We’re all familiar with children’s books and adult fiction, but ‘young adult’ is a category to which I hadn’t given much thought.  But recently, while on holiday inSicily, I stopped into a book shop in Capo d’Orlando to look for an English novel by a good writer.  There are about four book shops in Capo d’Orlando, but I knew that the shop in the main square carried a few English books (about 25) and some German books, as well (about 10).  If that this represents much less than 1% of their stock surprises you, I have to say that less than 1% of the population of Capo d’Orlando speak any English!

I had a browse through the English language books, and one ‘from the bestselling author’ Carlos Ruiz Zafon caught my eye.  The brief write-up on the author said that “Carlos Ruiz Zafon is the author of six novels, including the international phenomenon The Shadow of the Wind and The Angel’s Game.  His work is published in more than forty languages and has been honoured with numerous international awards.  He divides his time betweenBarcelona,Spain andLos Angeles,California.”

The novel I bought was The Midnight Palace – originally published in Spain as a young adult novel, “The Midnight Palace is a haunting story of a secret society and a labyrinthine railway station with a dark past.”

“Murders most foul, chilling crimes and dark deeds” says Vogue.

The story begins inCalcutta,Indiain 1916 when twin orphaned babies, a boy and a girl, are carried to safety by a police officer who is then murdered.  The story continues in 1932 when the orphans have turned sixteen and are released from their orphanages.  Their mission, together with five other released orphans (four boys and a girl) is to find out who killed the parents of the twins.  Sound interesting?  I thought so, and as I read through it, I began to discover what seemed to be some of the elements making up best-selling young adult fiction:

• The setting should be somewhat extraordinary as to place and time:Calcutta, 1932
• The main characters should be adolescents: in this case 16 years old
• Places should be intriguing: in this case a huge old railway station destroyed in a fire and an old tumbledown castle.
• There should be some major wrongs that need to be put right: lots of murders
• Plenty of mystery is a good addition, particularly if it takes all the deductive skills of the young orphans to solve it, with very little adult help.

Maybe I’ve become to unimaginative, and too literal in my thinking, but I got two thirds of the way through the book and lost interest.  There was too much in the story that defied credibility:

• A villain who’s motives and plans are extremely complex
• A villain who shoots fire from his fingers
• Lots of supernatural powers
• A burning, runaway train that keeps running away
• One person taking over the soul of another
• And an orphan boy who owns a watch inCalcuttain 1932

I guess to really enjoy this novel, one has to suspend disbelief.

The research I have done suggests that the ‘young adult’ category covers age 12 through 18.  It must be quite difficult to cover this age range with any one novel.  I suspect that writers who specialise in young adult fiction cater to a narrower age group.

There is one piece of young adult fiction that I remember well from my high school days, and that is The Catcher in the Rye by J D Salinger.  It was written in 1951 as an adult novel but has become an adolescent favourite, with 65 million copies sold, in almost all of the major languages.  I read it when I was 16 or 17 when it was required reading in my English class.

The Catcher in the Rye relies on a different set of themes that The Midnight Palace to capture the attention of adolescent readers. 

Briefly, it is a story told in the first person by Holden Caulfield, a 17 year old boy who is attending a military academy inPennsylvania.  He is kicked out of school and spends several days inNew York Cityduring which time he experiments in various ways and tries to understand himself.  Holden Caulfield has become an icon of teenage rebellion.  The novel deals with a number of themes which are important to Holden’s age group: identity, connection, sexuality, alienation and belonging, but I believe that this is a novel that anyone from the age of 15 onwards would find interesting and thought-provoking.

I had never heard of ‘chapbooks’ until recently.  They were popular, pocket-sized, paper-bound books which preceded the novel and existed from the late 16th century until the middle of the 19th century when they were unable to compete with newspapers and some churches considered them ‘ungodly’.  The form originated in England and Scotland, but similar books were published in the US, as well.  Chapbooks were an important vehicle for the distribution of popular culture, particularly for people living in rural areas.  They provided entertainment, information and (often fictitious) history.  Now, they are valued as records of popular culture, that has not survived in other forms.  Chapbooks were aimed at people without formal libraries, and, in an era when paper was valuable, the paper of old chapbooks was used for wrapping, and even for toilet paper.

