From: Perry Nodelman <perry.nodelman>
Date: Thu, 02 Mar 2000 16:28:47 -0600

What has been interesting me about Skellig is its weird and fascinating parallels to another novel: Spinelli's Wringer. Most obviously, both books are about boys who find themselves encumbered with a winged creature they feel they must hide from others. In both cases, the creature requires food and attention, and getting those things and keeping the creature hidden forces the boy to lie to others, including his parents. In both cases, the boy entrusts his secret to a sensitive and solitary girl who lives nearby. and in both cases, his caring for the creature and being involved with the bird puts him at odds with a gang of boys he wants to be part of and with whom he does more conventionally manly kinds of things. In both cases, also, the girl clearly represents a different and opposite set of values from those of the gang of boys, and thus puts the main character in the position of having to make a choice between the two sets of values. Here the books part company; one boy does make a choice, but the other boy, in Skellig, seems able to keep both the apparently opposing sets of values--not together, but as different things that engage parts of himself at different and separate points in his life. Finally, in both books, the boy must act in a way that saves the vulnerable winged creature from death but requires some vulnerability to danger for the boy himself.

I hasten to add that I'm not wanting to accuse anybody of borrowing or copying. I'm thoroughly convinced that each of these authors arrived at this set of circumstances independently. What intrigues me, especially, is that the kinds of matters the plots revolve around should have led two different authors on different continents to such similar solutions to the questions of how to go about unfolding those matters.

In both cases, I'm suspecting, a concern with questions about masculinity and about what it means for a boy to be a boy is central. The gang of boys tend to represent conventional idea of exuberant, aggressive, thoughtlessly and unfeelingly physical boyhood--"the boy code" that Pollock discusses in his book Real Boys. In the world of the boy code, real feelings must be kept hidden--closeted, as homosexuality often must be in the culture of contemporary boyhood. In Wringer, the boy Palmer literally does keep his pigeon companion in a closet, and suffers the usual kinds of punishments and ostracism when the secret is let out of the closet--and also, a freeing permission to be bravely different, if solitary. While that doesn't happen in Skellig, the main character must wrestle with a concern about what his nurturing of Skellig and his love for his sick sister means about his manliness--and about what would happen if the boys in his group found out about either of those things.

That's about as far as I've gotten with this up to now. I'm wondering, though, about whether there are other children's or YA novels about boys that replicate these features: a main character caught between a sensitive girl and some rough and ready boys, a creature to be looked after, a questioning of what it means to be male and manly. It seems to be a plot admirably suited to opening questions about masculinity, and I'd be intrigued to hear of other versions of it.

Yrs.,

Perry Nodelman perry.nodelman at uwinnipeg.ca http://www.uwinnipeg.ca/~nodelman
Received on Thu 02 Mar 2000 04:28:47 PM CST