used fantasy, comedy or tough reality to enlarge the horizons of readers. By the 1990s we had a range that went from Jacqueline Wilson writing about a very bad girl with some residual sense of good (starting with The Story of Tracy Beaker in 1991), through to Diana Wynn Jones and the Chrestomanci series (fantasies published between 1997 and 2006), just some among a wealth of ‘growing up’ stories set in other worlds and times.
This area hasn’t just focussed on the realities of adolescence. Now books explore other issues, with one of my favourites being Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time (2003) about an autistic boy. Among so many, John Green’s novel about incurable illness in teenagers, The Fault is in Our Stars (2013) was confronting, compelling, and insightful, and Becky Chambers’ outstanding science fiction novel, A Long Way to a Small Angry Planet (2015), dealt with gender and species issues. These are just a few from so many great examples.
You’ll be relieved to know I am almost out of space. I could keep going for a long time, which is my point. It’s a gross simplification, but I can see two major changes in YA literature over the past 40 years. The first was to take us beyond comfortable, male dominated fantasy adventures, exceptional though many were. Now high fantasy includes stories with women in lead roles, and have shifted from ending with a successful quest or battle to presenting worlds in which life continues to throw up new challenges and threats. The other shift is to provide us with a deeper insight into the lives of young adults who don’t fit in. What a time to be a reader. Before I return to finishing New Moon, all I can add is ‘hurrah for YA lit today!’
