Peter Pan and Tinkerbell

I'm going to discuss the novel Peter Pan a bit, and there will be spoilers abound. Issuing spoilers for a story well over a hundred years old may seem silly, but I hadn't read it in all that time, so someone else may also be able to say the same.

Anyhoo, I've been thinking about Peter Pan of late, more in connection with the wretched Hook than anything else. Oh, did I hate that movie. The idea of Hook kidnapping modern kids is great (better, perhaps, if Peter Banning hadn't been Peter Pan after all) but the movie itself... Not so. The father-who-learns-better hasn't just been beaten to death. It's been killed, brought back as a Romero Zombie and left out in the sun too long. Brack!

Anyhoo, I was doing my usual "Can't think of how this sentence should go, oh, what's up with the webcomics!" type deal one day when I encountered this strip in the comic Nukees. Specifically the line, Tinkerbell died.

And I went, "What? No she didn't. Did she?"

I went to Wikipedia and sure enough, the little fairy gets gleeped. Short life span, we're told. All that clapping was for nothing.

More reading lead to my finally getting around to buying the novel, and you know what? I can't read the damn thing. Oh, I'll read a bit here, a bit there, that's fine. But I can't sit down and plow my way through it the way I did Dracula and most of Moby Dick. Part of the problem is that I'm not the "old tyme reader" I used to be; the verbose circling the old writers used to do kills my interest dead. But mainly the J. M. Barries's style does nothing for me.

That and the Disney version seems particularly close (if a little tame).

But what I have read of the novel has left me with a definite impression: Peter Pan is one evil little bastard. Not just for forgetting poor, evil little Tinkerbell. Have a gander:

When he saw [Mrs. Darling] was a grown-up, he gnashed the little pearls at her.

and

The boys on the island vary, of course, in numbers, according as they get killed and so on; and when they seem to be growing up, which is against the rules, Peter thins them out [Italic mine]; but at this time there were six of them, counting the twins as two.

He forbids the Lost Boy to think of their mothers, steals them away from their homes. I find that "thins them out" part particularly interesting. How does he thin them out? Does he return them to their homes as he does the Darlings and the current Lost Boys? Why do I doubt?

For a children's book, all of the children seem to be particularly cruel. This seems to be Barrie's intent rather than a fault. In fact, the whole book quite heartless, especially at the end:

As you look at Wendy, you may see her hair becoming white, and her figure little again, for all this happened long ago. Jane is now a common grown-up, with a daughter called Margaret; and every spring cleaning time, except when he forgets, Peter comes for Margaret and takes her to the Neverland, where she tells him stories about himself, to which he listens eagerly. When Margaret grows up she will have a daughter, who is to be Peter's mother in turn; and thus it will go on, so long as children are gay and innocent and heartless.

Dark, dark book. Such potential for darkness that, as far as I know hasn't been tapped. (I haven't seen the most current version, but the IMdB entry gives me doubts)

It also makes me hate Hook a little more. What a waste.