Castaway Tales by Palmer Christopher;

Author:Palmer, Christopher;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Wesleyan University Press
Published: 2016-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

6

Recent Children’s Novels

Recognizing Indigeneity, Facing Death

This chapter discusses a selection of recent castaway novels for children:1 Island of the Blue Dolphins (Scott O’Dell, 1960), To the Wild Sky (Ivan Southall, 1967), Nation (Terry Pratchett, 2008), and Kensuke’s Kingdom (Michael Morpurgo, 1999). Each of these novels finds a way to revive the buoyancy and confidence of nineteenth-century castaway novels for children, such as The Swiss Family Robinson, Masterman Ready, and The Coral Island, and in this respect they resemble the science fictions to be discussed in the next chapter. What is most striking about them is the decisions they each make about their main characters: girls and non-European people are given new importance, and the altered angle that this provides is perhaps the clue to their achievements. It certainly lends each a thoughtful quality; the constituents of the story cannot be taken for granted. Each has to rethink the elementary matter of getting the castaways onto the island, which in O’Dell’s and Pratchett’s novels has been their home.

The nineteenth-century novels mentioned earlier often concerned a castaway family in which adults were the reliable leaders and instructors. In the more recent novels under discussion here, arrival on the island marks a break, a rupture, from the castaways’ previous lives as children, or teenagers, that is, as part of a society of which they are not yet full members; indeed, the narrative of this rupture occupies most of To the Wild Sky. Each of the more recent novels features an indigenous castaway who can no longer live as her society requires (Karana in O’Dell), or has only just recognized that she is indigenous (Carol in Southall), or is caught between man and boy, like a hermit crab that has abandoned one shell and not yet found another, and besides is in revolt against the religion of his people (Mau in Pratchett).2 Experimenting with an indigenous castaway, and yet subjecting this character to the rupture with the grownup world that is frequent in novels about growing up, and making this world an indigenous one—all this makes for a rich revision of the castaway novel. In addition, girl castaways figure in three of these novels—Karana is Native American; the castaway teenagers in To the Wild Sky are a mixture of males and females; Daphne, who is English, is paired with Mau in Nation. Finally, each novel confronts death, in this facing something that is often taken for granted in earlier castaway narratives, the deaths of all but the survivor or survivors on whom the novel will concentrate.

Island of the Blue Dolphins

It was a good day to begin my new home.

SCOTT O’DELL, Island of the Blue Dolphins

Island of the Blue Dolphins tells the story of Karana, a Native American girl left behind by mischance when the remnants of her tribe left their island. She is forced to fend for herself for the years of her growing up. The story is based on that of Juana Maria, as her eventual white rescuers called her, marooned on San

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