Past it... Biggles
Are boys the new girls? Is murder and mayhem taking over from all that pink and glister in the children's section of your high street bookshop? Will Young Bond finally assassinate Barbie?
The thinking seems to be that getting boys to read is a victory in itself. No need to go any further than that. But surely what you read is every bit as important as reading itself.
The reinvention of the "boys' own adventure" genre for the 21st century seems to have taken the media by storm. It has the hazy glow of nostalgia for a simpler world, a world where everyone knew their place in the white, male playground. Problem is, that world no longer exists, if it ever did, and in reinventing the ripping yarn genre (whose most enduring example is Biggles), some of the problems of the original have reappeared. Beneath the surface are racial tension and xenophobia, cultural traits that were institutionalised during the colonial era.
We are offering up a fast food menu of impoverished stereotypes to our sons, based on rigid class systems and exclusion. The thought of filling 21st century boyhood with the same stale old guff on evil foreigners and government-sanctioned assassins makes me feel tired and more than a bit concerned.
This is a scary and thrilling time to be male and I can't help but think we are shortchanging our sons. The new millennium has seen the unravelling of old, obsolete male values, and good riddance to them, too. Men have come to realise that we need new ways of being male if we are to negotiate the contemporary world of globalisation. Why do we feel the need to inflict our own nostalgia and wishful thinking on our children? Such stories offer no advice on how to survive and thrive in our increasing complex and accelerating culture, while fostering an unhealthy fear of otherness.
What we need is a literature that feeds and nurtures a sense of courage and quest in our children; a solid and trustworthy base from which they can explore and inhabit themselves. Through our literature we need to be equipping them with the tools to forge a sense of self that is strong and elastic enough to survive the bewildering cultural landscape we inhabit. We must resist confusing them with mixed messages of violence as courage and reaction as quest.
It is of real importance, considering the multitude of other things vying for their attention, to encourage our sons to read. But they must be provided with a literature that opens up the world for them. A literature that helps generate a developing sense of belonging to the world as it is. Books such as David Almond's and of course Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials set the right kind of example. Such authors create a sense of excitement at the same time as giving strong, positive role models that help growing minds.
We should think twice before giving them books that help lever our children back into the smaller boxes of the last century.
