Their dark materials

Remember those butt-ugly Parental Advisory: Explicit Lyrics stickers Tipper Gore and the PMRC successfully lobbied to label albums with back in the ‘80s? Not many bands do. Goldfish-brained musicians – several of them recipients of such stickers – queued up to participate in her husband Al’s Live Earth extravaganza a couple of years ago, leaving one to wonder if Frank Zappa and John Denver died in vain.

Granted, those stickers never stopped underage kids from mainlining Tupac and Eminem. If anything, they probably gave such potty-mouthed albums additional cache.
Soon, the written word will be subjected to a similar indignity. The publishing industry will impose age-banding on books intended for young readers, effective this autumn. The categories are 5+, 7+, 9+, 11+ and 13+/teen. Such measures have inspired yowls of protest from authors, illustrators, editors, booksellers, librarians and teachers, who’ve come out in force against the proposal, adding their names to the online petition www.notoagebanding.org. The list includes Philip Pullman, Neil Gaiman, Jacqueline Wilson, Darren Shan, Roddy Doyle, Terry Pratchett, and many other authors whose work crosses the netherzones between adult and children’s literature.
“I have had letters from children of seven who say they have read all the way through His Dark Materials and they have an astonishing knowledge of it,” Philip Pullman told the Daily Telegraph last week. “But not every child is the same. A child of nine might be tentative and unsure about reading, and to give them a book that says 9+ will reinforce their sense of failure. The book should be suited to the individual child.”
Neil Gaiman, author of many stories that have bewitched kids and grown-ups in equal measure, including Coraline and the forthcoming Graveyard Book, had this to say in his blog:
“You can get all the information about who a book is aimed at across to a book buyer with typefaces and design. Putting more or less compulsory coloured bands on books saying what age the reader is expected to be seems like something that’s just going to stop people – of all ages – reading books. Exclusive, not inclusive.”
When I was about ten or so, my Aunt May brought me to the local book shop as a treat. I picked out a non-fiction title about the history of werewolves, vampires, cannibals and such, replete with plates of Vlad The Impaler pronging the heads of his vanquished enemies on pointy sticks. My dear old aunt surveyed my choice and wondered if I was old enough to read it. I reassured her that I loved this stuff. Satisfied with that, she bought the book. That’s all it takes.
Reading is a chain-link process, and every child’s path is different. The present writer’s route went from Willard Price to 2000AD to Stephen King to John Steinbeck over the span of a decade. My youngest daughter is deep into Barbie books, the next one up devours JK Rowling and Eoin Colfer, the eldest is currently buried in Alan Moore’s Watchmen. When publishing houses start dictating the terms to kids, they’re meddling with very delicate mechanisms (what are they afraid of – roving hordes of unchaperoned children rampantly browsing the bookshelves?).
Any parent will tell you it’s hard enough to unplug kids from the Playstation without corporations micromanaging their reading tastes for reasons you can be sure have far more to do with market-targeting and demographics than guarding our little darlings from fictional bogeymen. Contributing to an online discussion last week, Darren Shan said: “I am 100% against age branding, as I see it as (a) a very stupid idea, (b) a definite, irrevocable step towards censorship, and (c) a way for publishers to exert even more control over their authors, to make writers conform to their idea of what a book should be, how it should be pitched and marketed, and – even more crucially and worryingly – how it should be written in the first place.”
Reading is freedom. End of story.