Harry Potter and the curse of middle age: should fictional children ever grow up?
JK Rowlings beloved characters are taking to the stage as adults in The Cursed Child. But are fans ever ready for their childhood heroes to grow up? Leading authors have their say
Anthony Horowitz
Author of the Alex Rider series
Children shouldnt grow up, really and certainly not the heroes of childrens books. Take a look at the last chapter of Peter Pan, which comes with the oppressive title, When Wendy Grew Up. Wendy is now a mother with a daughter called Jane and they have this exchange:
Why cant you fly now, mother?
Because I am grown up, dear. When people grow up, they forget the way.
For Barrie, this was something of an obsession. His older brother, David, had died in an ice-skating accident at the age of 14, and the family took solace from the fact that the dead child would remain young for ever. This was certainly part of the inspiration for Peter Pan. All children, except one, grow up, he mournfully observed.
The best childrens books celebrate the innocence and joy of childhood. They capture and preserve it. Do we really want to know that Just William became an accountant or that Charlie sold his chocolate factory to Nestl and took up golf? Speaking personally, I felt a sense of betrayal when we glimpsed Harry as an adult at the end of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. I was reminded of a wonderful film, Joseph Loseys The Go-Between, which is as much about childhood as it is about love. At the end, the youthful Leo, played by Dominic Guard, is transformed into the elderly, ghost-like Michael Redgrave. Leo, youre all dried up inside, hes told and he doesnt disagree. Thats what growing up can do to you. Its what childrens books fight against.
Curiously, I once flirted with the idea of re-examining my own hero, Alex Rider, in his late 20s. He wouldnt exactly be old, but he would certainly be a wreck, psychologically damaged by all the terrible adventures Id put him through. I saw him in the opening chapter, waking up in a dirty, crumpled bed in a shabby room, rolling over and lighting two cigarettes; one for himself, one for the woman he was sleeping with. My publishers told me, politely, that it was a terrible idea. And they were right.
As it happens, I have recently begun a new Alex novel. But hes still a child. After surviving 10 missions, hes aged just one year from 14 to 15. Alex still embodies, for me, the resilience and the single-mindedness of childhood. I dont want to see him hurt. More to the point, nowadays I often meet people in their late 20s and early 30s who read him as a child and who have clearly not quite forgotten the joy they felt sharing his adventures. I feel the same about Hal and Roger Hunt in the Willard Price stories and Jim Hawkins in Treasure Island. Why would any writer want to sully that with the withering curse of old age?
Cressida Cowell
Author-illustrator of the How to Train Your Dragon series
I began writing How to Train Your Dragon when Id just had my first baby. Theres a moment as a new parent when you look in the back of the car and think, Theyre going to let me out of hospital with a baby? That feeling of excitement mixed with terror still visceral, years later was a huge inspiration to me as an author, because it made me think about what sort of childhood I had had, and what sort of parent I wanted to be.
Consequently, the heart of the How to Train Your Dragon series is all about growing up. The very beginning of the first book starts with Hiccup looking back: I was not a natural at the heroism business. I had to work at it. This is the story of becoming a hero the hard way
I include humour and illustrations because I want the books to be accessible and encourage kids to get into reading but actually, Im trying to get them to think about deeper issues. Why are there wars? Why do we need to look after the environment? What makes a hero? What sort of person is Hiccup growing up to be, and who do they want to be?
Growing up is also an integral, inescapable part of being a childrens author. I write and illustrate a book a year, but Im very aware that my audience is growing up at the same rate and I want them to stay with me. I write with a dual audience in mind: the books are for children, of course, but theyre also for the adults who often read with them. I set out with a very specific aim of trying to make the adult reading the book with the child cry (sorry, adults!). The ultimate ambition of a childrens author is to be part of their readers childhood, or parenthood, and, of course, to get children reading in the first place. A key part of that is getting the adults to enjoy bedtime reading as well: I believe that books read in your parents voices stay with you all your life.