The word chapbook is derived from the old English word ce’ap, meaning an itinerant peddler.  The peddler would buy the books, on credit, from publishers which were originally clustered in the London Bridge area of London.  The peddler would travel about, selling the books at markets, fairs and door-to-door.  In the mid 17th century enough chapbooks were printed in one year to account for one English family in three.  They were usually printed on a single sheet of paper and folded to produce a book of up to 24 pages, often with woodcut illustrations that may not have had any relevance to the text.  Reportedly, in most cases the quality of the paper and the printing were very poor.  However, in some cases, chapbooks were long, well printed and historically accurate.  At a time when an agricultural labourer was making 12 pence per day, chapbooks sold for 2 to 6 pence.

The literacy rate in the mid 17th century for English males was about 30%.  This figure rose to 60% a century later.  It seems likely that chapbooks contributed to this rise in literacy, with many working people readers and a few were even writers.  Before the industrial revolution, workers had periods of time available for reading, and chapbooks were read aloud to families, and probably in pubs, as well.

Between 1661 and 1688, Samuel Pepys collected chapbooks.  His collection is kept at Magdalene College, Oxford.  Mr. Pepys devised the following list of subject categories of items published during that time:

• Devotion & Morality
• History – true & fabulous
• Tragedy: murders, executions, & judgements of God
• State & Times
• Love – pleasant
• Love – unpleasant
• Marriage, Cuckoldry, etc.
• Sea – love, gallantry & actions
• Drinking & good fellowship
• Humour & frollicks

Stories set in a mythical past were popular, as were stories about heroes (rich or poor) triumphing in difficult circumstances.    Robin Hood is featured in chapbooks before he started giving to the poor what he took from the rich.  Ignorant and greedy clergymen were often figures of fun.  Some trades (cobblers, weavers and tailors) whose members were often literate were sometimes the subject of a story.

Today’s novel, while far more sophisticated (in most cases) than chapbooks, owes some of its attributes to the chapbook.  These include entertaining and informing, while historic novels provide historic settings.  But the modern novel goes further: considerably longer, written (mostly) in better English, with more complex characters, interactions and plots. Many novels today are intellectually more challenging than the chapbooks of two centuries ago.

Each writer is supposed to have a genre.  (Genre – adapted from the  French – is “A category of artistic composition, as in music or literature, characterized by similarities in form, style, or subject matter.”)  I’m afraid I  don’t have a genre, as yet.  But then, I have to confess, this is typical of me.  For example, at university I had difficulty deciding on a major (principal field of study).  I started out wanting to do  architecture; then, I changed to mathematics, and after taking a course in set theory (which I didn’t understand at all), I ended up as a physics major.  Or, more recently, consider my track record as a management consultant.  I’ve worked in the health, financial services, retail, manufacturing, technology, engineering, and business services sectors.  And in terms of my assignments, they have included business process improvement, cost reduction, strategy, sales and marketing, service improvement, team building, culture change, and coaching/mentoring.  Not much focus there.  “Jack of all trades and master of none,” you might say.

Does it matter?

It didn’t really matter for me as a management consultant, although my colleagues considered me a little bit strange.  I generally took the assignments that clients wanted to give me, and made a decent living.  Besides, I rather enjoyed the changes that lack of specialisation brought with it.

But, for a writer, the situation is somewhat different.  The reputation of a writer is very clearly linked to his or her genre: romance, science fiction, mystery, etc.  People will continue to buy a particular author’s books, because they like them and they know what to expect with the next one.  J K Rowling and the Harry Potter series are good examples.

So, what about my books?  Well, the first one, Fishing in Foreign Seas, is in two genres: romance and business.  The second, Sin & Contrition, is a series of morality tales.  The third, which is about to be published, Efraim’s Eye, is a romantic thriller.  The fourth, which I’ve just finished, is another thriller about the drugs trade in Afghanistan and Iran.  I’m just getting started on a new novel, which is written in the first person, and is an interesting (I hope) philosophical biography, but not an autobiography.  So is there a theme that runs through these five?  Well, yes, there is temptation: not just sexual temptation, but human temptation; there is sex and there is religious/spiritual controversy.  I suspect that those themes would not constitute any recognised genre. 

(Efraim’s Eye was published 24 September 2012.)

(For more information about my novels, see www.williampeace.net.)

I rather enjoyed writing the two thrillers, but the trouble with most thrillers – from my point of view – is that the genre isn’t really suitable for promoting serious thoughts about what it is to be human.  Guns and debates about spirituality, values and morality don’t naturally fit well together.  But, I think most educated readers enjoy both excitement and some intellectual challenge in what they read.

So, I’ve got to keep working on defining my genre!