Who are we kidding?

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The books I liked best when I was young were the Victorian children's novels my grandmother had won for regular (forced) attendance at Sunday school. I liked them, not for any uplifting quality, but because they were about what I instinctively knew must be Real Life. The people in them lived through wonderfully satisfying dramas. They lost all their money, fell ill and died after long and noble suffering, went mad with grief, were sent to prison. No matter that they were usually falsely accused - that made their predicament all the more satisfactory.

I despaired that nothing as interesting seemed to happen in the boring suburb where I grew up. Our intensely respectable neighbours kept themselves to themselves behind their lace-curtained windows. To cheer things up, I invented exciting lives for them all. I told my friends that the people next door had a mad uncle locked in the attic - I knew, because I had heard him gibbering through the thin, party wall - and that the man with the squint who lived in the bungalow at the end of the street and walked his dog late at night was a dangerous bank robber.

What I longed for from literature, in fact, was realism of a gritty kind, not nice, safely adventurous stories about happy children with loving parents, which were the only modern children's books around when I was young. And even when I started to write for children myself in the Sixties, books for them still tended to avoid awkward or depressing facts of life.

"No, dear," my agent said, when I sent her my first children's novel. "The mother dies in the first chapter, the father has a breakdown and they have to live in their old aunt's boarding house where one of the lodgers is a mad woman ... not really suitable for children, is it?" Luckily a publisher thought otherwise.

Now, things are very different. With the exception of fantasy, most books for older children eagerly embrace "unsuitable" subjects: mental illness, poverty, crime, sex and drugs. In spite of predictable protest, books such as Melvin Burgess's 1997 Junk, about heroin addiction, received both critical acclaim and good sales. His new one, which will be published on 1 May, is best described as soft porn for 12-year-old boys, and has already aroused even more violent dissent.

The title, Doing It, is self-explanatory. The different ways of doing it with success is the burden of the book. I thought it rather unremitting in its concentration on what the boys call "Mr Knobby", but my resident child, who is in her teens, says it may be a disgustingly filthy book, but it is hilariously funny.

Perhaps childhood is disappearing. When most information, as well as entertainment, came from the printed word, it was possible to isolate what children read from the fare on offer for adults. This came to mean the sheltering of children from adult secrets, particularly sexual secrets. The growth of radio, television and the internet obviously means that this isolation is now at an end; all children now have access to information that would have been automatically denied them as little as 20 years ago.

And not just sexual information, of course. In recent years there has been a spate of what you might call "social-worker novels", or, less politely, "misery memoirs". Dysfunctional families are central to most of them, so much so, as to provoke nostalgia for a story about Janet and John. (Remember that happy pair, neat boy, neat girl, smiling mum and dad?)

Some of them come with a parental guidance sticker, but few of these stickers are integral to the cover and a sticker that can be removed before a parent sees it is likely to encourage a child to seize upon the book. Not all misery memoirs carry these stickers, which usually warn of sexual context. But, to my mind, they should come with some sort of warning. I have recently read Mark Haddon's cleverly done story about a boy with Asperger's syndrome, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time.

Another, Cut, by Patricia McCormick (out next month) is about a girl who cannot talk because of some unexplained trauma, and who is incarcerated in a therapeutic institution where, since she remains silent, she has plenty of time to record the doings of her fellow inmates: the druggies, the substance abusers, the anorexics.

The story is told with some humour and understanding, but the trouble with this kind of book is not that it is badly written, nor that studies of unfortunate or damaged people are likely to warp children's minds, but that they concentrate on a single aspect of life: the story is only about whatever misfortune is being "explored", there is no wider context, no hint of the complexity of life, the humour, the hope.

It is not a mistake that Dickens would have made, for example, nor, to make a more up-to-date comparison, Jacqueline Wilson or Lynne Reid Banks. Both of these excellent and widely read novelists often place their characters in unhappy situations. Wilson's new novel, Lola Rose, features a child with a feckless mother who later is diagnosed with cancer, and a drunkard father; Alice by Accident, Reid Banks's latest, out in May, chronicles the life of a nine-year-old with a difficult mother and absentee father.

But these aren't miserable books, because their young heroes and heroines are gutsy enough for the reader to identify with and applaud; these are not stories just about sad situations, but about the successful fight to survive them.

As I have said, I am all for Real Life. But there seems to be a certain lipsmacking pleasure in the way some writers have taken to writing about the sordid, the hopeless, the relentlessly gloomy side of the modern world, recommending grubby social realism as suitable for children with words like "provocative" or " challenging", but inescapably giving the impression that they are simply dancing to the latest fashionable tune.

It is all, perhaps, in the skill of the telling.

 

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