2022/43: Peter Darling -- Austin Chant

From down the hall, he heard a creak of bedsprings, and his mother called: “Wendy?” Panic shot through Peter and he stared at Tink, afraid she hadn’t known.[loc. 565]

A transformative (and trans-formative) work riffing on Peter Pan: Peter returns to Neverland after ten years away, and reencounters his old nemesis Hook. There's another boy, Ernest, leading the Lost Boys, who don't really seem to need Peter any more and -- horrors! -- have become rather less bloodthirsty in his absence. But Hook and his pirates still pose an existential threat, and Peter leaps back into the fray with relish.

Hook, though, has some important lessons to impart to Peter, not least that Neverland is powered by story, and creates the characters the story needs. It was Hook's story once, before an obnoxious brat showed up claiming to be the spirit of youth and joy. But both Hook and Peter are older now, and Neverland has changed as well. The two arch-enemies must form an alliance in order to survive -- and Peter must stop rejecting and repressing memories of his real life.

I very much enjoyed this, not least because in my mind Captain Hook bears a strong resemblance to Jason Isaacs (a preference shared by the author) and I found this oddly vulnerable, grieving, yet still flamboyant Hook perfectly in alignment with the one in my head. I also managed to read this 'cold', without realising that Peter is trans, and the way that his identity was built up over the first half of the book was marvellously done. It's an exemplary transformative work, too, unpicking the original story and knitting it into a new shape: all the original elements are present, but they no longer look the same.

I was slightly confused by the timeline: Hook came to Neverland after losing a lover who went off to the Great War, and it's implied he'd been there a long time before Peter's first appearance. But I'd always thought of Wendy and Michael and John as Edwardian children, which would mean they visited Neverland before Hook arrived... But this is really not important to the story, or stories, and it did not detract from my experience of the novel.

A gift from a dear friend: thank you, N!

“I always thought the only way to grow up was to be someone else. I don’t know what to do as me.”