Such a childish mistake

Chldren's literature, as well as being literature for children, has an unfortunate second identity as an enthusiasm for adults who don't want to think too hard. Ever since it got going as a genre in the 19th century, there have been people who turn to it as a break from all the more taxing and difficult things adult fiction does. This is forgivable, but it is a mistake, and it makes for bad reading of what is actually there on the pages of children's books.

Yes, writing for children avoids some kinds of upfront difficulty, but that does not mean that it is charmingly simple, or that it is just a cutdown version of adult fiction. It is its own thing, with its own riches and its own complications.

For reasons I can't quite fathom, Alison Lurie has joined the ranks of those who treat the whole genre as a kind of model village, where even the biggest monuments are only knee-high. She ought to know better. In fact, she used to know better. She is a novelist with a nicely acidulous understanding of the human condition, as manifested in both tall and short people, and she wrote Don't Tell the Grown-Ups, a good book about the way children's stories create subversive pleasures for their readers.

But here she has written a set of essays about the Oz books, and Harry Potter, and the great John Masefield, and Tove Jansson's Moomin series, which are pleasant and agreeable and utterly unchallenging. Worse, they are devoted to the frankly silly proposition that the most gifted authors of books for children are not like other writers: in some essential way, they are children themselves.

Well, no. Gifted writers for children have to be able to remember childhood vividly, and they have to be in sympathy with the child's eye-view of the world. The material of children's lives has to be somehow prominent in their imaginations.

But then they have to apply to that material the qualities of emotional assessment and shaping craft that come with adulthood, in accordance with the unique status of children's writing as the only kind of literature that is, by definition, not written by the kind of people who read it.

As evidence of E Nesbit's childlikeness, Lurie says that she spent "weeks building a toy town out of blocks and kitchenware". True, and if she hadn't enjoyed it she wouldn't have been able to write The Magic City; but the toy town in question was built for an exhibition at Olympia, and Nesbit was also the person who brought subtle, observational social comedy into children's books.

Lurie's evidence of TH White's childlikeness is that he "preferred the company of animals", and "lived alone with his hawks and his hounds". But White lived alone because he was grievously miserable with his sexuality. To see The Sword in the Stone as a natural expression of a childlike spirit is to underestimate it as an achievement, as something hard-won.

Over and over, in these essays, Lurie gets stuck at the beginning of an explanation. What she says is fine, so far as it goes, but she stops just as she gets to the point where there is a chance to say something distinctive. She tells us that, in Charlotte's Web, "nature is magical and can be life-changing".

She points out that a fairy tale "presents experience in vivid symbolic form". She remarks that the box in Masefield's Box of Delights is like a book, or rather "all books. The person who owns it has the power to bring the world to life through imagination ..."