[UA] Darkening Children's Tales

[James Palmer]

>
>Hm... so I'm running this through my mental checklist and going "'Dark 
>Materials'?  Often absent, and when they're not you frequently wish they 
>were.

'His Dark Materials' is really more in the 'Luke, I am your father' category 
of active, powerful, ambigous parents.

>
>Now, that made me think.
>
>How's this for a children's novel: The kid -- let's name him 'Mel' -- has 
>fine parents, interesting, pleasant, concerned, yadda yadda.  Mel gets 
>pulled into some Narniesque scenario -- he's off having perilous 
>adventures, but outside time and in a different place.  There's nothing 
>where he's gone for weeks on end to alarm his folks, BUT... they notice.  
>They notice that SOMETHING is different about their son, and they try to 
>get involved but Mel either (1) tells them and they don't (of course) 
>believe or (2) Mel hides it because he knows they won't.  So you get this 
>interplay.  Could be neat.
>

As I recall, the 'So You Want To Be A Wizard?' books, by Diane Duane, have 
concerned parents who eventually accept that their children are magicians 
... and 'The Dark is Rising' has Will angsting over his relationship with 
his parents.

I can think of quite a number of children's books where the children have 
parents, but the parents (and adult society as a whole) are generally 
blindly indifferent to the events in their children's lives.  There's a 
particularly funny example in one of the E. Nesbit books, where the house is 
being attacked by Red Indians that are completely invisible to the 
grown-ups.

Reread Alan Garner's ELIDOR this morning, a fairly terrifying book, in which 
the adults are completely unaware of the forces pursuing their children, 
except insomuch as the energies coming from Elidor interfere with their 
father watching television.  ELIDOR, by the way, is also a prime example of 
how to create disturbing unnatural phenomena - the shadows on the wall, the 
power coming from nowhere, the static building around the house - that isn't 
blatantly horrific.

I'll put in a plug here for Alison Lurie's excellent book on children's 
literature, NOT IN FRONT OF THE GROWN-UPS.  Well worth reading.

J.
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