Cyrano

Man with a long nose longs fall a girl way, way out of his league, and eventually hates himself for helping his rival win her affections by using his hidden superpower of being able to write well. No wonder writers have always enjoyed this fairy tale, even more than the average Joe. Now here comes prolific British warhorse Geraldine McCaughrean, who's written more books than I can count, to re-tell the old story like Charles and Mary Lamb re-telling Shakespeare. It's a bit unfair to accuse McCaughrean of being unable to write clearly and effectively. And she is doing more here than merely supplying character tags to Rostand's dialogue. When Cyrano hears Rozane make her confession that she would love an ugly man if he was as fine as Christian, McCaughrean doesn't just let Cyrano react. She spells out every one of his interior feelings in a way that no dramatist could. "There was a crack," she writes (at first I thought his nose was going to crack, like his heart, and fall off), "there was a crack, as if some planet on the far outskirts of the universe had broken open and spilled its golden yolk down the alleyways of space." Rather an elaborate science fiction metaphor there, but this emphasizes how people in the Middle Ages believed in the Sun revolving around the earth and being more or less like an egg, filled with white and yolk. "Cyrano did not know," continues McCaughrean, "whether he had heard it inside or outside his head." She's got a real thing for inside and outside and the boundaries between the two states, more porous than in many other writers for children, but that's how children see things, slipping between one state and another. It's no wonder that she was chosen to write the official sequel to PETER PAN, even though a superios sequel (PETER PAN AND THE ONLY CHILDREN) is already in print, written by UK postmodernist Gilbert Adair. "His pupils contracted," writes McCaughrean, "and he could not clearly see." I submit that she is doing more here than merely reproducing the beloved dialogue of Rostand's play. For better or worse, she is remaking the characters in her own likeness, and she's cute.