I dont think that books have to have their characters growing up I love adventures of series, such as the Asterix or Tintin books. But for me, Hiccups journey towards heroism and growing up is the story, and my own, too, as a writer and a parent. And that first baby? Shes 18 this year, and leaving home, just as I have finished the last book in the series, How to Fight a Dragons Fury. Ill let you decide whether that is a coincidence or not
Charlie Higson
Author of the Young James Bond series
The thing about characters in childrens books is theyre not supposed to grow up. Just William managed to remain 11 years old for 50 years, from the 1920s right through to the space age. Bart Simpson has pulled off a similar trick, as has Dennis the Menace (although, who knows, he may yet appear in a Martin Amis novel as a disaffected, state of the nation adult who has problems with his rug). And as for Peter Pan, the whole point is that he never grows up, which is why hes so sinister and heartless hes a permanent boy with all of a boys limitations. The Spielberg film, Hook, with Robin Williams as a grown up Peter who has to regain his youthful spirit in order to set things right, seems to miss the point. I think Barrie presents Peters arrested development as lonely and rather tragic.
That said, ageing was always built in to Harry Potter. Each book took him through a year of his life. JK Rowling very cleverly kept the spirit of the books the same, and aimed them at a fairly consistent age group, even though Harry was growing up and facing new emotional challenges as the series progressed. And now shes done the obvious thing shes given Harry three school-age children, and one of them, Albus, fills the Harry Potter role. This is the alternative to the Just William model, to constantly refresh a popular series with new children, as was done in stories like the Chalet School books by Elinor Brent-Dyer.
My problem, when I was planning the Young James Bond series, was the opposite how to take a well-known adult character and show him as a boy. Ian Fleming would no doubt have been appalled at the idea. Bond says a few times in the original books that he had a fairly ordinary childhood and that the innocent boy he had been would not recognise the deadly adult he has become. But a series of adventure books in which the main character makes sand castles and goes to the pictures would not have gone down very well. So I used Bonds musings on his past as a starting point and I began my series with James as an ordinary boy starting big school. Hes already slightly set apart from the others because hes lost both his parents (all children in adventure books have to be orphans), but hes going to be put through the ringer. Over the course of the series I showed the traumatic, terrifying and yet exhilarating experiences that mould James into the damaged yet resourceful adult we meet in Flemings books.
Francesca Simon
Author of the Horrid Henry books
Will Horrid Henry ever grow up? What will Horrid Henry be like when hes an adult?, No, and I dont know is how I answer these questions when children ask, which they do, frequently. When you create a character, you may know him well, but you dont know everything.
What I do know is that Henrys magic is his youth. Lose that and you lose everything that makes him appealing and funny. Without his fizzing energy, his plotting, his squabbles with his younger brother, Henry deflates in my mind. I could write an adult character called Henry, but it would be someone else.
Horrid Henry isnt unique as a literary child who never ages. William Brown is forever young. So is Pippi Longstocking. Like Horrid Henry, the qualities that make them original, imaginative and fearless are tied up with both youth, and the constraints of youth fighting against conformity and the adult world they all reject.
Louisa May Alcott aged the March sisters, which works, though Ive yet to meet the person who treasures Jos Boys above Little Women. The reader gets the joy of finding out what happened next, but there is always loss, as the adult characters inevitably lack the folly, the insouciance and the possibility of their younger selves. We move from a world where everything is up for grabs to one where most doors slam shut. (Dont marry that boring professor!) Ive always admired JK Rowlings boldness in ageing her characters. What makes Harry, Hermione and Ron unique and compelling is much more than their youth: Harry Potter lives in such an extraordinarily detailed alternative universe that adulthood brings new challenges. In some ways, the world itself is more compelling than the characters, so keeping the magical background is what keeps the stories and the characters forever young.
Horrid Henry for prime minister? I dont think so. Horrid Henry the bank robber? Unlikely. Horrid Henry, Lord High Majesty and Ruler of the Universe? Now were talking.
Patrick Ness
Author of the Chaos Walking trilogy and A Monster Calls
I call this the First Four Years question. As a kid, I read and reread the Little House on the Prairiebooks over and over again (favourite book: The Long Winter. I wanted to be trapped in my own blizzard, still do). The final book you may never have heard of it, youre forgiven, see below is The First Four Years, which documents the titular time period of Laura Ingalls marriage to Almanzo. Its the shortest book in the series, caps everything off and finishes a glorious box set. Three decades after I first read Little House in the Big Woods, I am yet to reach the end of The First Four Years.
Thats not actually because I was necessarily uninterested in Lauras married life (though I doubt eight-year-old me cared that much). Its because (whisper it) its a pretty rubbish novel. They all get a little weird and libertarian by the end, thats true, but this one in particular is an unpolished draft and doesnt match up to the rest of the series. And it has no notable blizzards.
