Growing up with the novel

A Family Failing by Honor Arundel (Hamish Hamilton £1.25) IN the children's book world (a specialised but intensely active one these days), discussion often centres on the teenage novel: a vexed and complex subject which it would take more space than I have to discuss in detail.
Very briefly, the problem is this: young people grow up faster, are faced with problems sooner, lose what was once called innocence but perhaps was merely ignorance a great deal younger, than they used to.
The stories written for the young teenager when I was one (holiday adventures, school stories, family tales of the mildest and most middle-class kind) would not be thought emotionally suited to children of eight or nine. Even the best written and most realistically envisaged — those by Arthur Ransome, say — would seem crazily irrelevant to the 14year-olds who once lapped them up and felt a part of their world.
Today's bookish teenager will of course, as bookish teenagers always have, go on to adult novels; but there are areas of teenage experience untouched by adult fiction and it is these that the teenage novel is trying to deal with.
Some people bewail the loss of the simple, sexless fictional world of ponies and sailing that once seemed enough for the young; to them, the teenage novels seem brutal and depressing, full of the kind of thing called. in my childhood, "unnecessary."
In other words, they depict the kind of incident or attitude to which adults liked to shut their eyes, at least in the company of the young. To others they seem a hopeful sign of adult effort. at least, to enter the young's often mysterious, often touching, sometimes impressive world.
Honor Arundel has written several novels which enter the world of today's educated girl. Hers (that of Miss Arundel's particular girls, that is) is rather a Sunday-supplement world, leftish and trendy by the standards of the old-fashioned "squares" though middle class and moderate by the standards of extremists.
In "The Terrible Temptation" it was that of a girl at university; in A Family Failing the heroine, Joanna, is still at school when the book opens. "Nothing happens to us," she says ruefully, for she wants to be a writer, "and what is there to write about? We're just an ordinary happy family."
But she isn't left rueful for long, because the book she comes to write (a rather odd mixture of subjective and objective reporting, of first and third person narrative) describes the breakdown of this happiness, the falling apart of her parents, and so of the family as a unit.
The father, a fairly successful journalist, loses his job and, in mid-middle age, can't find another. Just at this point the mother, also a journalist, gets a jdb on a television quiz — a silly programme which provides instant fame of a temporary kind and plenty of money to exacerbate an already tricky situation.
Touchiness turns to ex asperation, and the happy, stable family gradually declines into rows and wretchedness. Mark, Joanna's brother, leaves home and university to help found a farming commune.
Joanna is left strung between parents, sympathising with both, understanding some but not all of the awful emptiness that has come to four lives which were once rich and fulfilled. There is no happy ending—just a pause in which things may improve but probably won't go back to being the way they once were.
It's a long way from those bean-feasts in the dorm, or those camps on Dartmoor, with their rocklike backgrounds of stability, peace and plenty. Even books for much younger children (Ivan Southall's, for instance) are now facing up to danger, insecurity, handicaps of all kinds, deprivation and death. But the sheltered child, in the old sense of the word, no longer exists, and children's books are simply reflecting the fact.
Isabel Quigly