Growing up in Narnia...

[Pyan]

Reading the thread on the growth of the main characters in the Harry Potter books made me think about the same sort of thing in other YA series, specifically the works of CS Lewis.

Does anyone else find the following a little, well, odd?

We're asked to believe that after the events of nine-tenths of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, the Pevensies grow up, become adults, rule the country and generally live their lives up to full adulthood. In fact, the events of The Horse and his Boy take place entirely within this "Golden Age of Narnia".

Yet, when Aslan decides it's time for them to go back to the Shadowlands, they're casually dumped back into this world, having lost 15 years of growth, changes in appearance, language, clothes, etc - and they just shrug it off, and go back to being kids again. The effect on the girls especially, having to go back to prepubescence, must have been traumatic in the extreme, with the major physical changes they must have gone through in Narnia cancelled out.

I wonder if CSL realised the oddness of this premise as well, because the Pevensies are the only children drawn into Narnia to go through this. Polly, Gregory, Jill and Eustace all return after only a few months, not enough to make any real difference between their Narnia ages and their ages here.

 

[Teresa Edgerton]

Perhaps Lewis was uncomfortable even thinking about the physical changes little girls go through at a certain age.

He certainly didn't take kindly to Susan growing up in the real world.

 

[Pyan]

He wouldn't be alone there, either - Enid Blyton's Famous Five, and the Swallows and Amazon kids in the Arthur Ransome books ignore the facts of life in the same way.

 

[The Procrastinator]

I think that's one of the things that makes Narnia a lot more magical to read when you're a kid. I have to say if I read it as an adult not having the nostalgia of my childhood dreams to buoy me up, I would not be that impressed...

 

[Teresa Edgerton]

Although it's also a feature with a lot of series books written for adults that the main characters don't seem to age appreciably, no matter how much time passes between books. I refer mainly to books outside of the SFF genre, particularly detective novels, where the world changes around the main character and yet he or she remains ever the same age. In these cases, it's generally because the character is not particularly youthful, and to show him or her twenty or thirty years older would be to rob them of the powers of mind and body they possess at the beginning of the series.

I was discussing this same thing with a friend just he other day, in regard to Ngaio Marsh's hero, Inspector Alleyn. When she begins writing about him, he is in his forties. He falls in love, eventually wins and marries the lady of his choice, they are parted for a period of time by World War II, on being reunited they eventually become the parents of a little boy, who is then about twenty when the last books are written. Inspect Alleyn, meanwhile, can't have aged more than ten years at most.

But at least, like Lord Peter Wimsey, he has a life in which the typical events of an ordinary life occur (no matter how extraordinary the circumstances) in a more or less typical progression.

So it's not just writers of children's books refusing to allow their little people to grow up; other writers do the same sort of thing, refusing to allow their big people to grow old.

(In soap operas, on the other hand, they'll sometimes age kids several years while they're off at summer camp, in order to integrate them more fully into the action of the story. It's called SORAS -- soap opera rapid aging syndrome -- and when it happens several times, a character can go from babyhood to adulthood in an amazingly short period of time, sometimes outpacing other children who were already toddlers when they were born.)

 

[Pyan]

You can work out the year of each Wimsey from internal evidence in the books, though, and DLS does change him as he ages. There is a deal of difference between the character in Whose Body? and Gaudy Night.

Campion, in the books by Margery Allingham, goes through a similar process.

On the other hand, there are great swathes of Miss Marple and Poirot books by Agatha Christie when the protagonists don't seem to age in the slightest...

 

[Teresa Edgerton]

There is a deal of difference between the character in Whose Body? and Gaudy Night.

Yes, he does change. So much that it rather strains credulity. However, I was probably unclear. I wasn't pointing him out as a character who doesn't change, but as one like Alleyn who does go through life changes (although in the case of Marsh's hero, without adding a wrinkle to himself).

But to return to the topic: if you are writing a series of books for young children, and you want it to continue to appeal to children in in a certain age group (and not, like Rowling, to readers who get older along with the characters), then you don't want to let your characters age to the point where they cease to be of interest to readers in that particular age group.

Actually, in the first couple of books (as we know) Lewis used a group of characters of different ages to broaden the appeal. E. Nesbit did the same in her children's books (though the age span was not so great), and so did Edgar Eager, both of them effectively, I think. I wonder why Lewis abandoned that approach?