boldness of purpose and her directness of style were recognised and applauded in many
circles at the time.
Admitting that sex among teenagers does take place was an important breakthrough
for both writers and readers. For the first time, writers were beginning to acknowledge
fully the reality of teenage relationships and to recognise the pressures that teenagers
are under and the choices they have to make. As with their romantic predecessors,
experiences were predominantly retold from the girl’s point of view. Boys’ feelings about
sex and relationships were rarely explored except as a shadowy foil to whatever the girl
at the centre of the story was thinking. The knowledge that girls are the prime readers of
romances and the expectation that therefore the stories should be told from their point
of view survives today and most teenage romances are still told from the girl’s angle.
Alan Garner fared better than most in Red Shift (1973). He was absolutely up-to-date
in making Tom and Jan’s failure to have a satisfactory sexual relationship the centre
point of his story. Because of his parallel and mirroring historical narratives—one set in
Celtic Britain and one in the English Civil War—the pertinence of the central story was
easily missed and that, combined with Garner’s elusive and cryptic style, made the book
have less impact than it should. Garner’s male perspective was refreshing, as was his
superior writing in an area not always noted for this quality.
For both of these reasons Aidan Chambers, too, was an important contributor to the
teenage books of the time. A boy’s sensitivities were described by him in Breaktime
(1978). Like Garner, Chambers is a demanding writer. His account of Ditto’s sexual
initiation and the subsequent reassessment of his life, and especially of his relationship
with his father, is retold in a complex but thrilling narrative which offers insight into
ways of reading literature as well as speaking openly about sex. In Dance on My Grave
(1982) Chambers is bolder in both subject matter and style. Hal has known for some time
that he is gay but he has not acknowledged it openly. When Barry appears, the two
recognise their need for one another, but also acknowledge that they may not be faithful
forever.
The telling of Dance on My Grave is introverted and complex. Jean Ure’s The Other
Side of the Fence (1986) is more accessible but the point of the story—that Richard’s
girlfriend Jan turns out to be a Polish boy—is not revealed until the very end, making
the story didactic rather than instructive. Both books mark a brief window during which
gay sex could be written about before widespread knowledge of AIDS made such fictions
even more controversial and harder to tackle.
In Hey, Dollface (1979) Deborah Hautzig writes far more plainly about Val’s developing
feelings for Chloe. Written in the first person by Val, Hey, Dollface describes how the
friendship becomes romantic and physical though, after discussion, the girls decide not
to become lovers.
Such openness about relationships marked an important change in the way teenagers
and the kind of books they might want to read were perceived. But the upsurge of
writing about teenage sex and the conviction that physical attraction was the impetus
for all teenage relationships began to distort the realities of society. Ursula Le Guin’s A
Very Long Way From Anywhere Else (1976) was an excellent antidote providing a welcome
respite for teenagers who were quite happy having strong but wholly platonic
friendships. Owen and Natalie are both intelligent, strongly motivated people set on
386 TYPES AND GENRES