"Neverland" Book Review

Neverland: J.M. Barrie, the Du Mauriers, and the Dark Side of Peter Pan by Piers Dudgeon
My rating: 1 of 5 stars

"In his revelatory Neverland, Piers Dudgeon tells the tragic story of J. M. Barrie and the Du Maurier family. Driven by a need to fill the vacuum left by sexual impotence, Barrie sought out George du Maurier, Daphne du Maurier 's grandfather (author of the famed Trilby), who specialized in hypnosis. Barrie 's fascination and obsession with the Du Maurier family is a shocking study of greed and psychological abuse, as we observe Barrie as he applies these lessons in mind control to captivate George 's daughter Sylvia, his son Gerald, as well as their children who became the inspiration for the Darling family in Barrie 's immortal Peter Pan. Barrie later altered Sylvia 's will after her death so that he could become the boys legal guardian, while pushing several members of the family to nervous breakdown and suicide. Barrie 's compulsion to dominate was so apparent to those around him that D. H. Lawrence once wrote: J. M Barrie has a fatal touch for those he loves. They die."

 This felt a bit like in the last book of the Harry Potter series, "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows", where Rita Skeeter writes an unauthorized biography of Albus Dumbledore. Yeah, it felt just as disgusting as that while I read this book, except it was in real life.

It isn't exactly new to suggest writers have problematic lives: many are drunks or drug-addicts (Hunter Thompson, Ernest Hemingway, Tennessee Williams, Edgar Allan Poe, F. Scott Fitzgerald, etc.), many kill themselves (Hunter Thompson, Ernest Hemmingway, Virginia Woolf, John Berryman, Sylvia Plath, Jerzy Kosinski, Richard Brautigan, etc.), because they're loners and odd they usually face constant rejection in real life and even the literary world (Madeline L'Engle, C. S. Lewis, Margaret Mitchell, Rudyard Kipling, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Dr. Suess, George Orwell, Stephen King, etc. I could probably go on forever.). Methinks they're going to have issues. Also, many don't feel comfortable with people their own age, they hang out with children, who are more accepting (Lewis Carroll, alias Reverend Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, J. K. Rowling, and Beatrix Potter). J. M. Barrie is among that last group.

While interesting, this book seems filled to the brim with answers to situations that were pulled together by stretching any facts that were found and using fictional works as honest sources to fill in the rest. It can be said that writers base their work on real life; you can go through the facts of their lives, piece together what they may have been feeling at the time, and then read their work as they supposed wrote them and see if a bit of themselves shine through the writing. But I doubt anyone should take the fictional work as fact. I hope this Dudgeon fellow never attempts a biography of Stephen King, Clive Barker, Neil Gaiman or Shakespeare, for that matter: he might try to convince readers that they had been to the world of fairies and haunted meat locker trains based solely on their writings.

While plausible, I doubt anyone will fully know what happened to Barrie's brother, David. The fact that the author of this book dares to insinuate that his death wasn't an accident, but seems to have been a premeditated murder on the part of Barrie so that his mother would love him more, seems like a stretch.

The author worked with Daphne du Maurier and seemed to have been a friend of hers. But the minute she wanted to keep something secret, he pounced on it, like a vulture. Now it seems that everyone and their dog has written a biography of Ms. du Mauriers, but this guy seems to have gone too far with his 'research' and assumptions. But, also, if this is how this guy treats his recently deceased friends, I hope to God I'm never one of them.

While there are a lot of tragic circumstances surrounding the du Mauriers and Mr. Barrie, I don't think he meant them to be unhappy, much less kill themselves. He kept watch over them and paid for their schooling after their parents died. That doesn't sound like an uncaring Svengali. I think he was an odd, little man who was very lonely. Tragedy happens and life sucks.

If the author had really wanted to state that the boys had had their lives drained from them, I find it odd that the Llewelyn Davies boys that killed themselves were either really young (Michael) where hormones were raging so feelings were muddled and confused as many psychologists would say and he was away from home and he had someone else doing it with him so as to ease the tension and fear and not go it alone, and the other one (Peter) waited until 23 years after Barrie's death to throw himself under a moving train. This theory just doesn't hold muster for me.

In the end, I couldn't finish this book. I got about a fourth of the way through the mire of this muckraker's 'biography'. Maybe some people find trashing a dead man's reputation fun and titillating, but I'm still of the opinion that you have to have actual source material instead of hearsay before you can be published.

View all my reviews