So theres your dilemma. If youre going to show your young characters as adults, it had better be good. Readers have a say in what their reading universe includes, and theyll leave you behind if you get it wrong. Having said that, I absolutely believe that its the author alone who needs to make this decision. If youve got something new to say, then absolutely say it. Stories come from all sorts of places and why not, if something grabs you and needs to be told?
This is the pressure that Rowling is under. Asking readers to pay for two nights of West End tickets is an audacious undertaking. But I like audacious undertakings. If by some unforeseen disaster, The Cursed Child doesnt work, a generation will do what I did with The First Four Years: pretend it doesnt exist and go back to the books I loved. But for the sake of boldness in childrens literature, for the sake of widening its already incredible scope, I hope its a barnstormer.
Michael Rosen
Author of Were Going on a Bear Hunt and Sad Book
JK Rowling took a big risk with the Harry Potter cycle when she let her heroes grow older. She triumphed over one tradition in childrens literature: the one that freezes its heroes in a state of permanent childhood. Now shes fleshing out their adult lives. Its all getting to be a bit like the TV series 7Up. Is Ron driving a taxi? Is Hermione teaching gender studies at the University of Sussex?
One of the many falsities of fiction that we accept quite happily is the non-ageing of characters as they appear across series and sequels. Perhaps it all started with tales of gods, goddesses and superheroes who may well start out as infants (or chunks of matter), grow up, but then plateau out into a state of permanent warring, lusting and vanquishing. Storytellers would garnish or add extra courses according to taste. Down on earth, the same goes for the animal heroes of folk tales and fables: Europes Reynard, north Americas Coyote, the Caribbeans Anansi. One generation of tales was like an invitation to people to add on new adventures. The cunning animal lived on.
The effect of all this is to offer us something we cant realise in life, a permanent youth in which we experience daily time but not lifespan time. By the end of the Victorian era, key examples from the canon of childrens literature were laying down a blueprint: the Alice books, George MacDonalds The Princess and the Goblin. In popular childrens literature chapbooks and comics the old folk tradition of ageless heroes, like the characters themselves, never died, whether thats 19th-century figures such as Aly Sloper or 20th-century ones such as Dennis the Menace.
With the two Winnie-the-Pooh books, AA Milne grappled with this permanent childhood problem in the last pages of the second book, apparently accepting that there is a place where Christopher Robin is going to, but where Pooh and Eeyore and the rest cannot follow. Thankfully, Just William, the Famous Five and the Secret Seven have never become the stockbrokers, MPs and headteachers they all sounded as if they would become.
Kate Saunders
Author of Five Children on the Western Front
If I loved a fictional child when I was a child, I always wondered what happened to them afterwards. Did Mary in Frances Hodgson Burnetts The Secret Garden grow up to marry gorgeous Dickon? Did Bobbie in E Nesbits The Railway Children marry the boy with the broken leg, who happened to be the grandson of the Kind Old Gentleman? And what about poor old Susan Pevensie in CS Lewiss Narniaseries? The end of The Last Battle made me want to shake the tweedy old misogynist until his dentures rattled. Susan is left all alone after a train smash whisks her entire family off to an eternity of tea with Mr and Mrs Beaver (still my idea of heaven), when her only crime was turning into a pretty young woman.
The point is that when great characters enter the readers imagination, they take on a life of their own. Millions have dreamed of the further adventures of Harry Potter will they be disappointed to see him on stage as a grownup with kids and a stressful job? This is the risk a writer runs, when he or she lets in the drab colours of real life. JK Rowling is far too brilliant to burst her own bubble, but some writers have shown that they cant be trusted with their own creations.
I was disappointed by LM Montgomerys endless sequels to her classic Anne of Green Gables. In the first book Anne is utterly charming, brimming with promise and possibility, and it was painful to watch her dwindling into the rather smug wife of a country doctor. I was never entirely satisfied with the later lives of the Fossil girls from Ballet Shoes either, when they made guest appearances in Noel Streatfeilds later novels (sadly I wont be alive when Ballet Shoes goes out of copyright so Ill never get to write about the stormy early life of Madame Fidolia).
While I was writing Five Children on the Western Front, in which the five children from Nesbits Psammead books grow up to experience the first world war, I was incredibly careful not to break faith with the spirit of the originals; I couldnt forget how much I loved them, and love isnt too strong a word to describe the feelings children have for their favourite fictional characters. Some of us never grow out of it.
