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Thursday, September 16, 2004
Open wide for Peter Pan: Three-book prequel is coming
The kings of boogers and bad guys, Dave Barry and Ridley Pearson, team up to write it
For one of the great classics of children's literature, "Peter Pan" has a surprising number of plot holes.
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Five-year-old Paige Pearson spotted one right off when her father, thriller writer Ridley Pearson, read her a boiled-down version one night.
"She looked up in my face and said, 'Yeah, but how did Peter meet Captain Hook?' "
It was one of those ah-ha! moments. Thinking about it, Pearson saw other gaps in J.M. Barrie's classic story. How come Peter never grows up? What makes him fly? Where did Tinkerbell come from?
A century after Barrie's most famous creation -- a tale that changed the world of books, Broadway, Disney videos and peanut butter -- the world still had no answer.
So Pearson, known for best-selling cop thrillers like "The Body of David Hayes" -- the latest in his Seattle Police Department series -- sold Disney on the idea of a children's book trilogy that would flesh out Peter's early life.
Then he sold his pal, Dave Barry, on the idea.
The Pulitzer-Prize-winning humorist and sometime novelist, known for booger jokes and exploding-cow sightings, jumped at Pearson's invitation to work together.
Until then, Barry's main exposure to the story had been the 1953 Disney animated film and the 1956 NBC broadcast starring Mary Martin, whom he recalls as "this middle-aged lady on wires (who was) supposed to be a boy."
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Two years and hundreds of e-mails later, they completed "Peter and the Starcatchers," which would be a really good name for a rock band. Instead, it's a 452-page romp that's so fun and fast-paced, kids will get whiplash from turning the pages.
On the eve of the Seattle stop on their book tour, Barry and Pearson spoke by phone about their first children's book, the mystique of Peter Pan and their long friendship as running buddies and band mates.
Their disembodied voices are easy to keep straight. Barry's is more boyish and loosey-goosey, while Pearson has a deeper, slower manner of speaking. To forestall confusion, Barry offered this helpful tip: "When it's really interesting and quotable, it's me." (Laughter in the background)
The two writers met in Anaheim, Calif., in 1992 at the American Booksellers Association convention, where they helped found the Rock Bottom Remainders, a rock band that also includes writers Amy Tan, Mitch Albom, Stephen King and Scott Turow. They tour occasionally to raise money for literacy projects.
"Ridley was the bass player and actually had musical talent," said Barry, who plays lead guitar. "We just hit it off."
Barry was Pearson's best man when Pearson got married in the Cotswolds in 1996. "That's because I am the only one who could make it to England on three hours' notice," Barry said.
Not all writers can collaborate, but this seemingly unlikely duo knew they could make it work because of their years playing together onstage -- and because they share similar outlooks on writing.
"We are both in our own ways very Type A," Barry said, adding that they avoid literary pretension in favor of well-crafted, highly readable stories.
"We're seat-of-the-pants writers," Pearson said.
"I think of ourselves as hacks," Barry said.
There's nothing slapdash about the way they crafted "Peter and the Starcatchers," one of the most exciting children's books this fall.
Pearson, who recently moved to St. Louis after years in Sun Valley, Idaho, got together with his Miami counterpart to scope out the plot and assign primary responsibility for various characters. Back home, they traded countless e-mails in which they edited each other's work, then edited the edits until they reached consensus.
Pearson, never at a loss for a plot twist, said of Barry, "He believes in simplifying things and I sort of overcomplicate things. What was interesting for me was to write something and have it come back from an editor-friend and be even better."
Strong characters and short, quick chapters drive the story, which boils down to this: Peter and four other orphans at St. Norbert's Home for Wayward Boys are delivered to a scurvy vessel, the Never Land, to be sold into slavery to a distant king. More urgently, a dastardly pirate named Black Stache (for his foot-long mustache) is trying to run them down on the stormy seas to steal the ship's mysterious cargo -- a trunk kept under lock and key.
Strangely, the trunk emits a hypnotic combination of warmth, levity and the musical sound of bells, the byproduct of a mysterious substance called "starstuff."
As danger gathers, Peter joins forces with a salty crewman named Alf and a young, resourceful passenger named Molly (Wendy's future mother?), who knows more than she's telling about the trunk. Add talking porpoises, morphing mermaids, a monster named Mr. Grin and an island that's fatally hostile to drop-in traffic and you get a barnburner of a book that seamlessly fills in Peter's back-story.
