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A review by richardleis
The Annotated Peter Pan by J.M. Barrie
5.0
Expensive, gigantic, beautiful book! I have only read Peter and Wendy so far, including the annotations on those pages, but the book is full of much more content, essays, defenses, reactions, images, and more.
The story itself is fantastic if charged with unwelcome racism and sexism. Some of this can be explained away by a writer trapped in the prejudices of his own time, but some of it is harder to take. There is also the shadow of rumor and allegation about J.M. Barrie himself, and the book leaves the reader with some disquieting questions at the end.
There are incredible depths to be found in the tension between children and adults who don't often act their age in the story, and a suggestion that perhaps there is little difference between these two arbitrarily defined age groups. At the end, though, with Peter Pan's petty ageism, the story suggests to me the limitations of a real world bound in mortality, and an unexpected insight that perhaps the key to Peter Pan is not that he is forever a boy but that he is immortal. Like many fairy tales I have been reading lately, I have been finding unexpected connections with the modern world, especially one undergoing tremendous technological and demographic change, suggesting that fairy tales may soon serve as guides to a magical and strange new reality.
The story itself is fantastic if charged with unwelcome racism and sexism. Some of this can be explained away by a writer trapped in the prejudices of his own time, but some of it is harder to take. There is also the shadow of rumor and allegation about J.M. Barrie himself, and the book leaves the reader with some disquieting questions at the end.
There are incredible depths to be found in the tension between children and adults who don't often act their age in the story, and a suggestion that perhaps there is little difference between these two arbitrarily defined age groups. At the end, though, with Peter Pan's petty ageism, the story suggests to me the limitations of a real world bound in mortality, and an unexpected insight that perhaps the key to Peter Pan is not that he is forever a boy but that he is immortal. Like many fairy tales I have been reading lately, I have been finding unexpected connections with the modern world, especially one undergoing tremendous technological and demographic change, suggesting that fairy tales may soon serve as guides to a magical and strange new reality.