I notice that a lot of my favorite stories are ones frequently dismissed as ‘for children:’ Harry Potter, The Hobbit, Avatar: The Last Airbender, Watership Down, heck, even the Godzilla series is frequently viewed as ‘kids stuff’ (yes, the series the kicked off with a nightmarish allegory of nuclear bombings is ‘kids stuff’). Actually, pretty much all of these stories are distinctly not what you might think of when you say “children stories:” they’re full of war, death, evil, gruesome details, and uncompromising depictions of evil. The Harry Potter series overtly likens its villains to the Nazis, complete with chilling depictions of show-trials and mass arrests, while the story of Avatar starts off with genocide and goes on to include parental abuse, sadism, and concentration camps. Watership Down, meanwhile, becomes downright gory towards the end (apparently the BBC is still receiving complaints about the film version nearly forty years after it was made: parents assume a movie about bunnies must be for children and are traumatized when the bunnies start tearing each other’s throats out). But, then again, the best children’s stories are often the ones filled with gruesome details and dire perils (note the popularity of, say, Roald Dahl). Kids are a lot more resilient about these things than we tend to give them credit for, and they prefer stories in which the bad guys are really bad and the good guys are really hard pressed. I remember when I was a kid my mental processes went something like “more people killed=worse bad guy,” and so I preferred villains who were genuinely bloodthirsty to the ones who simply declared themselves evil and wore black (but then again, I’m a rather odd fellow).
But that’s the thing: “children’s stories” does not mean “bad stories.” Children don’t start off liking bad literature and slowly develop into liking good literature. They usually have some sense of what is and is not good work, what is acceptable in a story and what isn’t. If you find a book that is popular with children, odds are you’ll find something worthwhile in it.
Personally I agree with C.S. Lewis, who said that if a story is any good to read for children, it’s good to read for adults. If it isn’t: if the grown-up finds it to be dull or unimaginative or stupid, then it wasn’t really any good to begin with. A good story is a good story, whether you’re ten years old, twenty years old, or fifty years old, and we should never be ashamed to look for good stories anywhere. It was only a few years ago that I read the Prydain chronicles, ostensibly for children (with their short length and rather simplistic prose) and found them to be engrossing works.
I think the trouble is that we’ve been conditioned to think of certain types of stories as ‘grown-up’ and other types as ‘for children.’ We think a grown-up story should be ‘realistic,’ that is, obey the rules we live by every day, like gravity, science, and so forth. It should take place in a world we recognize, it should be serious and somber in tone, with philosophical ideas brought up, criticized, and set aside as uncertain. It should have complex, or otherwise interesting prose, and should delve deep into the minds and souls of the characters. Now, all these things are well and good and can be part of good stories, but I don’t think there’s anything particularly ‘grown up’ about them. They’re just features that may or may not be present. They tend not to appeal to children, but then again, they tend not to appeal to many grown-ups either. They appeal to people of a certain temperament, and I suspect you could find children who would enjoy them just as easily as you could find adults that enjoy them, and if not it is only because the children haven’t yet been taught that they should enjoy them and are going purely by what they actually do enjoy. I suspect a large number of adults like these kinds of stories, stories by people like William Faulkner, Flannery O’Connor, Earnest Hemmingway, and Toni Morrison, less because they actually enjoyed them and more because they have been taught that they really should enjoy them.
Now, let me clarify: I don’t think any of these authors are bad writers (well, I was highly unimpressed by Morrison). O’Connor in particular is one of my favorites. I also don’t think being taught that you should enjoy something and so coming to enjoy it is necessarily a bad thing. Quite the reverse, I think it’s often the key to higher appreciation of art. I do think that something has gone wrong, however, when we start to think that only people like Faulkner or O’Connor are worth reading, or even are necessarily preferable to other stories. I like O’Connor very much, but on any given day I’d probably rather revisit Harry Potter.
I also think we err in assuming that intricate sentence structure, philosophical ambiguity, and rich narration make for a good story. The two aspects are separate: good writing and high intellectual examination may accompany and even enhance a good story, but they can never make a good story. Avatar may be an animated TV show, but it’s a very good story, which makes it preferable, in a way, to something like, oh, The Unvanquished, which didn’t impress me as a story at all. I cared much more about Aang, Katara, Sokka, and Zuko than I did the Satoris family, Ringo, or Cousin Drusilla. The former’s struggles, goals, and development felt a lot more important and ‘real’ to me than the latter’s, who I simply couldn’t have cared less about.
This points to the advantage of ‘children’s stories:’ whatever else they are, they have to be engaging. If they are not, they won’t be read. They have to catch and hold a child’s interest long enough to tell their story, since they can’t rely on the child reading for enlightenment or to admire their intricate descriptive prose. Therefore, while ‘grown-up’ books can be difficult and require a great effort on the part of the reader to be appreciated, a children’s book doesn’t have this luxury and, quite often, benefits from this limitation. Art from adversity includes catering to your audience. Watership Down has to be enjoyable to read in addition to being deep and philosophically rich because it is a book about rabbits. Camus’ The Stranger, being about humans, is free to be as thudding and difficult as it likes.
This is why many adults, unless they’ve been specifically trained not to, return to the beloved books of their childhood again and again. Here they have a good story that touches something inside them, but also wrapped up in an engaging, easily accessible style. It’s like the difference between going to a chic, five-star restaurant and dropping by the local steakhouse: the former may produce objectively better food, but the latter is more comfortable, you don’t have to get dressed up, and you prefer steak to duck l ‘orange most of the time anyway.
In conclusion, I honestly think children’s stories are oftentimes better as stories than most adult literature. I certainly tend to prefer them, and I get more out of them than I do more ‘mature’ works. Truth is wherever you find it, and a good story is a good story, whether it’s a somber work about the mid-twentieth century deep south or a series about the adventures of a giant, mutated, ray-shooting dinosaur. It’s just that the latter tends to be more enjoyable.
