Cover Charge #16: Peter Pan

Article by Sean Wilkinson,

a.k.a. The Pagemaster.

I'd like to start this off by giving credit to Gates Of Imagination, whose audiobook thumbnail I edited into the above banner image. It's hard to find a decent public domain reading of anything (the LibriVox version varied in quality from insufferably dry first takes to diabetic over-acting, and I wasn't about to give my analytics support to "fully voice-acted" AI slop, so as flat as the narration could be here, I'm glad to have found this channel). Reader Arthur Lane at least tried with his dialogue delivery, and was a consistent, soothing auditory presence. In the case of some of the book's more absurd imagery, his level delivery even turned these moments into feats of deadpan comedy.

As I've said before, I had previously only experienced J.M. Barrie's Peter Pan in movie form (the 1953 animated movie, the Mary Martin stage film, Hook, and Peter Pan's Neverland Nightmare), through TV show allusions (specifically Once Upon A Time Season Three), and as a Zenescope adaptation (I'll be expanding the Neverland Omnibusted with the Hook miniseries and Pan's role in The Dream Eater Saga tomorrow), relying on TL;DR resources like Wikipedia for comparison information in my past content.

I knew it had a bit of darkness and edge, but until now, I had never read the actual book (I guess I still haven't because an audiobook voice read it for me, and if you want to get into metaphysical, existential philosophy about time and drifting molecules and data erosion and whether I am the same me as the one who started writing this post half an hour ago—which would have been an hour and a half ago yesterday because I started writing this on Daylight Savings day, so I'm a really different person—or the book is the same book, I never will, especially not if I keep drinking enough energy supplements in a day to come up with bizarre tangents like this, because I will eventually mutate my brain into a mass of fruit-flavored biofuel capable of a form of time travel so convoluted that it will accomplish nothing and return me to the exact moment I left...did I do it yet? How about now?).

Umm...perhaps I should start talking about the book now.

The book, Peter Pan (originally titled Peter [Pan] & Wendy) is a 1911 children's novel by Barrie, adapted from his 1904 play, Peter Pan; or, The Boy Who Wouldn't Grow Up, which was preceded by his 1902 novel The Little White Bird.

Much of Peter & Wendy's absurdity and poorly-aged indigenous depiction was adapted into the Disney version (and the final chapters were mined for sequel material such as the aforementioned Hook film and the Disney follow-up Return to Neverland), but its darker edges, subtext, and high-concept lore were either softened or omitted (because children are stupid and weak, and letting them know that bad things exist is an act of abuse so severe that it could lead to all manner of violence and deviant behavior that will cause the downfall of society, just like my democratic communist socialist fascist sarcasm because I eat babies and fuck pizza for a living or whatever dumb shit the actually insane people in this country think us normies do with our lives while they're doom-scrolling through an echo chamber of their own propaganda).

Yeah; I'm over-caffeinated. Sue me. My point that I'm getting to is that Peter Pan is wild.

Not counting the innuendo that's only innuendo if you don't realize that language changes with time and location (Barrie was Scottish and his book is a hundred-fifteen years old, so children being gay means they're happy rather than homosexual, Captain Hook doesn't literally "give coitus with his hook," and George Darling not getting to see Mrs. Darling's "innermost box" doesn't—entirely—mean what you think it does), Nana being cartoonishly human for a dog, Mr. Darling making everything into an actuary problem and getting so psychologically broken by the children going missing that there's a modern theory he is the origin of the "husband in the doghouse" saying, the Darlings somehow being able to adopt and raise over fifty time-traveling children by the end, and Barrie himself breaking the fourth wall to talk to the characters at a few points, there's the fact that in the story, Wendy, John, and Michael are abducted by a selfish, absent-minded, flying serial killer, mass-murderer, dictator, and cult leader with mommy issues and no sense of time who lives in (and basically rules) an amalgamated mass-consciousness multiverse island dimension that affects memories, defies the laws of physics, and is populated by mermaids, an exploited indigenous tribe named after a silly-sounding racial slur, a cult of abandoned babies whom Peter treats like the Children Of the Corn, the sentient energy of baby laughter (fairies are basically that one line from the end of It's A Wonderful Life), and pirates (whom Peter and the just-mentioned Lost Boys kill on the regular, and eventually wipe out and forget by the time the story is almost over). Yeah, the original book depicts Peter Pan (who has a flute that he plays once, so he's also a Pied Piper/Greco-Roman party god reference on top of everything else) as more of a slasher villain than the actual Peter Pan slasher movie did. Go figure.

And yet, despite being almost killed by Tinkerbell (whom I'm guessing was born from Peter's first laugh, considering her jealous attachment to him here, which was treated relatively well but differently in Zenescope's version) and knowing that he culls older children, has his cult murder adults for fun, brainwashed her into being his cult's mother figure and irregularly perennial housekeeper, and later tried to murder her daughter in her sleep, Wendy continues to harbor feelings for Peter and take care of him even though he'd rather go on being a mercurial folk-god and immortal white savior to those he deceives, collects, exploits, murders, and forgets, instead of giving up his "gay and heartless" ways for the love of the one person (we know of) that he kissed and thimbled and promised to always remember. Go figure...silly-ass bastard.

Ultimately, what stuck with me about Peter Pan, aside from how weird and dark and ambitious and sometimes cartoonishly funny it could be, was its heavy thematic relationship with time and memory (and potentially—but I could be reading too deep between the lines—trauma). Scholars and experts in psychology and related fields have noted other themes (fear of responsibility and death, most obviously), but as a once-educated layman, I immediately thought of Peter's forgetfulness as an ironic, existential allegory for dementia (though he never ages, he has forgotten entire people and events with the passage of time, gone from his mind as if they never were to begin with because, obviously, glory is fleeting and grief isn't fun) and Wendy's as a nostalgia cope for something awful she either experienced in Neverland or came to realize later as an adult when the blind optimism of youth and the influence of the place left her (reframing traumatic experiences in Neverland as happy times and sources of bedtime entertainment for her daughter Jane, or forgetting them altogether despite those experiences having shaped who she is). 

The only grade I can give is to say children should read more books like this. It's one of those "I don't like being uncomfortable, but I like why and how it's uncomfortable, and that it isn't consistently a torturous experience" books. People die. Animals die. In the book and in real life. Don't be afraid to grow up. Don't be afraid to learn and know and accept fundamental truths. And don't be afraid to live. Fear and ignorance of reality (and abandonment of historical knowledge for short-term selfish gains) is what is making our reality so much more terrifying.

Read Peter Pan so you don't end up like Peter Pan, and please Stay Tuned and remember to Become A Ticketholder if you haven't already, leave your comments at the bottom of this post and any others you have thoughts about (happy or otherwise), help out my ad revenue as you read so I can continue to afford adulting, and follow me on BlueSky, Tumblr, Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, YouTube, and LinkedIn to like what you see and receive the latest news on my content, like that Neverland update I'm doing tomorrow.

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Pagemaster,

Out of Energy.