The Child Thief: Novel Review
Apr. 9th, 2011 09:05 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
labingiI've just finished The Child Thief by Brom, a "dark retelling of the stories of Peter Pan and the Lost Boys" (Wikipedia). I'm giving it a 3 out of 5, with a point for concept and the many beautiful illustrations. It was a super idea for a story; it's a shame that the novel exploited the idea for about 5% of what it's worth.
Moderate Spoilers
Summary
The book takes place in modern times with the basic plot being that Neverland (here Avalon) is dying and Peter is furiously gathering lost children to form an army to fight the "Flesh-eaters" who are destroying his faerie home. Chief among them is a boy, Nick, who serves as Everyman observing the horror and (rarely) wonder. Peter is conceptualized as a half-faerie, half-human individual from Britain c. 400 or 600 AD or something, who was abandoned by his human family out of fear he was a changeling and attached himself to the Lady (of the Lake), whose champion he considers himself. Echoes of various figures from Peter Pan appear, the most effective of whom is Sekeu (Tiger Lily), a tough Native American girl from the 1600s who is Peter's lieutenant.
Pirates and pixies also figure, fairly unconnected from Barrie's characters. Far from being Captain Hook, the Captain is a sympathetic figure, a Pilgrim lost in the Mist, who has spent centuries trying to get his crew and passengers back to the real world. However, the magic of Avalon wreaks grievous damage on these adult humans, turning them into sometimes vicious monsters in spite of themselves; hence, they have become the Flesh-eaters Peter and the elves oppose.
Review
The strongest aspect of the book is its sociopolitics. The various factions in play-- elves, men, and children--are all presented in a light that is both sympathetic and problematic. Each group strives to protect itself and, in so doing, sometimes attacks first and asks questions later. One understands why the elves hate the men, who are, indeed, destroying their world, and why the men hate the elves, who are, indeed, bewitching and deceiving them. As in real life, the crimes are real but motivated not by "evil" but by fear and need.
Everything else is fairly boring. Crucially, despite being over 400 pages long, the book offers almost no development. While Peter initially appears a playful, recognizably Pan-like character, it swiftly becomes evident that this is mostly a mask covering an agonized individual who has been enduring horrors and fighting battles for many centuries with a very adult sense of responsibility. He remains in this mode throughout the novel, with a slight--and not very well motivated--transformation right at the end. The bulk of the book consists of trials, battles, conflicts, etc. designed to highlight the dire straits of Avalon and the nasty side of Lost Boy life. They come steadily one after the other, attached to, at best, superficial character development and little rising action in the plot. There is ultimately some plot resolution, but it is so unconnected to real character or thematic development that it's a bit hard to care.
A Missed Opportunity
It may be that the book's lackluster storytelling particularly stands out because the concept invites so much more. The illustrations are tantalizing. It goes without saying that Brom is a fantastic artist, and his visual concept for Peter (and others) is immediately engaging. (I really did buy this book half for its cover.)
Moreover, the idea is a terrific jumping-off point. What if we caught up with Peter Pan in the early 21st century? What if Peter Pan "grew up" (and did not become Robin Williams)? What if the story actually did what Brom's afterword states he intended and show the "dark side" of Barrie's concept a hundred years on? It could have been brilliant.
The fundamental mistake was to make the story discontinuous with Barrie's. It should have been a sequel rather than a reboot. It should have built on the incredible power of the original rather than substantially ignoring the very concept that defines Peter Pan: the "gay and innocent and heartless" viciousness of perpetual childhood.
If I were to fic this concept, here's what I'd do. Keep the "dying Avalon" plot. Keep Peter in a position of genuine struggle at such a pitch and seriousness that he cannot spin it into "fun." Force him (like many an abused child) to be an "adult" out of sheer necessity because if he isn't, his Neverland will perish. But present this as an evolution from the truly carefree Peter of the late 19th century. Peter doesn't have to be 1500 years old. He comes to us as an emphatically Victorian construct, and transplanting his Victorian roots, so ably presented by Barrie, into the 21st century with a bunch of American kids would present more fascinating cognitive dissonance and sense of being displaced in time than Brom's pretense at an ancient origin. After all, a boy who is, say, 130 is really no less remarkable than a boy who's 1500.
Peter should also be completely human. Barrie's character is compelling (frightening) because we can imagine him as any little boy unmoored from the adult world. Making him an outcast half-breed faerie takes the chill out of this concept.
