LONDON: The classic plot in children’s literature pits an individual with a mission against an unrelenting individual or institution. And something of this kind has now occurred in the genre itself, except that, in place of Lyra Belacqua or Harry Potter, the passionate protagonists are Philip Pullman and JK Rowling and, substituting for Lord Voldemort or the Magisterium, we have Britain’s leading publishers of books for the young.

The cause of this war occurred in April, when the kid-lit wing of the Publishers Association announced plans to print a suggested reading age on all children’s books. This followed research apparently showing that many adults are wary of choosing junior volumes as gifts because of the risk of, say, giving a novel about an adolescent being hired as a drug mule to a sensitive eight-year-old.

Although it amounted to a radical change in the way that school-age books have been sold, the initiative attracted little coverage at the time. But now, six weeks later, like heroes and heroines suddenly awaking to their special powers, children’s writers, led by Pullman, have risen up against the plan to stamp a number on their jackets.

Let’s, for the moment, borrow the coolly neutral tone of a history textbook and try to summarise the claims of the competing factions. On the side of the age stickers is the fact that there is greater opportunity for confusion on the under-16 shelves than in adult fiction. Many authors including Pullman and Jacqueline Wilson, another writer in a rage about age guidance write different series aimed at infant and senior schoolers.

Another argument in favour is that other art forms have long steered material towards different birth dates: the cinematic system of certification and also the (UK) 9pm watershed for grown-up shows that is more or less observed by television broadcasters.The contrary position, vigorously expressed by Pullman, is that literary development is hugely variable. There are columnists who claim to have been devouring War and Peace at six years old while, routinely, there will be children in any classroom whose reading age will be a couple of years ahead of or behind the number of birthdays they’ve celebrated.

Pullman and Rowling, in particular, have demonstrated this elasticity of appeal. Her Harry Potter books seem genuinely to have achieved the old advertising dream of appealing to consumers from eight to 80, while he, although the Dark Materials trilogy would seem most suited to people in their early teens, has also found a precocious younger audience. It’s clear that such catholicism might be nobbled by declaring the age at which stories should properly be absorbed, and it doesn’t take much imagination to predict what might happen to a 10-year-old spotted on the school bus with a book aimed at the seven to eight-year-old.At the moment both sides seem unyielding. The Publishers Association insists that the number stickers will go on the front of books. And yet writers such as Pullman, Rowling and Wilson would clearly have the economic power to demand a retreat, backed by the threat of establishing a new, ageless publishing house.

In adjudicating between these views, my biggest concern is that the move by the Publishers Association seems to have been motivated more by commerce than morality. All its statements emphasise that, by guiding nervous buyers through the bewildering shelves, this system will result in more books being sold.

Yet, in other areas of the arts, age-badging has always been ethically driven and has accepted that income may fall as a result: more cinema tickets and DVDs would be sold if restrictions were not in place. Also, as beginner literature is one of the current growth areas in publishing, it’s really not clear that a sales drive is required especially, as Pullman points out, one that may, in fact, suppress the market by discouraging adventurous reading.

The other worry, as with all forms of intervention between the audience and art, is who gets to set the standards. Shoe size can be empirically measured but, even beyond variations in reading age, there’s the problem of competing sensitivities. Liberal and Christian parents, for instance, might differ greatly in their view of suitable reading for a 10-year-old. To avoid fuss or legal trouble, the age ranges seem likely to be drawn up cautiously, with further risk of infantilising bright readers.

But, finally, the comparison with cinema is instructive in a particular way. It is now only with category 15 that the state begins to take an absolute stand on what people can see. The two lower categories PG and 12A leave it to the parents or guardians to make the decisions. Those rules seem to acknowledge that late teenagers are more homogenous in their reactions than younger children. So, on this basis, the existing system of children’s bookselling in which a general, invisible PG certificate applies to all titles might sensibly be left in place.

—Dawn/ The Guardian News Service