By Michael Bouman, Executive Director, Missouri Humanities CouncilIt’s lonely being the “blog captain” here. No one appointed me to that post. But since I created this blog as a voluntary service for the ReadMOre enterprise, I feel obliged now to create some content.
Call me Michael. I’m an avid reader, not much of a sailor, and I remember the Peter Pan story from my coloring book days more than fifty years ago. I direct the Missouri Humanities Council, which is an avid supporter of public book discussion programs and is donating web site hosting for ReadMOre. ReadMOre isn’t “our” project. It belongs to a loose association of readers and librarians and literary critics.
Having just finished all three books for this year’s programs, I’m happy for the experience. I have loved the idea of ReadMOre since its invention several years ago. As a grass-roots project, it had to “get its sea legs” under it, to use a metaphor appropriate to these three books. We’ve had some wonderful books to discuss.
We’ve also had the challenge of inventing a “culture” for this association. How would we select each year’s book? Whose input would be invited and welcomed? How would we evaluate competing good options? How would we nurture public interest in participating?
These are still open questions. Two years ago we invited people to submit short family memoirs involving their fathers. That was in connection with a Calvin Trillin family memoir. We didn’t have a lot of submissions, but there are more than a handful, and I love them all. We’d like to find ways to promote online engagement and discussion as well as live discussion.
So let’s get into Peter and the Starcatchers. I began with the book itself, not with the Reader’s Guide that’s on the web site. I didn’t review the original Peter Pan story and didn’t look up it’s author, James Barrie, until just now.
I knew his name from long ago. I played Lord Loam in our high school junior class play, Barrie’s The Admirable Crichton, which is a comedy of the English class system. As in the Peter Pan story, which came out at about the same time, the characters spend several years marooned on an island. There must be something about life on a faraway island that stimulated in Barrie’s mind.
Wikipedia informs me that Barrie popularized the use of the name Wendy in Western Culture. So if you’re a girl named Wendy, you probably owe a debt of gratitude to J.M. Barrie. If you’re a boy named Wendy, I suggest you write a country song.
So…we dive into the book, knowing it is the work of two authors who collaborated by e-mail. I’ve long been a fan of Dave Barry’s humor, but I had not read anything by Ridley Pearson until ReadMOre selected this trilogy. Part of my attention was always on the “voice” of the narrative, to see if there were places that I thought were definitely in Dave Barry’s voice.
The book begins with a thoroughly rank environment. It would be a fun writing assignment to invent some other story that begins with as many disquieting features. The sense of bad odors is a favorite anchor throughout the trilogy, and I surmise this is Dave Barry appealing to the gross-out sensibility of the pre-teen boy reader. Maybe I’m wrong.
Look at all that’s bad on page one: Peter and the other boys are orphans who have lost their bearings. Their bearings were pretty bad, but now they seem bound for a nasty sea voyage on a nasty ship. They got to the ship in a hot, nasty carriage in which their nasty body odors were all there was to breathe, and the nasty man in charge of sending them on their way like to rough them up.
As the orphan boys are waiting on the dock, another scene unfolds in a warehouse, and we meet THE COMMON MAN in the person of Alf, a seaman assigned to heavy lifting and all manner of menial task.
Alf was a simple man, of simple wants. What he hoped to get from life was food that was soft enough to chew, a place to sleep out of the rain, and some grog now and again. Alf had never known true happiness, and he didn’t expect to.
I wondered when I read that evocative passage, “what is this true happiness that Alf doesn’t expect to know?” The bit about “food soft enough to chew” is a wonderful way to pull the reader into the harsh conditions of folk in Alf’s situation.
And it is this deft stroke concerning Alf’s small expectations that leads directly into Alf’s shocking discovery of sheer wonder. I could not help thinking of the parallel narrative device in the Christian gospels, in which shepherds, not merchants or professors, are the first to hear the news about the coming of wonder into their world. And so, on page 10, the mysterious element of Wonder comes into our story to stay.
Another story that came to mind is Richard Wagner’s Ring Cycle, a story of stolen treasure and the world-ending consequences of greed. Wagner also wrote an opera titled The Flying Dutchman. We’ll get to “world-ending” and a flying dutchman in a later blog.
Quite soon after Alf’s encounter with wonder, we meet a tyrannical pirate captain called Black Stache for his outlandish facial hair. The authors must have had a good time writing up the rank particulars of food, clothing, and smell on a pirate ship.
If Black Stache laughed, you laughed. If he snarled, you snarled. If he breathed in your direction, you ran for cover. “Ratbreath” his sailors called him behind his back. It was said that he liked to eat vermin raw, with a touch of sea salt.
The sense of the disgusting carries the pirate part of the story along. Here’s a careful description of Black Stache’s cabin:
There was a tentative tap at the door.
“Come in!” growled Black Stache. Smee entered and gagged; the cabin smelled like a dead cow. This was because there were, in fact, several pieces of dead cow on Black Stache’s bunk, as well as the half-eaten carcass of a turkey. Gnawed remnants of other meals littered the floor. Flies buzzed everywhere.
The ship carrying to orphans is also a scene of disgust. The orphans are to be kept alive, so they receive rations so horrible that they don’t eat it until forced by starvation. Better food is served to the better sort of people in better cabins. This horrible ship, The Neverland, has one precious passenger, a girl named Molly, who is Peter’s age and who communicates with porpoises.
I’d better tell you here and now that I don’t intend to leak the whole story in this blog. You’ll have to read it.
When you do, I hope you’ll get on the ReadMOre bulletin board or write comments to this blog when you find story elements that remind you of other stories you’ve seen or read.
For example: in this story, all of the characters converge on an island populated by the Mollusk People. These are the natives who J.M. Barrie had named The Pickaninny Tribe. Dave Barry and Ridley Pearson have given these people an overhaul as well as a distinctive language that I suspect they borrowed from a 1970s film comedy about African Bushmen titled The Gods Must Be Crazy.
Tell me, what do you think of the mermaids? Is their story a commentary on the concept of evolution? Is there a meditation on human consciousness embedded in this young-adult novel?
Pretty soon, I’ll write a blog about the second book of the trilogy, so please keep up.
+++ Recent Comment from The Never Fairy +++
(We've moved this blog to Blogger after two days at another site, and are copying below the first comment on this blog.)
Though I found “Peter & the Starcatchers” to be a great adventure book, the fact is it really has little to do with Peter Pan. It’s as if all things Peter Pan happen within the last twenty pages…and all of it is out of synch with Barrie. For one thing, Peter’s origins were in Kensington Gardens, not an orphange.You might be interested to know about “Peter Pan’s NeverWorld,” a sequel based on Barrie’s notes for one. Unlike other expansions, this one does not go contradict Barrie. It’s not out yet, but it will be soon.
Happy reading! Believe!
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