Should children's books have a happy ending?
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Version 0 of 1. Amanda Craig, author and critic This year the Carnegie prize has surpassed itself in once again choosing a novel with the bleakest ending imaginable. Kevin Brooks's The Bunker Diary is about a kidnapped boy who never gets out. There is no hope for him. The Carnegie prize has form in choosing books whose heroes and heroines die – after all, it not only rewarded Sally Gardner's Maggot Moon but CS Lewis's The Last Battle, in which both the children and Narnia are killed off. Despite the occasional triumph for comedy, adventure and warmth, the prize's focus seems relentlessly downbeat. I'm not arguing for a sappy-happy story. Children love books in which bad things happen, from bullying to bereavement, but it seems to me that the best obey the fairytale rules, in showing how heroes are returned from the dark to hope, and the feeling that life still has something to offer. This is why readers return to them repeatedly, even as adults. As a children's book critic I feel strongly that books for the young need to take into account their emotional vulnerability. They don't have the defences we do when reading, say, Kafka, or John Fowles's The Collector (which shares Brooks's plot). Stories are what Francis Spufford called in The Child That Books Built "mood altering drugs". A book that makes a reader feel worse rather than better may deserve to be published (and I am a huge fan of Sally Gardner, Patrick Ness, Meg Rosoff and other winners), but it does not deserve to be promoted by the children's equivalent of the Booker prize. This is a specific audience. Robert Muchamore, author of the Cherub series of books and Henderson's Boys Being small and powerless gives children a thirst for justice. By the age of three, most kids have clear concepts of goodies and baddies. They love the happy endings in picture books, and get cross when Uncle Robert changes the ending so that the big bad bear gobbles up the little girl scout on the final page. This taste follows us through our teens and into adulthood. Cinemas are packed with audiences for James Bond and superhero movies. There is no real suspense: we know Batman will win while we're still in the popcorn queue. With sport, the outcome is less certain, but the happy ending when our tribe wins is all the more satisfying because of it. But while a childish thirst for happy endings satisfies and entertains us, the real world is so complex that unambiguously happy endings hardly exist. Did the big bad bear return to its den, unable to feed her starving cub with a tasty girl scout? And was the bear only hunting close to the scout camp because its natural habitat has been ripped up to make coffee tables? The Carnegie medal was created to showcase young adult fiction, and it would be pitiful if it wasn't open to nuanced arguments and the darker side of life. AC I am all for nuance, but that isn't the point. Children's books reflect the real world through a glass darkly, and what they do with this darkness is markedly different from the tropes of adult fiction. Many young adult novels currently focus on dystopia (The Hunger Games), and dying children (The Fault in Our Stars), but as adults well know the reality would be so much more horrible without love to soften the agony, and without the triumph of the young and brave over the old and wicked. In your Cherub books, the spies may swear and have sex, Robert, but in reality they would be raped, tortured and shot. The best children's fiction is about finding something inside yourself which also works in the real world – the power of courage, kindness, humour and imagination. Hunger, bereavement, bullying, powerlessness, terror, despair and even torture feature in children's books from Peter Rabbit to Harry Potter. They don't deny that bad stuff happens, but what they tell readers is that it can be endured, and overcome. Adult novels often reach different conclusions – but you'd better be as good as Tolstoy or Kafka to make that worthwhile. RM The spies in my Cherub books live in a world that is complex and dangerous. Although the setting is contemporary, I agree that it is no more the "real world" than that in a Lee Child novel or an episode of EastEnders. But is absolute realism a requirement for the depiction of complex arguments or grim truths? Happy endings necessitate a black-and-white world. But what is the mindset of a child who has grown up exposed only to goodies, baddies and happy endings? A hundred years ago, young men queued at recruitment offices to fight the evil Kaiser. Today, they watch online propaganda, switch fast-food uniforms for Kevlar and head for Iraq and Syria. After childhoods crammed with clear-cut villains and happy endings, is it any wonder they're conditioned to believe in fighting for justice and that ultimate happy ending: the promise of eternal life? I'm not Tolstoy or Kafka, but if a kid reads one of my books and works out that not only do the good guys not always win, but that a lot of the time you can't even work out who the good guys are, I'll be pretty pleased with what I've achieved. AC I'll grant you that classic children's fiction up to the 1960s tended to have clear-cut villains and happy endings, but after that it became much less black and white. Maybe you need to refresh your memory of the works of Philip Pullman, Katherine Langrish, Joan Aiken, Cressida Cowell, Anthony McGowan and even your rival in the world of children's thrillers, Anthony Horowitz, whose Russian Roulette is told from the point of view of a contract killer whom we come to understand as a person who has never had the chance to exercise mercy. All of these make complex arguments about moral choices. But my essential point is that children's fiction is, and should remain, a world apart. There's plenty of time for adults to discover that, alas, terrible things happen to good people who have done nothing to deserve it. And besides, children themselves have to deal with problems which adults tend to forget, such as what it's like to be beaten up for your lunch money, or sexually abused. That is why, as you say, they thirst for justice. However, I don't think terrorists are the ones whose hearts and minds have been fed on good books, though they may well have had their capacity for sympathetic imagination twisted by crass computer games. It's children's authors, not poets, who are the unacknowledged legislators of the world – the world as it should be, if not as it is. RM My mum read me Geoffrey Morgan's Soldier Bear when I was six. Based on the true story of Voytek, a bear cub befriended by a Polish regiment during the second world war, I howled with laughter as it rampaged through camp, stealing bras and getting drunk. But the book ends with all Voytek's comrades going home to their families, and the lonely bear caged in a zoo. I still remember sobbing desperately at my mum's side. But wasn't this a more valuable insight into the world than some Disneyfied version, where the bear trots happily into the sunset? And would my first taste of adolescent angst have been better served if Adrian Mole's parents got back together, and a session in the sack with Pandora cleared up his acne? Without the freedom to deliver a sad ending, many stories would lose the emotional power that makes them great. Do you really want a miracle cure for the terminally ill girl in The Fault in Our Stars? Would young readers get a better insight into the holocaust if The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas's main characters were plucked from the gas chamber and lived happily ever after? Children's writers must carefully consider the effect their stories have on young readers. But that's a different thing to making rules on how stories must end and vague assertions that our books must fit inside some cloyingly safe "world apart". Cherub: Lone Wolf by Robert Muchamore is published on 1 August |