"It's wonderful -- they did it brilliantly," said Peter Glassman of the New York store Books of Wonder, which publishes lavish, illustrated editions of children's classics, though not yet "Peter Pan."
Glassman said he's usually skeptical when adult authors turn their hands to children's books, "since most of them fail miserably." But he had only high praise for "Peter and the Starcatchers."
"I think it's a rip-roaring good read," he said. "It does not disappoint on any level."
Judith Chandler, special events coordinator at Third Place Books in Lake Forest Park and a longtime acquaintance of both writers, was equally effusive.
"I think it is just brilliant," she said. "It is really a wonderful piece of work -- I can't praise it enough."
Barry said he knew going in that writing for children isn't as easy as it looks. "I know I myself have at times mocked those who try to write children's books," he said.
He sought advice from novelist friend Carl Hiaasen, whose debut children's book, "Hoot," got good reviews. Hiaasen told him not to worry too much about the audience -- just let the story be his guide.
Through grateful for the fantasy elements Barrie created, they wanted to change a few things, from the patronizing characterization of the Indians -- "we wanted to make our Indians way smart," Barry said -- to the "prissy, schoolmarmish" quality of Wendy, who won't appear until later in their series.
"I felt like we were doing what the guys who wrote the screenplay for 'The Wizard of Oz' screenplay did -- they took the central symbols of the story" instead of translating word-for-word," Barry said.
One change: Instead of being a boy who won't grow up, their Peter is a boy who can't grow up because of a sorrowful twist of fate.
"It's a curse as well as a blessing," Pearson said.
The biggest plot challenge was to create a believable reason for the story's magic to exist. Pearson credits Barry with the "starstuff" idea, saying, "It was one of those dance-around-the-office days" when Barry came through with it. (Barry modestly credits Pearson for helping shape the idea.)
Book 2 is due out in September 2006 and Book 3 a year later, but the duo hopes to push up the publication dates. With a 350,000-copy first printing of "Starcatchers" -- and a third printing already in the works -- that shouldn't be a hard sell.
Surprisingly, no one has bought the film rights, although Disney is interested in a theatrical version. Meanwhile, Pearson and Barry are too busy touring to watch their advance copy of "Finding Neverland," a biopic of Barrie that's due out in November, with Johnny Depp in the lead role.
If you like their style, stay tuned: Besides their Peter Pan books, they also have signed up to do at least two smaller chapter books on the scale of Lemony Snicket's "A Series of Unfortunate Events." Which would be a really good name for a rock band.
HISTORY OF PETER PAN
Peter Pan leaped to life in a 1904 play by Scottish author J.M. Barrie, who reportedly modeled his hero on the youngest of five neighbor boys he adopted after their parents died.The character had made a brief appearance two years earlier in the book "The Little White Bird." But it was the hit stage play -- "Peter Pan, or The Boy Who Wouldn't Grow Up"-- that captured the public's imagination.
In 1911, Barrie turned the play and its sequel into a book titled "Peter and Wendy," variously titled "Peter Pan and Wendy" or now just "Peter Pan."
The origin and meaning of the work still captivate critics. As one scholar wrote in "Children's Books and Their Creators," edited by Anita Silvey: "The history of 'Peter Pan' is one of the most complex in children's literature."
"Barrie's fantasy land had its roots in real-life events," continues the entry, written by Mara Ilyse Amster. "The sudden death of his older brother and the attention Barrie lavished on his grieving mother manifest themselves in his veneration for mother figures and his interest in little boys who do not age."
Barrie, who was knighted in 1913, enjoyed fame and praise, and his obituary in the Illustrated London News in 1937 called him "the best-beloved writer of his day." In 1929 he had donated the copyright to the story and characters to a children's hospital.
However, in recent years some critics have called the story dark and suggested that Barrie had a predatory interest in little boys. (The fact that Michael Jackson named his ranch Neverland adds to the taint, some say.) Others say Barrie, a melancholy figure who stood less than 5-foot-1, was asexual. It's believed he never consummated his marriage.
A Boston Globe article by James Parker earlier this year noted that the youngest of the five boys whom Barrie adopted, Nico Llewelyn Davies, "swore in his old age to a biographer that he had 'never heard one word or saw one glimmer of anything approaching homosexuality or pedophilia. Had he had either of those leanings in however slight a symptom, I would have been aware.' "
Whatever the truth, the "central symbols of the story," as writer Dave Barry calls them, live on in books, movies and the imagination.
-- Cecelia Goodnow
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