The basic arc of the story, then, would be Peter's progressive "growing up," the evolution of Barrie's "gay and innocent" boy into a gradually older, gradually grittier figure who must confront violence that has consequences in the company of the Lost Boys (and Girls) of the 21st century, who, as Brom rightly indicates, are not naive, upper class Victorian kids from the nursery, but themselves hyperaccelerated toward adulthood by everything from child abuse to modern media. The basic struggle of the story would be the tension between Peter's highly understandable desire to remain his old, carefree self and his mounting understanding of the need to think in a more systematic, more long-range mode. One aspect of this would be his cultivation of memory, his coming to realize that he no longer has the luxury of letting people die off and replacing them as though they'd never been. If he's truly leading an army, he needs to conserve both lives and the cohesiveness of group loyalty under constant strain, including honor for his followers' grief over fallen comrades.
The upshot of the story would be the irrevocability of Peter Pan growing up, because I don't think he could go backward, even if Avalon were saved. He might end the sadder, wiser child, much in the place where Brom first finds him: still playing at being the eternal boy but with a new consciousness that it's a masquerade and a sense of a different phase beginning to hatch.
The Passage of Time
For any update of Peter Pan to work, it requires a sensitivity to the passage of time. The timeless of the Peter amid the flowing of time around him is fundamental to the concept, all the more so if we have flowed a hundred years into the future of the tale we all grew up with.
It is deeply unfortunate, therefore, that Brom shows little facility for handling time. He notes he has done some research into ancient Britain to bring in aspects of Celtic mythology. He, likewise, nods at the early colonization of America by Europeans and the Civil War. But his text gives these things no weight. (At times, I wished Anne Rice had got hold of this idea; say what you will of her writing, she has a genuine love of historicizing.) The ancient world is stereotyped in exactly the way you'd expect from an average made-for-TV movie: mead hall, puritanical reverend, pirates saying, "That it be."
Indeed, Brom has virtually no sense at all of culturally specific language. He haphazardly applies some "old fashioned English" to the pirates, and makes a decent stab at the 1970s dialect of one of the Lost Boys, but by and large, everyone always speaks in contemporary American English. (Several characters speak in something like African American English when I am far from sure they are meant to be African American.) Anachronism is everywhere. For example, Peter in Celtic Britain is named... Peter. Five minutes with Google, however, informs me that "In England the Normans introduced [the name Peter] in the Old French form Piers, which was gradually replaced by the spelling Peter starting in the 15th century" (Behind the Name). In other words, Brom's use of the name is almost 1000 years away from historical plausibility. This is fairly indicative of the attention given to history throughout the story, and it's one of the greatest damages done to a concept that is all about the passage of time.
There should have been so much more here. Fic, anyone?
Moderate Spoilers
Summary
The book takes place in modern times with the basic plot being that Neverland (here Avalon) is dying and Peter is furiously gathering lost children to form an army to fight the "Flesh-eaters" who are destroying his faerie home. Chief among them is a boy, Nick, who serves as Everyman observing the horror and (rarely) wonder. Peter is conceptualized as a half-faerie, half-human individual from Britain c. 400 or 600 AD or something, who was abandoned by his human family out of fear he was a changeling and attached himself to the Lady (of the Lake), whose champion he considers himself. Echoes of various figures from Peter Pan appear, the most effective of whom is Sekeu (Tiger Lily), a tough Native American girl from the 1600s who is Peter's lieutenant.
Pirates and pixies also figure, fairly unconnected from Barrie's characters. Far from being Captain Hook, the Captain is a sympathetic figure, a Pilgrim lost in the Mist, who has spent centuries trying to get his crew and passengers back to the real world. However, the magic of Avalon wreaks grievous damage on these adult humans, turning them into sometimes vicious monsters in spite of themselves; hence, they have become the Flesh-eaters Peter and the elves oppose.
Review
The strongest aspect of the book is its sociopolitics. The various factions in play-- elves, men, and children--are all presented in a light that is both sympathetic and problematic. Each group strives to protect itself and, in so doing, sometimes attacks first and asks questions later. One understands why the elves hate the men, who are, indeed, destroying their world, and why the men hate the elves, who are, indeed, bewitching and deceiving them. As in real life, the crimes are real but motivated not by "evil" but by fear and need.
Everything else is fairly boring. Crucially, despite being over 400 pages long, the book offers almost no development. While Peter initially appears a playful, recognizably Pan-like character, it swiftly becomes evident that this is mostly a mask covering an agonized individual who has been enduring horrors and fighting battles for many centuries with a very adult sense of responsibility. He remains in this mode throughout the novel, with a slight--and not very well motivated--transformation right at the end. The bulk of the book consists of trials, battles, conflicts, etc. designed to highlight the dire straits of Avalon and the nasty side of Lost Boy life. They come steadily one after the other, attached to, at best, superficial character development and little rising action in the plot. There is ultimately some plot resolution, but it is so unconnected to real character or thematic development that it's a bit hard to care.
