Lately, I have had a fascination, almost a hunger, for children’s stories. Well, young adult stories. At first, I couldn’t figure out what it was. Was I just too tired to read my normal range of fiction? Bored? Regressing into stupidity and a smaller vocabulary?
Then, randomly playing songs on my iPod, I heard David Crosby’s “Hero”. It has a couple of lines that struck a chord:
“It was one of those great stories that you can’t put down at night. The hero knows what he has to do, and he wasn’t afraid to fight. The villian goes to jail while the hero goes free. I wish it were that simple for me.”
… and …
“And the reason that she loved him was the reason I loved him, too. He never wondered what was right or wrong; he just knew.”
That’s the attraction; the young adult stories that I’ve been reading address the adult problems of the world, with black and white solutions – absolutely wrong or right – and it’s O.K.
Harry Potter and Lord Voldermort who is unquestionably bad – Lord Voldermort gets it in the end, and even if there is a cost, it’s unquestionably worth it. It’s a battle unquestionably worth fighting.
Thomas Pullman’s Lyra in The Golden Compass (which I read for the first time years ago, and have picked up again since seeing the movie) and subsequent stories – … along with Madam Coulter…
Fiction with clearly defined, clearly bad, bad guys and clearly defined, clearly good, good guys – even when they have flaws – is just soothing, because everything is either right or wrong, good or bad, and no one sits on the fence. Those who do are traitors, and therefore bad, even if they occasionally contribute to whatever good is up to.
Unfortunately, life isn’t ever that clear, and people such as my DH who see just about everything in terms of black and white drive me absolutely bonkers. The world isn’t black and white. Those stories are fictions, because, magic aside, they wouldn’t really happen that way in the real world. Hardly anyone can be good (or bad) all the time, and the situations we face are rarely clean-cut either. There’s always at least two sides to everything. So it’s soothing to get into a fiction where right and wrong are as clearly opposite as black and white.
Of course, this type of fiction is always a little shallow; the best stories are the ones that mash it all up (Ender’s Game, for example). Why? Because they are a better reflection of reality, of ourselves, and easier to connect to and really feel. But it’s not as easy to cheer our characters on, because we see do a little of the not-so-good along with the good. We want to smack them upside the head and yell, “You moron! what the hell were you thinking?!?!?” If you notice, young adult fiction doesn’t often have the hero do things that warrant that.
As a kid, those simplified versions of the world act as a sort of lesson – here’s what to expect when you get there, and here’s the moralized ideal of how to act when you face whatever it is. Which, I supppose, is as good a starting point as any. As an adult, though, it’s a nice escape back into a simpler place where those very same moralized ideals rarely work out-of-the-box.
