Meg Rosoff on Coming of Age

Can you tell me about A Separate Peace?

It’s not very well known in England. It takes place in a boys’ boarding school in America just before World War II. It has a little bit of that Brideshead feeling about it – a boy of privilege and a boy who just happens to be there – and it’s about this extraordinary friendship between a risk-taker – a confident, beautiful boy called Phineas – and his poorer, much more awkward, intellectual roommate, Gene. They create an initiation rite that involves jumping out of a very high tree, and it’s all about physical excellence. But Gene begins to be jealous of Phineas; a jealousy that grows angrier and angrier, as he thinks Phineas is trying to undermine his academic career, which is, of course, all he has. During one of the initiation rites, Gene joggles the branch of the tree. Phineas falls and shatters his leg and never realises that his best friend has done it. In the end Gene goes to see Phineas and tries to tell him that he did it, but Phineas won’t believe him or accept that he would ever have tried to hurt him.

What I really love about it is that it’s one of the very few novels that I read as a kid that deal with that really intense kind of friendship between boys, a kind of presexual love story that grows up at boarding schools when there are no women around. I became very affected by it because of the subtlety of the psychological portrait of the two. It became a sort of required text in a lot of American schools – if you talk to most Americans my age they will all cite it. It was just an amazing turning point kind of book. It was not only a bestseller, but one for all ages.

Basically the story is that kind of self-realisation that happens when someone begins to understand himself through someone else. It got something that no one had really talked about very much – that period in self-realisation where some people just seem to have the confidence and the rest of the world doesn’t, and there’s a huge attraction between those two poles but also a huge resentment

Pride and Prejudice?

It’s about Elizabeth Bennet, who’s 20, and she’s in a situation where there’s a huge necessity for her to marry and marry well. She goes out on a huge limb in deciding or being convinced that she wants to marry for love. In my mind what makes it a teen novel is that Elizabeth is a romantic – and because she’s still young she’s allowed to be a romantic, whereas her father is a very weak man who believes in romance. He says: don’t marry a man you don’t love, which is a slightly ridiculous thing to say to his daughter given her social position. If he were to die of a stroke the next day it couldn’t have been worse advice – they will be out on the street – so in a sense he’s still behaving like a teenager. Elizabeth gets very lucky because passion does win out in the end. I love Elizabeth as a character because she’s acting like a teenager by not considering her future in a serious way, by believing in love – which is a wonderful indulgence. She’s the great true rebel character.

I like to read it from a class point of view. I’m always interested in that bit when Jane asks Elizabeth when she first knew she was in love with Darcy, and she says, ‘When I first saw his house’. It’s a coming-of-age story, because she throws aside her prejudices but also sees the house and realises that she could be quite comfortable and maybe realises how important that is.

Shakespeare’s Henry IV Part I?

It takes place around 1400, with the usual battle in the background, and the basic story is that King Henry IV is beleaguered and besieged, and is waiting for his son, Prince Hal, to give him a hand. It keeps cutting off to Hal in taverns wasting his life, and in the meantime his rival Hotspur is making his own bid for the crown, assuming Prince Hal will never amount to anything. I just love Shakespeare’s version of a coming-of-age story. For me the wonderful turning point is where Prince Hal, who’s had a fantastic time playing around and joking and drinking, throws off his friendship with his ne’er-do-well companions (particularly Falstaff) and gives that absolutely wonderful speech: ‘I know you all, and will awhile uphold the unyoked humour of your idleness.’ It’s just such an absolutely brilliant and cold-hearted declaration of what it is to be a king.

Reaching adulthood is part of the job for a king.

Well exactly – it suggests a kind of recognition of his own destiny. One’s not sure how much he’s recognised it all along and has just been biding his time. There’s a lot of time spent talking about the betrayal of Falstaff, but I think that’s terribly sentimental: Falstaff was born to be betrayed. The wonderful thing about teenage years, and coming of age and so on, is that shift that happens: that moment when everything is refined and everything suddenly leaps into focus.