A Missed Opportunity
It may be that the book's lackluster storytelling particularly stands out because the concept invites so much more. The illustrations are tantalizing. It goes without saying that Brom is a fantastic artist, and his visual concept for Peter (and others) is immediately engaging. (I really did buy this book half for its cover.)
Moreover, the idea is a terrific jumping-off point. What if we caught up with Peter Pan in the early 21st century? What if Peter Pan "grew up" (and did not become Robin Williams)? What if the story actually did what Brom's afterword states he intended and show the "dark side" of Barrie's concept a hundred years on? It could have been brilliant.
The fundamental mistake was to make the story discontinuous with Barrie's. It should have been a sequel rather than a reboot. It should have built on the incredible power of the original rather than substantially ignoring the very concept that defines Peter Pan: the "gay and innocent and heartless" viciousness of perpetual childhood.
If I were to fic this concept, here's what I'd do. Keep the "dying Avalon" plot. Keep Peter in a position of genuine struggle at such a pitch and seriousness that he cannot spin it into "fun." Force him (like many an abused child) to be an "adult" out of sheer necessity because if he isn't, his Neverland will perish. But present this as an evolution from the truly carefree Peter of the late 19th century. Peter doesn't have to be 1500 years old. He comes to us as an emphatically Victorian construct, and transplanting his Victorian roots, so ably presented by Barrie, into the 21st century with a bunch of American kids would present more fascinating cognitive dissonance and sense of being displaced in time than Brom's pretense at an ancient origin. After all, a boy who is, say, 130 is really no less remarkable than a boy who's 1500.
Peter should also be completely human. Barrie's character is compelling (frightening) because we can imagine him as any little boy unmoored from the adult world. Making him an outcast half-breed faerie takes the chill out of this concept.
The basic arc of the story, then, would be Peter's progressive "growing up," the evolution of Barrie's "gay and innocent" boy into a gradually older, gradually grittier figure who must confront violence that has consequences in the company of the Lost Boys (and Girls) of the 21st century, who, as Brom rightly indicates, are not naive, upper class Victorian kids from the nursery, but themselves hyperaccelerated toward adulthood by everything from child abuse to modern media. The basic struggle of the story would be the tension between Peter's highly understandable desire to remain his old, carefree self and his mounting understanding of the need to think in a more systematic, more long-range mode. One aspect of this would be his cultivation of memory, his coming to realize that he no longer has the luxury of letting people die off and replacing them as though they'd never been. If he's truly leading an army, he needs to conserve both lives and the cohesiveness of group loyalty under constant strain, including honor for his followers' grief over fallen comrades.
The upshot of the story would be the irrevocability of Peter Pan growing up, because I don't think he could go backward, even if Avalon were saved. He might end the sadder, wiser child, much in the place where Brom first finds him: still playing at being the eternal boy but with a new consciousness that it's a masquerade and a sense of a different phase beginning to hatch.
The Passage of Time
For any update of Peter Pan to work, it requires a sensitivity to the passage of time. The timeless of the Peter amid the flowing of time around him is fundamental to the concept, all the more so if we have flowed a hundred years into the future of the tale we all grew up with.
It is deeply unfortunate, therefore, that Brom shows little facility for handling time. He notes he has done some research into ancient Britain to bring in aspects of Celtic mythology. He, likewise, nods at the early colonization of America by Europeans and the Civil War. But his text gives these things no weight. (At times, I wished Anne Rice had got hold of this idea; say what you will of her writing, she has a genuine love of historicizing.) The ancient world is stereotyped in exactly the way you'd expect from an average made-for-TV movie: mead hall, puritanical reverend, pirates saying, "That it be."
Indeed, Brom has virtually no sense at all of culturally specific language. He haphazardly applies some "old fashioned English" to the pirates, and makes a decent stab at the 1970s dialect of one of the Lost Boys, but by and large, everyone always speaks in contemporary American English. (Several characters speak in something like African American English when I am far from sure they are meant to be African American.) Anachronism is everywhere. For example, Peter in Celtic Britain is named... Peter. Five minutes with Google, however, informs me that "In England the Normans introduced [the name Peter] in the Old French form Piers, which was gradually replaced by the spelling Peter starting in the 15th century" (Behind the Name). In other words, Brom's use of the name is almost 1000 years away from historical plausibility. This is fairly indicative of the attention given to history throughout the story, and it's one of the greatest damages done to a concept that is all about the passage of time.
There should have been so much more here. Fic, anyone?
