Rosemary Standeven's Reviews > Peter Pan: Or The Boy Who Would Not Grow Up - A Fantasy in Five Acts

I’ve been watching a series on TV about the golden age of children literature – ‘Wonderland: From JM Barrie to JRR Tolkien’. I had thought that I had definitely read all the books mentioned, though many, many years ago. However, my memories of the stories did not always tally with the TV program. Of course, now I am an adult, I would view things differently – but it was more than that. The program talked about the darkness in each of the authors’ lives, that came out in the books. I remembered ‘Peter Pan’ as being fun, full of adventure – not dark at all. Maybe it is only the Disney film I remember. So, I had to reread it (or maybe read it properly for the first time).
The only copy we had at home was a beautiful Folio Society book, with illustrations by Paula Rego (I couldn’t find that on Goodreads). It is the play, rather than the novel – the first telling of Peter Pan, which Barrie later revised and turned into a novel.
It took me a while to read it – mainly because I just could not get into it, and found much of it quite boring. Language has changed, as has society, and while I don’t want to condemn a book by applying current attitudes to something written a century ago, there were parts that I now found uncomfortable – primarily the depiction of the ‘redskins’ and calling them pickaninnies, the assignation of all housekeeping to Wendy, and the pretty much useless father (who even makes Peppa Pig’s father look competent). There is an almost beatification of the role of ‘Mother’, which seemed to revolve around a woman doing all the work to look after boys. The Lost Boys and Peter adopt Wendy as their Mother – clearly any female will do, age no object.
I found the spoken lines of the play rather irritating and insipid. However, the stage direction – which the audience never sees nor hears – can be sublime. A few that caught my attention:

“What you see is the Never Land. You have often half seen it before, or even three-quarters, after the night lights were lit, and you might have beached your coracle on it if you had not always at the great moment fallen asleep.”
“Cruellest jewel in that dark setting is HOOK himself, cadaverous and blackavised, his hair dressed in long curls which look like candles about to melt, his eyes blue as the forget-me-not and of a profound insensibility, save when he claws, at which time a red spot appears in them.”
“Down this the pirate (Hook) wriggles a passage. In the aperture below his face emerges and goes green as he glares at the sleeping child. Does no feeling of compassion disturb his sombre breast? The man is not wholly evil: he has a Thesaurus in his cabin, and is no mean performer on the flute. What really warps him is a presentiment that he is about to fail.”

Therefore, I have great hopes of the novel. As a play, the imagery and poetry of Barrie’s prose is sadly missing – and the sexism and racism (which will probably still be in the novel, as a product of the times) hits one unmediated. And yes – it is dark.
A childhood memory sadly excised. But a classic nonetheless, which continues to save thousands of sick children through its funding of the wonderful Great Ormond Street Children’s Hospital, which holds the rights to the story.