Peter Pan in Scarlet is the official sequel to J.M. Barrie’s Peter Pan, one of my favourite childhood books (apparently, there are other treatments, but this is the version authorised by the copyright holder, Great Ormond Street Hospital for Children in London. The copyright is about to expire has expired).
The sequel opens with Wendy and the Lost Boys all grown up, for the most part with families of their own and happy. Then they start dreaming of Neverland…soon they find themselves going back (using a rather unorthodox and yet strangely logical method) to find Peter.
Neverland is a polluted place now, darker and more dangerous than ever – the light Disney cartoon version obscures just how dark a place it is, and how dark a character Peter Pan is, too. This book does not shy away from that; in fact, it is an exploration of that darkness in Peter, without losing the gently funny tone of the original that made the darkness so much more palatable (hey, it is is a children’s book after all: children like to be scared by darkness, and then they like to be reassured that darkness can be overcome).
One example of the intermingling of the dark and the light is very early on in the book: one of the Lost Boys (now called Old Boys) is not mentioned. Just…not mentioned. And just as you start wondering where the hell he is (has the author messed up?) – well, they’re all grown up, aren’t they? It’s now the 1920s, isn’t it? There’s been a Great War in between the two books…the worst part is, of course, Peter’s reaction. He’s just being Peter and Peter’s a selfish little git most of time. That doesn’t make him less likeable, just less…trustworthy. And more noble when he fights his own nature.
McCaughrean competed with over 100 other writers to get the job, and she did well with it. It didn’t have the same magic for me as the original, but, really, how could it? It was always a worry that she’d ruin Peter Pan with an unworthy sequel, and she surely did not do that; she captured the tone and the characters and took us back to Neverland. She’s written lots of other books and her website is here.
Interested? Buy it from Fishpond.com.au
I’d be interested to know of more of the implications now that the copyright on the original is about to expire.
Apparently it’s quite complicated already in that North American and European rights already differ.
The hospital hopes the authorised sequel will help control its rights over the characters even though the book itself has come out of copyright in EU.
Meanwhile, the hospital and US publishers (particularly Disney) differ on whether the copyright already expired 10 years ago, or is due to last another 15 years – but it’s up to the hospital to bring a law suit to prove it one way or the other. It depends on whether the US Copyright Extension Act can be retrospectively applied.
In Australia, it fell into the public domain for a little while, but then the federal government granted it some extra time.
Upshot is, the hospital is due to lose an undisclosed amount of revenue and wants to hold the characters because it knows the book itself will become a lost cause eventually.