nnozomi

I was thinking about books which are focused on a thirteen-year-old, and (sometimes) meant for readers of about that age, but in which the adult characters are more compelling to me. The three examples I’d like to discuss are National Velvet (Enid Bagnold), Growing Up Weightless (John M. Ford), and King and Joker (Peter Dickinson).

National Velvet is, of course, one of those books that’s always getting described as a “much-beloved children’s classic” etc etc. I think that does it a gross injustice. It was written as a children’s book, and I certainly read it and loved it when I was a kid—but the language is complex and many of the themes, now I think on it, not child-directed at all. The main story may be standard horse-book fare (Velvet, the youngest and plainest of four sisters in an English village between the wars, wins an uncontrollable horse for a shilling and rides it to victory in the Grand National), but nothing else is. In particular, when I reread it now I find myself increasingly fascinated by Velvet’s mother, the onetime Araminty Potter. At nineteen, Araminty swam the English Channel (“against the tide, in a terrible dirty night in a storm…it was a bigger thing than anything that’s been done since”), but when we meet her she is the wife of the local butcher, mother of five, fat and stolid. We never see her as an unsympathetic character: Velvet adores her, and Mi—the down-to-earth young man, short of dreams for himself but full of them for Velvet, who makes Velvet’s horse-dreams real and whose father was Araminty’s trainer—all but idolizes her. She and her husband, interestingly, show us one of the two romantic relationships in the book. Araminty and William are anything but the golden-haired couple their oldest daughter Edwina and her Teddy are, both middle-aged (when I was a kid I thought of Velvet’s mother as vaguely “old,” but the math suggests that she’s only thirty-nine), overweight, sunk deep in daily life, undemonstrative; but the understated conversation (“Love don’t seem dainty on a fat woman,” she says, “…you always was a nice chap”) they have late in the book shows the solidity of their relationship, and gives to the narrow-minded, unimaginative William another dimension in his love for an unconventionally attractive woman.

Growing Up Weightless is science fiction, of course, young adult or not depending on your reading. It’s a book with many facets, set on a recently independent Moon. The point-of-view characters are Matt Ronay, at thirteen ready to choose his future career and desperate to get away from his politically significant father’s influence, and his father Albin (usually referred to by his last name), a reluctant politician whose true vocation is music. I have always found Albin Ronay’s story more interesting, maybe because I was already into my twenties when I discovered the book—if I’d been ten or eleven, I might have found Matt and his friends more compelling. Frustratingly, Ford never tells you exactly what he’s doing in any of his story lines, it’s all guesswork and hints, but we might piece together the story of a once romantic young Albin who was ready to give up his life for the Moon colony, and who instead gave up his lover—another man—to marry and produce the next generation. And who then found himself gradually drawn away from composing and conducting, his other true love, to struggle with the morally dubious politics of keeping the colony going. (“Is that what you think you’ve been doing? Compromising yourself for twenty years?”) The no-right-answers complexity of the life Ronay has ended up with, based on the best of intentions, emphasizes Matt’s thirteen-year-old naiveté.

I hesitate a little to add King and Joker to the list, because I find its thirteen-year-old heroine, Princess Louise, more interesting than Velvet or Matt—readers of this blog, if there are any, will know I hold Peter Dickinson in the highest esteem—but still, it’s similar in a way. Louise is the second child of King Victor II (was it?) in a subtly alternate 1970’s England; the book is a mystery involving the truth of Louise’s parentage and her introduction to the confusion of adult relationships in general—damn, I can’t even begin to summarize it, but it’s a coming-of-age novel in a way as well as a murder mystery, and like all Dickinson’s best is rich and subtle and deeply interesting. One thing I have noticed on repeated reading, though, is how central the character of Louise’s father King Victor is. King of England since age ten, short, bald, highly sexed and attractive to women, a qualified doctor of ferocious intelligence, short-tempered, affectionate to his family, ruthlessly cynical and realistic—it’s in some ways typical of Dickinson to make even his secondary characters this extraordinary.

I’ve been reading fanfiction lately, as I mentioned somewhere, and I wish I were a good enough writer to attempt fanfiction for any of these books. Imagine a novel centered around Araminty Brown (what were the options for a physically powerful, enduring, taciturn, working-class girl in 1905 or so? How did she come to train for the Channel swim in the first place? Did she dream of other futures than the one she got?) or Albin Ronay (he gets half a book or so, granted, but I still want to know what happened before and after) or King Victor (all the things in his life that Louise, as his daughter and still a young teenager, didn’t or couldn’t see). Writers should live twice as long as other human beings.