Geraldine McCaughrean
PETER PAN IN SCARLET
275pp. Oxford University Press. £12.99.
0 19 272620 X
It is not long since we marked the centenary of the first performance of J. M. Barrie’s Christmas play Peter Pan in December 1904. But it is rather the seventieth anniversary of Barrie’s death, in June 1937, that underlies the publication of Geraldine McCaughrean’s new Pan adventure. Next summer, Great Ormond Street Children’s Hospital will lose the rights in the play (and its several prose offshoots) that Barrie gave it in the 1920s. A competition to write an “official sequel” before that deadline was won by McCaughrean, a prolific and resourceful children’s author. As the hospital will receive a share of the proceeds from the book, it would take a black heart to begrudge any commercial success it may have; but charity aside, Peter Pan in Scarlet is a treat, combining the observance due to Barrie’s ground rules with an effervescent fancy of its own, in an outcome both more rigorous and more delightful than her sponsors had cause to expect.
McCaughrean sets her narrative in 1926, when the original explorers, Wendy and John Darling and the six Lost Boys, have grown up to be the mothers, judges and musicians they were meant to be. Yet in the spring of that year, each is suddenly troubled by dreams of mermaids, redskins, hooks – signs, as they see them, of trouble in Neverland. Recovering a sort of infancy by dressing up in their own offsprings’ clothes, they fly to investigate, with minor changes in personnel: Michael Darling, it emerges, has been “lost” in the Big War. (Among the five Llewelyn Davies brothers for whom Barrie made up the stories of “the boy who never grew up”, the eldest, George, died in Flanders; Michael, his favourite, died, or committed suicide, in a boating incident at Oxford in 1921: events which McCaughrean stitches, with admirable discretion, into her story’s subconscious.)
Alas, they find Neverland, against its special nature, in the grip of autumn and corruption. The red of the trees is the only fair colouring in a show of ecological horrors: a polluted lagoon, the washed-up ribcage of a mermaid, pathetic paper dragons that they “kill” like wanton boys. But the gravest change appears in the sulking, petulant person of Peter: “It was Peter Pan and it was not. His suit of skeleton leaves was gone, and in its place was a tunic of jay feathers and the blood-red leaves of autumn: Virginia creeper and maple”.
The sense in which this red Peter is “not himself” is the catalyst of McCaughrean’s plot. She seems here to have taken her cue from one of the many densely speculative “stage directions” of the play; at the close of Act V, scene 1, “the curtain rises to show Peter a very Napoleon on his ship. It must not rise again lest we see him on the poop in Hook’s hat and cigars, and with a small iron claw”. The premiss of his friends’ visit is that “when you put on dressing-up clothes, you become someone else”; and if the hat and hook and cigars are the three props he avoids, Peter, styling himself “Captain”, gets the trappings of his new identity from the wardrobe of the Jolly Roger: Hook’s second-best scarlet coat and thigh-boots. Three-fifths of the way through the story, his hair blackened and petted into Cavalier ringlets, the transformation is thoroughgoing: “Peter Pan had begun to behave exactly like Captain Hook”.
That old adversary, meanwhile, has undergone his own sea-change. Before they have found their feet on the island, the children are encountered by a circus-master, one Ravello, got up in prodigious, shaggy, hooded cardigan – a man with whom to shake hands is to grab a fistful of greasy wool. It is “Ravello” who insinuatingly directs the party along the main line of the narrative, to recover Hook’s peculiar treasure; a story is told later, as his disguise unravels, of a living death in the belly of a crocodile, among stomach acids and digestive stinks, and of a gift for survival on which the art of the sequel depends.
Geraldine McCaughrean, too, is required by her commission to wear the stuff of someone else’s imagination – irksome, you would think, for a novelist. But she has wrapped herself in her subject like a biographer, and makes her gains by that. Once or twice Peter slips off the red coat to speak out in a different register, at once stirring and obsolete – “All goes if courage goes”. His words on these occasions have the fatal glamour of Satan’s address to the fallen angels in Paradise Lost, as well they might; they are transplanted from the text of Barrie’s Rectorial Address on Courage, “the lovely virtue”, delivered at St Andrew’s University in 1922 to an audience of students who had grown up with courage and its poor returns. When, elsewhere, McCaughrean seems momentarily to be interposing her own view of things, fondly chastising Peter for being “wrong about mothers”, she is only repeating an awkward concession of Barrie’s own. In the circumstances, it is not giving much away to say that after some rather hectic final chapters, in which Peter suffers a new near-death experience on every seventh page, the essentials of Neverland are left intact for the pirate chroniclers of the future.
