When is a children’s book not a children’s book? JK Rowling and Philip Pullman have changed the answer to that question. If we see an adult reading one of their books we don’t think it’s a sign of regression. We think it’s proof of the new freedom to cross what used to be barriers.
And how does this affect our view of children’s books from the past? Do we expect the new dispensation will allow them to escape their categories as well? Treasure Island is an interesting case in point. When it was first published in 1883, Robert Louis Stevenson made no bones about it being a “boy’s adventure story”, and when he discussed its origin in other pieces of writing by other writers, he confirmed the impression.
By taking elements of his narrative from Washington Irving and Daniel Defoe (as well as lesser-known figures such as WHG Kingston, Captain Frederick Marryat and Charles E Pearce), he allied his own tale with others that were designed to make a specific appeal to younger readers. To this end, he cheerfully admitted, “Plagiarism was rarely carried further.”
He wanted to create an archetype, and he did. Nowadays all pirates (though not Somali pirates, interestingly) are in some sense a version of Long John Silver, even when they have got two legs – think of Captain Jack Sparrow. In the same sort of way, all stories of treasure-hunting have Jim Hawkins’ journey in the Hispaniola as their ghostly counterpart. That’s part of the appeal, of course: when we read Treasure Island we feel that we’re in at the beginning of something.
Yet in order for the book to keep working, it obviously has to be exciting as well as distinguished – and for that to happen, childhood impressions have to coalesce with adult ones. In my own case, this is tricky because I didn’t read Treasure Island as a child. Not because my parents and I had anything against it in particular – we weren’t much in favour of books in general. I read Beatrix Potter, pretended to read The Wind in the Willows, then closed my eyes for 10 years and opened them again to find I was doing my A-levels.
It was only when I got to university that I started to catch up and read a lot of things I might reasonably have been expected to know already – Treasure Island among them. I would have been 19 then and the book certainly passed the excitement test. In fact, I still find it impossible to read it (especially the opening chapters) without inventing a childhood I never had, and half-scaring myself now as I wish that I had done then. The isolated inn; the arrival of Billy Bones; Blind Pew tap-tapping through the mist; the unseen but unignorable one-legged man; the delivery of the Black Spot … Stevenson wrote the scenes very quickly (he wrote the whole first half of the book in about a fortnight, in fact) and the speed of his creating shows in brilliant ways. Everything has a feeling of rush and dash and hurtle – to the extent that Jim never has time to think about the consequences of any event. Things just happen, dreadful things – natural deaths, unnatural deaths – and then another thing happens. It’s a weirdly existential universe.
To put all this another way: Treasure Island defies its original categorisation as children’s (or more specifically boy’s) literature for a number of overlapping reasons. Because the memories (for those who have them) of enthralled early readings survive into later life and become part of our adult fabric. Because the excitements created by the story have an archetypal and enduring resonance. Because Stephenson writes extremely well, with a speed, economy and eye for metaphor that appeals equally strongly (though possibly for slightly different reasons) to adults as much as it does to children. And because beneath the limpid surface of the prose, Stevenson maps some seriously interesting emotional states, which also speak as powerfully to adults as they do to children.
At the centre of them lies a complex story about father-son feelings – it’s no exaggeration to say that this operates as the secret engine of the book (and of many other books by Stevenson as well). Our narrator Jim’s actual father is already ill when the book opens, and dies shortly after the initial skirmish with the pirates: Jim has very little time to grieve for him (as he also has very little time for reflection of any kind in what follows) but once the trip to the island is proposed, he finds himself in a proxy-son relationship with the most complicated character in the book. With Mr Silver.
Looked at from one point of view, Silver is a murderer, a devilish deceiver, and violent demon – with a large blond face “like a ham”. From another point of view, he is resourceful, brave, canny, ingenious, clever in his manipulation of people, and a sociably minded good cook. No wonder Jim finds him attractive as well as alarming.
No wonder, too, that when Silver claims to recognise something of his younger self in Jim (“I’ve always liked you, I have, for a lad of spirit, and the picter of my own self when I was young and handsome”) we sense that he is doing more than simply getting Jim on side.
He’s noticing something in Jim’s own character that is acquainted with vice, with greed, with the idea of being fallen. Noticing, in fact, that everyone on board the Hispaniola, pirates and non-pirates, is an opportunistic “gentleman o’ fortune”. And as the action develops and the excitement builds, we realise that we are being presented at the same time with a very subtle portrait of the guilts and griefs – and the attractions and revulsions that flow from these things – that form the foundation of this and many other father-son relationships. Jim and Silver are bound together, whether they like it or not. “I’ll save your life,” Silver says to him at one point, “if so be as I can – from them. But, see here, Jim – tit for tat – you save long John from swinging.”
There are plenty more examples of such (as it were) “adult” themes incorporated into the (as it were) “young” adventure story. Themes that tend to cluster around various notions of uncertainty. Not just the uncertainty of the narrative (will the Hispaniola arrive safely, will various plots be discovered, will the treasure be there?) but uncertainty of a more fundamental kind. We find, for instance, that different kinds and classes of character are all made to speak in slightly different languages, so that communication between them is constantly on the verge of breaking down. (The squawking of the parrot, Captain Flint, is an extreme version of this.)
In the same sort of way, we find that animals are at one point dismissed as “dumb creatures”, only to see that people are continually presented in images that draw attention to their creaturely qualities: people are variously described as being “as conceited as a cock upon a wall”, or as filthy as rats, or as leaping like a cat upon a mouse, or as rising early like an early bird, etc. The effect is both to make us think that creatures are not so dumb after all, and also to suppose that the behaviour of the characters in the book puts their humanity at risk.
But never in ways that allow the undoubted darkness that lies below the waterline of Treasure Island to erupt and overwhelm the adventure-life that happens on the surface. Bad things happen, sure, and the island itself is a kind of poisonous nightmare (perhaps the nightmare of adolescence, in which Jim has to sort out his feelings about his dead father and find a responsible way to achieve his independence). The drive towards home and resolution, however, is never really in doubt. This, as much as the book’s subtleties is, of course, a part of its enduring appeal.
The adaptation about to be unveiled at the National Theatre in London is the latest in a long line of reprintings, re-illustratings and adaptations for screen and stage. Yet the balance of its achievement is what makes this appeal so significant and impressive. As the lights come up and we see the silhouette of Treasure Island on the horizon, the thrill of our adventure can’t block out our memories of Marlow, in Heart of Darkness, staring from the deck of his own ship into the dark heart of the Congo wilderness.
• Treasure Island is on at the National Theatre. Andrew Motion talks about the work of Robert Louis Stevenson, whose novel Treasure Island inspired his own books, Silver and The New World, on 23 January, 5.30pm, Olivier theatre, London SE1, nationaltheatre.org.uk/discover/platforms/andrew-motion
