It wasn't a pick I expected to make. It wasn't in the original list of potentials for The Great Book Adventure. In fact, I never even considered delving into children's literature. Nevertheless, when my hand drifted to Peter Pan by J.M. Barrie I didn't second guess the instinct. All good adventures should have some spontaneity after all.

I think part of the reason I reached for Peter came as a reaction to having spent a month mired in Dickens' Bleak House (Parts One, Two, and Three). As books go, it was a pretty serious one, both from a plot and a reading perspective. By comparison, Peter is about a tenth of the length and was written for children. As for adventure criteria, it certainly has name recognition. The original play has been produced countless times at all levels, and movies like the Disney version and Hook have kept it in the public consciousness for generations. What most of those productions seem to have glossed over, however, is the darkness. There is an ever so faint shadow which hangs around the character and story. It's a slightly sinister feeling which makes only flickering appearances, at least early on. Its existence, I suppose, is only appropriate since it's a shadow that gets the whole story rolling in the first place.

If you know Peter Pan at all, you know he loses his shadow in Wendy, John and Michael's nursery and that that is what brings them to introductions. What you may not know, especially if you're like me and have only seen the movies, is that when Peter sits crying over his limp shadow, Barrie has already set him up as a character just this side of trustworthy. Just before Peter quite literally bursts onto the scene, Mrs. Darling is having a dream. She has already heard her children talk about Peter, though they haven't met him, and the narrator tells us "in her dream he had rent the film that obscures the Neverland." Right as she wakes up, the window blows open, Peter flies in and "gnashed [his teeth] at her."

Rent? Gnashed? Those are certainly not words I ever associated with Peter Pan. All I knew of Peter was that he was the boy that never grew up. He's always presented as joyful, perpetually excited, sometimes a little simplistic, but never so violent as those two words suggest. In the early chapters, there is something of the Pied Piper about him, something dangerous. Mrs. Darling is worried that he will take her children away, and rightly so it turns out. Though his focus is really Wendy, Peter takes all three with him to a Neverland that, like the Pan himself, isn't quite the pleasant dream we've come to expect.

In the old days at home the Neverland had always begun to look
a little dark and threatening by bedtime. Then unexplored
patches arose in it and spread, black shadows moved about in
them, the roar of the beasts of prey was quite different now, and
above all, you lost the certainty that you would win.