Children's Fiction: Towards the end of JM Barrie's Peter Pan and Wendy, the text which acquaints most readers with the story usually known simply as Peter Pan, there is a moment which encapsulates the essential theme of what has become a classic in the canon of children's literature.
The three Darling children, escorted by Peter Pan, have returned to their Kensington home after their adventures in Neverland, and their parents welcome them as Peter looks on. We read: "He had ecstasies innumerable that other children can never know; but he was looking through the window at the one joy from which he would be forever barred." It is this tussle between the delights of eternal childhood and the price to be paid for them which, appropriately, now lies also at the heart of Geraldine McCaughrean's "official sequel" to the Barrie original.
The children who had been the "Lost Boys" are now, some 20 years later, the "Old Boys", those of them, that is, who have survived. For this is 1926 and the Edwardian England which served as backdrop for the Barrie story has changed, not least because of what has happened in the trenches of the first World War. Even in Neverland, which now, in the form of dark dreams, haunts the men who had once been boys, the golden idyll has, apparently, been showing signs of becoming tarnished. As an emblem of what has been going on, Peter's usual leaf covering has been discarded and replaced by the "blood-red leaves of Autumn: Virginia creeper and maple".
Endowed once more, even if only briefly, with the secrets of flying and of growing young, our "lost boys" are now - in most cases - conventional and respectable middle-aged and middleclass males. They retrace their childhood journey to their changed domain, accompanied by the woman who is now Mrs Wendy, "a grown woman and as sensible as can be" (she had been one of the first of the old gang to sense the changes which had occurred). Their initial encounter with the newly garbed Peter indicates that, whatever else may have altered, the boy himself seems as cocky, self-centred and sharp-tongued as they recall.
"I am dying!" he proclaims histrionically, before going on to explain that his problem is boredom, a malady which he sees their arrival as helping to cure. "The best adventures in the world" will be the remedy.
And, for a while at least, there is no shortage of these, no lack of inventiveness on the children's (or McCaughrean's) part in sustaining a succession of diverting and playful interludes. Now declared by Peter to be members of The League of Pan, the resuscitated children embark on a journey on a make-believe train, survive a tempestuous storm and pursue dragons. They set sail, under Peter's red-coat captaincy, on a voyage of discovery and treasure-hunting on the Jolly Roger (now re-named the Jolly Peter) and confront the SS Sharkey and its piratical crew of throat-slitting redskins. Most engrossingly of all, they become caught up in a travelling circus and more than caught up in Ravello, the "tangle of manhood" who is its proprietor. It is Ravello who provides the hook - so to speak - on which most of the rest of the story so cleverly hangs, complete with some very mischievous twists and turns en route.
Entertaining, beautifully paced and skilfully structured as her narrative is, the final impression left by McCaughrean's novel - as with the Barrie original - is one of poignancy, symbolised in the haunting, yearning music which emanates from Slightly's clarinet: "Better loved ye canna be./ Will ye no come back again?" Much more than a mere piece of literary pastiche, Peter Pan in Scarlet, while having echoes of Barrie's self-deprecating, ironic tone, succeeds in delivering fresh insights into the energising potential of children's imagination and into how - for all of them except one - that imagination will eventually and inevitably be trimmed by the realities of an adult world.
Robert Dunbar is a commentator on children's books and reading
Geraldine McCaughrean will read from Peter Pan in Scarlet at Draíocht, Blanchardstown, Dublin, on Thurs as part of the Children's Book Festival www.childrensbooksireland.com
Peter Pan in Scarlet By Geraldine McCaughrean Oxford University Press, 275pp. £12.99