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Dark Matters – More on YA

JA March 18

Margo Lanagan’s Tender Morsels has just been brought out in Australia by Allen & Unwin in a beautiful YA edition, complete with a lovely rendering on the cover by Shaun Tan. An adult version has been on the shelves since 2008, yet seeing the YA one in the bookstore last week (the text of which is completely and thankfully unchanged) reminded me of a debate that was brought into the spotlight with the release of the book, in YA format, in the UK and US last year.

Like many, I still love delving into YA and Tender Morsels was as close to perfect as they come. Inspired by the ‘dark weirdness of traditional fairy tales’ (including the Brothers Grimm, The Ungrateful Dwarf by Caroline Stahl and the ‘Bear Day’ ritual in the town of Plats-de-Mollo in the Pyrenees) Lanagan manages to expertly capture the tone and feel of this bygone folklore without making it seem forced or pretentious. The story itself is brilliant wrought – dark, silky and devastating – and this was in part what I loved most about the book: its ability to handle difficult themes like rape, abuse and incest with such power and grace.

Not so in the US and UK when the book was released in YA form during 2009. The Daily Mail for one published this charmingly balanced write-up:

With a title that sounds more like a paedophile website than serious literature, it feels as if the author had a similar list of taboos to tick off as she wrote. In the first line, a character is described as a 'slut'; within the first chapter a father commits not one but two abortions on Liga, the 15-year-old daughter he has sexually abused… Worse is to come as Liga suffers a bloody miscarriage in the snow and is later gang-raped.

Parents were reportedly ‘alarmed’ and even Anne Fine, a former children's laureate, called for clearer guidelines regarding content and a return to happier endings, arguing that ‘realism has gone too far in literature for children’. This catchcry was mirrored somewhat in the US, where there was, briefly, a call for YA books to be rated much like the film industry. Writing for January Magazine, Tony Buchsbaum argued:

Much of our culture, after all, is driven by ratings. We accept and trust them; we would think carefully and search for more information before taking a young child to an R-rated film, for example… If movies, television, music and videogames are rated according to their own systems, why aren’t books?

This kind of reflex isn’t just reserved for books like Tender Morsels. Sherman Alexie’s novel, The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, a funny yet deprecating story about life on the Reservation for a young Native American boy, was banned in some schools in the US due to passages on alcoholism, bullying and masturbation. In Australia, Puberty Blues fell victim to the same kind of moralism when it was published in 1979 for its stark, honest retelling of life in Sydney’s surfing gangs through the eyes of two teenage girls: ‘There were six of us in the panel van. I sat in the front, calmly smoking a cigarette, listening to the suppressed screams of agony as Sue lost her virginity to Danny in the back.’ Gabrielle Carey summed it up in her memoir like so:

I have come to recognise the general hatred that the media, and perhaps the Australian community at large, have for "youth". It makes sense to me now why it was practically impossible to get intelligent, sensible coverage about a book that dealt with troubled young people, especially a book written by two women. Young, female, outspoken, articulate, sexually experienced—there were all characteristics that were loathed by the mainstream media and Middle Australia.

Perhaps I should try to be less idealistic, but these kinds of reactions, and the ongoing emphasis on the rhetoric of children’s ‘innocence’, when it comes to YA still surprise me. Many teenage readers are probably no stranger to violence or confronting themes, in life or in culture broadly – surely it is better that our literature reflects this rather than regressing to the ‘happily-ever-after’ bandaid, which in itself can create problems due to unrealistic expectations?

Phillip Pullman put it simply in an article in the Guardian:

I don't think there should be areas that children's books can't deal with. Why should there be, given that children are likely to encounter much stronger subjects in real life, ranging from divorce - which once used to be something terrible and awful that you must not talk about - to drug trafficking and sex?

Morris Gleitzman, whose books Once and Then tell the story of two young children struggling to survive the Holocaust, also pointed out in the December issue of Meanjin (Vol 68/4) that it is a mistake to assume that young readers are incapable of handling strong emotions:

… we adults often make the mistake of thinking that because kids are physically small, that what goes on inside them is commensurately small. But you don’t have to remember very much of your childhood to know that when you’re ecstatic or when you’re full of rage as a seven-year-old it fills the universe just as much as it does when you’re big.

The question to me is not what the book deals with, it is how. The benchmark has much more to do with authenticity and believability than with any pre-conception of what young readers can and can’t deal with. Every difficult scene in Tender Morsels was carefully underwritten and gently handled – the supposed ‘dark themes’ were, more often than not, glanced at obliquely with great attention placed to the emotional complexity involved. Of course I read it from an adult viewpoint, being even if I’d come across the book a teenager I think the experience would have been just as profound, if not more.

On another point, many of those ‘outraged’ by the darkness in YA books often equate them, in their arguments at least, with children’s books. While I’m weary being equally prescriptive when it comes to children’s lit, it is important to remember that there is a difference - YA readers are generally thirteen to eighteen. To confuse the two is to give easy access to kneejerk reactions over ‘inappropriateness’. Tender Morsels has, to my knowledge, always been pitched at older or adult readers. And, as far as I can tell, it's received wide praise across the board in Oz thus far. Here’s hoping it continues that way.

 

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