In Britain during the 1970s, a new
group of poets and writers arose, led by Craig Raine and Ian McEwan. The poets were sometimes referred to as “the
Martians” after Raine’s most well-known poem, “A Martian Writes a Postcard Home.” The idea of the poem was to describe the
familiar world in unfamiliar ways, giving a new perspective on ordinary
objects. McEwan’s early stories and
novels were poetic in their carefully crafted sentences, yet he also took
pleasure in a certain perversity in their plots. McEwen’s book for children, The Daydreamer published in
Britain in 1994 and just published in the US in the wake of the success of his
novel Atonement, brings to mind not McEwan’s early work, so much as the
Martian poets. Far from flirting with
taboos, McEwan’s book is a remarkably straight-laced collection of episodes in
the life of a young boy, ten-year-old Peter Fortune. Peter is a daydreamer of the first order, whose daydreams are so
powerful that he believes in them completely. 
Most of them take the form of Peter switching bodies with another
creature – such as the family cat, a doll, a baby, and an adolescent girl. In each switching, Peter comes to experience
the world in completely new ways. These
daydreams give Peter a new appreciation for the perspectives of other
people. In one slightly different
chapter, Peter stands up to a bully at school by realizing that the only reason
that the bully has power is because the other children give it to him. Peter points out the childish secrets of the
bully to everyone else, and suddenly the bully loses his ability to rule by
fear. It’s a nicely observed and
thought provoking scene. The
Daydreamer will appeal to imaginative children, ages 8-12.

© 2003 Christian Perring. All
rights reserved.

Christian Perring, Ph.D., is
Chair of the Philosophy Department at Dowling College, Long Island, and editor
of Metapsychology Online Review. His main research is on philosophical
issues in medicine, psychiatry and psychology.

Categories: Children