Chris Riddell
Childrens laureate and author-illustrator of the Ottoline and Goth Girl series
SF Said
Author of Varjak Paw and Phoenix
When I first read Ursula Le Guins Earthsea books, they were a trilogy about a hero in his prime. In A Wizard of Earthsea (1968), The Tombs of Atuan (1971) and The Farthest Shore (1972), she told the story of Ged, also known as Sparrowhawk, as he grew from Gontish goatherd to world-saving wizard: a classic childrens book narrative.
That seemed to be the end of it. But then she found new stories to tell. In Tehanu (1990), she showed Ged living a life without magic, learning to take satisfaction in the pleasures and pains of an ordinary existence with Tenar, the priestess who shared his greatest adventure. The book follows her story as much as Geds. Then in The Other Wind (2001), Le Guin showed Ged near the end of his days: still wise, but almost an absence now, reconciled to his irrelevance. The story was about other characters finding their way without him.
Le Guin wrote a new story whenever she had something new to say. That seems to me exactly right. Ive never wanted to give my own characters new adventures in which nothing changes. Repetition seems to me a much bigger risk than letting them grow. So in my first book, Varjak Paw, Varjak is a kitten: a very young character who learns a secret martial art from very ancient cats. In The Outlaw Varjak Paw, he is a grownup cat, and the questions he faces are grownup questions about law and justice, politics and morality. I stopped there, because I didnt have another story to tell about him.
To my surprise, now a decade has gone by, I find myself thinking more and more about Varjak. He seems to be ageing with me. I now feel sure there will be a third book, in which the story comes full circle. Varjak will now be an old cat himself, teaching the secret martial art to much younger kittens: passing it on. That makes sense to me as the shape of a trilogy, and the shape of a life.
But to write a story about an old character, perhaps you should be old yourself, to know what it feels like. Im getting there faster than I thought possible, but Im not quite ready yet. I am keeping notes, though, making plans, gathering material for that time. Its comforting to know that far greater writers have made this journey. I look at Le Guins example. As she recently said of Earthsea: Authors and wizards learn to be patient while the magic works. I just hope readers can be patient too.
Jamila Gavin
Author of Coram Boy and the Surya trilogy
The first time I confronted this was in The Wheel of Surya, the first of the trilogy. Readers asked, What happened next? and I loved it. In Coram Boy, there is a development from boy to man within the novel. When you have created characters, you do grow up with them.
Dickens did it in Great Expectations, which I read as a child and again as an adult. He was interested in how the child develops into the man, and JK Rowling seems to have the same interest. With characters as strong as Harry, Ron and Hermione, I think it will be a success. Writers instinctively know when theres more to be discovered.
Laura Dockrill
Author of the Darcy Burdock books
Watching Darcy Burdock grow up has been one of the most gut-twisting experiences of my writing life. Creating and falling in love with a character, nurturing them and seeing them through a book series is the closest thing Ive ever known to being an actual real-life mum. As the writer, you start to care about the tiny things your character cares about; your favourite food becomes dippy egg and chips, your favourite colour is sparkles too. If Darcy was real, I know these things most likely would not be her favourite things for ever, but isnt it scary to think they could end up being mine? Your fictional character could end up growing up and leaving you behind.
I like to see my characters as fixed. Loyal. Take The Simpsons, for example. Bart doesnt one day have an Adams apple and Lisa never starts talking about her period pains. In one episode Bart gets a stupid tattoo, but in the next, where is the tattoo? Nowhere to be seen. Good. We love them because they are the same. They are our friends. Friends who appear when we want them to. Who keep making mistakes for us, so we dont have to. We write and read childrens books because we want to grasp that precious tender age of anything-could-happen-ness. I dont want to see Tracy Beaker argue with her boyfriend outside a pub, I dont want to see Sophie from The BFG with a walking stick and grey hair, nor do I want to see Max from Where The Wild Things Are sipping champagne at his gallery opening.
I dont want Darcy to get insecure about turning 30. I want her full of hope. Maybe its selfish. Maybe Im just terrified of change or maybe quite possibly its me who needs to do the growing up.
Leila Rasheed
Author of the Bathsheba Clarice de Trop books
I love the idea of my child characters growing up. In a sense, thats what childrens literature is always about children or teenagers learning and growing and developing so at the end of the story theyre a step closer to the adult they will one day become.
