There is a type of book which operates both on an adult and a juvenile level. I am not thinking of books like Robinson Crusoe or Gulliver's Travels, which probe deeply into the human condition and to which the child may bring his own uncluttered and innocent responses, taking from the surface of the work an enjoyable fiction comprehensible within the limits of his own world. Nor do I have in mind those books (Alan Garner's The Owl Service may be one) which have been written with professional competence for a specific market, but which hold within them a range of interpretation that may seriously activate and perhaps even tax the critical and intellectual faculties of an intelligent adult. I am thinking of a third and rarer type of book, one which may well have been written in ignorance of the readership it will eventually find, and which operates successfully on the adult and the juvenile level simultaneously.

I suggest as examples of this an acknowledged classic, Robert Louis Stevenson's Treasure Island … and a modern story of adventure on the sea set in a similar historical period, Leon Garfield's Jack Holborn…. The former was produced when a writer of genius descended into the realm of juvenile fiction. Stevenson's integrity and devotion to his craft would not allow him to produce anything that was not the best he could write. The latter was written when an author whose talent in the field of juvenile fiction was shortly to be recognized set out to write an adult novel. Converging upon the dual level from opposite directions they appeal powerfully to the boy in man as well as the man in boy.

Superficially the two books appear to have a good deal in common. They both set out to tell a story crisply, clearly and with excitement. Involvement begins on the first page and our function as readers 'is to lay by our judgment', as Stevenson himself reminded Henry James, 'to be submerged by the tale as by a billow'. It is the familiar appeal of the romance, a willing suspension of all that may impede our enjoyment of the adventure and the journey. Thus the story is set in both cases in a world far removed from the one with which we are familiar, but a world, nonetheless, with whose outlines and general shape we feel a kind of distant blood-relationship. The pirates, the sea and the island in both cases spring at us from a dimmed past; they are something we half recognize and cannot fully forget. (pp. 113-14)

And as with setting, so with character. The people who are our companions on the voyage will be clearly enough delineated in their outlines for us to know who they are and what they stand for, but not so densely probed or explored that they will obscure the free flow of the story. 'Character', wrote Stevenson, in A Humble Remonstrance, 'to the boy is a closed book. For him a pirate is a beard, a pair of wide trousers, and a liberal complement of pistols.'… The narrator, in both cases, is adequate for the role he has to play but is seldom in danger of developing his own personality beyond the orthodox limits of the genre. And the assorted collection of squires, doctors, Trumpets and Morrises slide like greased counters around the set, every now and again erupting into a spasm of activity which rivets our interest, but never holding it at the expense of the progress of the story.

In the progress of the story, skilfully and effectively managed in both cases, one can observe an interesting variant of technique. In Treasure Island, as Mr. G. S. Fraser has pointed out…, the heightened moments often occur, paradoxically, at moments when the action is arrested…. [The] situation is lingered over, the tension deliberately drawn out, and both are resolved violently and suddenly as breaking point is reached. With Garfield, by contrast, there seems a definite effort to keep things continuously on the boil, to move as quickly as possible through the many hazards of the plot to the dramatic climax of the story. The impression is of a series of scenes in pictures, almost like a succession of colour slides, and with the same heightened colour that one often associates with such slides. Noises are added, the picture is set moving, and at the resolution of the scene the next slide is already in place. (p. 114)

[Jack Holborn] was conceived as an adult book and the intention was to deal with problems of good and evil through the medium of an exciting and well told tale. The 'doppelganger' theme, treated here through the good and evil captains of the Charming Molly, is at the centre of the complicated plot and everything else in the story revolves around it. Indeed, the fact that there are two captains, though the reader may have guessed it earlier, is not explicitly revealed until the contrived and vivid courtroom scene which is the climax of the book. There is a strong element of the detective story in the tale and a marked difference of voice in the manner of telling it.

The basic register of Jack in narrating the tale is that of the unaffected raconteur, eager to give a straightforward account of the extraordinary adventure that has befallen him, relaxed in the knowledge that the events themselves are sufficient to enthral all who are willing to be held. But nothing less than the melodramatic mode will do as the story gets under way and climaxes succeed one another with bewildering rapidity. The professional storyteller takes over, and the rhetorical devices of the raconteur, the measured delivery of key sentences, the pause for effect, the writer's equivalent of the distended eyeball and the stabbing forefinger, make themselves felt through the prose.

Sometimes the lyrical is attempted, as in the description of Jack's diamond in the bartering sequences. Sometimes the horrible is vividly represented; one remembers, perhaps, the extended treatment of Mr. Trumpet's unfortunate experience in the swamp. And sometimes the lyrical and the horrible are fused in a single description, suggesting again how good and evil may be aspects of the same thing. The river, for instance, which leads the weary party through the weird experiences of the middle section of the book, runs 'directly out of the sun to wind its uncanny way through the dark of the world'. At one point 'it had sparkled like a necklace', while later it is revealed as 'a creeping hearse of dead branches, and rotted vegetation, endlessly slit by the sinful smile of crocodiles'. That last image, straight out of the nursery, is an excellent example of the way in which a child's range of reference is used throughout this section to create a deep sense of adult evil. In this way, and sometimes in the simple but effective juxtaposition of opposites, as in the river's 'silver treachery', the prose reflects the main intention. The voice is not, perhaps, as personal, as controlled, or as consistent as Stevenson's, but it knows clearly enough what it is trying to say, and it is trying to say something very similar.

Similar to what? Not, surprisingly enough, the child's adventure story, Treasure Island, which fashioned the literary tradition in which it can now clearly be seen to lie and which its author had not previously read. But The Master of Ballantrae, that adult novel of the struggle between a powerful, evil man and a weak, good man, which Garfield admired and which provided him with the idea of a book in which the weak rather than the evil go to the wall. To this he added another major theme taken from the nineteenth century romances—Melville in Moby Dick particularly, and Victor Hugo in a number of his novels—the idea of nature as an active, evil force.

The attempt to bring this out permeates the book. In addition to the river there is the extraordinary prominence given to the dark storm, which follows the ship throughout its voyage and is invariably described as a tiger. When the party lands on the African coast the image is again there to meet them as the trees crouch like an enormous animal. And the courtroom scene itself, the climax of the book, is carefully and quite deliberately presented as a kind of storm. Not all of this is, I think successful, nor is it as obvious in the present version as its author might like to think. But in the original draft, twice as long and written as an adult book, the intention was clear enough. It is hardly surprising that the work carries with it to its different market at least some of the qualities which characterized the intention of the original. (pp. 115-17)