Children’s books and adult books – never the twain shall meet – or shall they?

Look in any bookshop, at any brochure for a literary festival, or any Saturday or Sunday Review page in the newspaper and you would be forgiven for thinking that there are two completely separate publishing entities: adult books and children’s books. The books look different, feel different, are priced differently. They are counted up on different bestseller lists, advertised in different ways and certainly have different amounts of review space devoted to them.

And so it has always been.

Traditionally, children’s books have been regarded as the younger sibling; not a sibling who would grow up one day but a younger sibling, stuck forever in another world who would be left behind to enjoy childish things while the older sibling entered the ‘real’ world.

But then ‘crossover’ fever struck and though it is the profile of only a very few individual titles that has been changed, the scope, understanding and potential of children’s books is now massively altered. When a book proves to be as successful as Harry Potter, everyone wants to know why, and how to get a bit of the action. Of course, as with all bestsellers there is no single answer to the 'why' part. Breaking it down into individual features, it’s not hard to see many of the reasons why Harry Potter was a hit, though why it should be enjoyed on a scale that has never been seen before is unfathomable. In a sense, it matters little. There have been many attempts at imitation, without the same success but, once a book has created such an enormous market, it’s known to be a possibility and everyone wants to do it again.

After Rowling came Pullman’s giant success of winning the Whitbread Book of the Year prize for The Amber Spyglass, the concluding title in His Dark Materials, the brilliant trilogy that began so strikingly (and so firmly rooted in the children’s books world that it won the Carnegie Medal) with Northern Lights. Pullman’s books were seized on by adults who not only adored the stunning story at the heart of the novels but also revelled in the intellectual vigour of the arguments. And that made two.

All at once, this new market was open wide. Fantasy fiction published for children is now promoted to the adult market too. The books have doubled in length, which makes them appear more ‘adult’ even before the book cover has been designed, and it is now increasingly popular to publish books with two different covers so that they appeal to both children and adult.

We’ve all got used to this – indeed, it’s surprising how quickly it begins to feel like the ‘norm’. Why would we not? It sounds an irrefutably good idea. After all, getting as many copies of a book to as many readers as possible is just good sense. Not only that, the idea of a ‘shared’ literature between adults and children has many very good features. For once adults are reinforcing what children read rather than dismissing it, as has too often been the case previously. It replaces the typical position that has seen adults urging children to read more ‘difficult’ books as if becoming a reader involved a series of upwards steps, or dismissing much-enjoyed authors, most notably Roald Dahl, as rude and crude even though, within playgrounds in the 1990s, he had the Harry Potter effect and created a generation of readers.

Certainly, the fact that adults applaud their children’s reading of these authors, that they too are enjoying, is a good thing and it is certainly a bonus that children can discuss the Harry Potter novels with the adults around them. It has created a strange but wonderful phenomenon – adult/child conversations at bus stops, on trains, over the dinner table, about a book.

But, there are also dangers. Big dangers, I think, and ones that could leave children’s books the poorer.

The current Holy Grail for any children’s author is to win the handle ‘crossover’. To this end, authors state emphatically that they don’t write for any particular reader – but for all readers. This has a wholesome sound to it: 'all readers' evokes thoughts of storytelling, everyone sprawled around the hearth in a Saxon hall or crowds gathering around a ballad seller. At a stroke, it transforms writing for children from a marginalised ghetto, which the literary establishment abandoned in the 1980s when the business seemed poor, handing it over to the education world who began to look at books in terms of how they could be ‘used’ in schools rather than as a vibrant introduction to life-long reading. Instead, writing a children’s book seems to be high on the ‘must do’ list for all kinds of celebrities, not least Madonna. And it’s not only celebrities. Everyone suddenly wants to write a children’s book. Not an ordinary, run-of-the-mill affair, of course, but a market-breaking, life-changing trilogy, series or sequence with a wholesomely wide appeal.

All that sounds great but is it good for the readers? The danger about searching for the ‘crossover’ market is that authors and their publishers are all piling into writing books that reach across boundaries rather than writing for children. This is a shame as children are very particular kinds of readers and there are some core features of writing for children that give the classics of the genre their longevity. It’s not about the writing, it’s about connecting with the audience and respecting their particular point of view and expectations. Books about childhood are not, of necessity for children. Why not? Because it depends on the perspective of the writer. Typically, children in children’s books are in, what might be seen as, a state of innocence – and unworldliness – but they are also aspirational as they look at the adult world. In contrast, adult books about childhood, describe the emotions of childhood, or perceive the world through the eyes of a child with a kind of yearning or nostalgia or curiosity for a time, and some of the important feelings associated with it, that have past. Recent examples of this are found in both Ian McEwan’s Atonement and Michael Frayn’s Spies.

If the UK’s distinguished reputation for children’s books is to be preserved and to flourish, it is vital that authors keep the faith with children and do not use them as a leg-up to a bigger market. Luckily, the majority still are doing so – hence the impression of the two very separate markets I implied at the beginning. The very best of the distinguished and plentiful number of established children’s authors such as Malorie Blackman, Gillian Cross, Peter Dickinson, Anne Fine and Jan Mark, and those following in their footsteps including David Almond, Anthony Horowitz, Hilary McKay and Celia Rees, to name but a few, respect their audiences and continue to write directly, though not of course exclusively for them. And children value that respect and respond to it enthusiastically. It is these authors that make the readers of the future. Of course, if adults choose to read these books, that’s nice, too.

That makes for some nice distinctions but then, just to show that there are no rules along comes Jacqueline Wilson (the newly appointed Children's Laureate). A children’s author par excellence. So much so that in general adult readers don’t see the point. They can’t understand the high-octane appeal of Wilson’s simple writing and they fail to see the potency of the storylines, dismissing them merely as books written about a number of ‘issues’. But, Wilson has just crashed through the 20 million mark for the sales of her titles and, for a second year running, she’s been the most-borrowed author from the UK libraries. Here is an author who writes for children and understands implicitly the particular way in which they see the world.

So Wilson is a children’s writer who doesn’t 'cross over' but still makes readers on an unprecedented scale. What does that say? For me, it gives great confidence in the belief that if we remain true to children as readers, children’s books will survive and flourish.

But, just to show that I can be open minded about the possibility of an all-embracing market and to show that all rules can be broken, there is one book that I would cite as having achieved that twin-pronged success. Forget the word ‘crossover’ and think ‘universal’. From the 19th century and on, there are those classics of children’s fiction which have been adopted by adults on the grounds that though the storyline may be childish there are underlying depths in terms of both the writing and the meaning. Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island, Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows and so on have long been claimed by adults despite their authors’ original intent. While it might be presumptuous to cite a book that has only lasted two years alongside such veterans, Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time is the one contemporary book that can also genuinely be said to have a universal appeal – albeit for different reasons. Written from a perspective that is uncertain in its standing in either a child’s or an adult’s world, it intertwines innocence and experience in a remarkable combination.

Let’s not create a new publishing entity on its shoulders, above all, let’s not forget children as readers. Instead, let’s just celebrate The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time as a remarkable and unusual achievement, which shows that all readers are within one universe although they may mostly spin in different orbits.

Julia Eccleshare is children's editor of The Guardian Review. She co-edited the Rough Guide to Teenage Literature and wrote the fascinating and insightful Beatrix Potter to Harry Potter: Portraits of Children's Writers, a celebration of a century of children’s literature.