I am sure Bathsheba will grow up to be a happier person because of what happens to her and the choices (including the mistakes) she makes. Having said that, I can understand that readers might not want characters to grow up. As a child I loved the Earthsea books by Ursula Le Guin, but when I came across a fourth, Tehanu, in which Tenar is an adult, I felt as if Id been slapped. I shut the book and put it back on the shelf. I saw Tenar as a girl, not a woman.
Another traumatic moment was reading the first of the Laura Ingalls Wilder books that depicts Laura as a woman. The change from carefree child, often in danger but always, ultimately, safe because her parents loved her, to an adult with no safety net, was really shocking. Sometimes readers want a child to stay a child.
Jennifer Bell
Author of The Crooked Sixpence
Characters exist beyond the pages of a book. They live and grow in readers minds, especially when those readers are children whose imaginations are boundless. I would be fascinated to read about the journeys my favourite child characters were embarking on as adults, but I would be nervous too. After all they had gone through in their youth and all I had gone through with them would I really want to see what had happened to them? Would that kill the magic of the original story or trivialise it in some way?
It is an exceptionally powerful thing to see a child transform into an adult. In the time slip adventure Toms Midnight Garden by Philippa Pearce, young protagonist Tom befriends Hatty a girl he witnesses ageing each time they meet. As Hatty leaves her youth behind, the story inevitably darkens; she becomes more of a stranger. Ageing a child is used just as effectively in the final chapter of JM Barries Peter and Wendy, in which Mrs Darling and Nana have died, the lost boys are grown up and done for and Wendy is married with a daughter. When Peter sees Wendy as an adult he is terrified, and the reader is too. The brutality of the passage resonates throughout the whole story, forcing you to consider what it really means to grow up.
Philip Reeve
Author of the Mortal Engines quartet
My characters keep growing up on me. I dont plan it that way, because I seldom plan ahead when Im starting a new book. I just write it, and if Im aiming it at older children and teens, I tend to make the main characters 15 or 16. But then it turns out to want a sequel, and maybe evolves into a series. Time passes in the world Ive created, and I soon find that Im writing about adults.
Im not alone in this. The Harry Potter series is a good example. If readers start with The Philosophers Stone when theyre nine or 10, and read one book per year, theyll age at the same rate as Harry and co. When the books were new, and fans were waiting for each one to be released, that was exactly what was happening, and Im sure part of the affection todays twentysomethings feel for Potter comes from the sense that he grew up with them. But now that the whole series is available, its far more likely that a keen young reader who burns through the whole lot in a couple of months will read about 17-year-old Harry while theyre still nine or 10 themselves.
This is not a problem, of course. Fiction is all about putting yourself in someone elses shoes, and it can add to the thrill if theyre a few sizes too big. Contemporary childrens books tend to feature child protagonists, but I grew up reading books from the 50s and 60s, in which the characters were often grownups, like Biggles, or the heroes of Ronald Welchs military tales. Tolkiens hobbits are mostly well into middle age by the time their adventures begin. Many of Rosemary Sutcliffs historical novels, like Warrior Scarlet, follow their central character from boyhood into adult life. In one of them, Dawn Wind, he turns out to be a rather bitter and troubled adult, which Ive always thought was a brave move.
Because there is a problem in writing adult protagonists for children. Even the lives of happy children are beset with fears and difficulties bullies, school, exams. They tend to look forward to being grownups, when they imagine theyll be able to do what they want and cope with whatever life chucks at them. But a writer trying to write seriously about adulthood cant shy away from the fact that it involves a lot of worry, compromise and disappointment, and that many adults look back on childhood as the best time of their lives.
In the end, like everything, it comes down to tone. Are you aiming for fun, or comfort, or escapist adventure, or brutal honesty? Theres room enough in the broad church of childrens fiction for stories that look unflinchingly at growing up and for those whose brave young protagonists mature into happy adults. And theres also a place for characters who never age at all, and whose adventures unfold endlessly in an eternal golden childhood.
Harry Potter and the Cursed Child opens at the Palace theatre, London W1D, on 30 July. harrypottertheplay.com. The official script is published by Little, Brown on 31 August. To order a copy for the special price of 9 (RRP 20), or browse the rest of the books featured, go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over 10, online orders only. Phone orders min. p&p of 1.99.
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