Eighty years on, Pooh bear stages return to Hundred Acre Wood

Published on Friday 9 January 2009 20:57

IN THE 80 years that have passed since AA Milne last wrote about him, generations of young readers must have wondered what happened to Winnie the Pooh and his young owner.

In October, they will be able to find out, the publishers Egmont announced yesterday, with the publication of the first authorised sequel to Milne's books, Return to Hundred Acre Wood.

The book will be published simultaneously in the United States and is expected to be available in 50 languages. Unless JK Rowling suddenly decides to write a new book, it will almost certainly be the biggest event in children's publishing this year.

The Winnie the Pooh franchise is a massive business for Disney, which acquired the rights to it in 1961. According to some estimates, the franchise is worth $1.5 billion (980 million) – more than for Mickey Mouse, Minnie Mouse, Donald Duck, Pluto and Goofy combined.

But for all the cartoon films, plastic figurines and Christopher Robin tea towels, the trustees of Pooh Properties – who manage the affairs of the estates of writer Milne and illustrator EH Shepard – have until now turned down all requests to write sequels to the originals.

The writer they said "yes" to is David Benedictus, an Old Etonian novelist who, in the early 1980s, was director of the Scottish Youth Theatre. He has also been a commissioning editor for Channel 4 and ran the Book at Bedtime slot for BBC Radio 4.

"The new book will have all the characters – Winnie the Pooh, Eeyore, Kanga, Owl and all the rest – but I'm not allowed to say much more," he said last night. "I think perhaps the reason the trustees agreed to this was because it's not just a pastiche. In a way, it's acting: I had to become AA Milne, to find out all about him, go down to his old house at Ashdown Forest, and try to imagine what it was like to be part of that posh world.

"I found the easiest characters to write about were the ones like Kanga and Rabbit that are actually a bit sketchy in the books. The hardest one is Eeyore, because he's so well characterised. Originally, I tried to give him a romantic past, but the trustees weren't having any of that.

"What is remarkable about the Winnie the Pooh stories is just how much story there is in them. They're like Friends: think how much plot you get through in a single 26-minute episode, how much interplay there is between the characters.

"I hope the new book will complement and maintain Milne's idea that, whatever happens, a little boy and his bear will always be playing."

ANALYSIS

SEQUELS to literary classics tend to be most successful when the authors have a free hand to take the story further, as Jean Rhys did with Jane Eyre in Wide Sargasso Sea. But literary estates are often unwilling to agree to go too far from the original, as Alice Randall was accused of doing in The Wind Done Gone, her rewriting of Gone with the Wind.

Among children's books, the biggest recent sequels include Charlie Higson's Young James Bond series and Geraldine McCaughrean's Peter Pan in Scarlet.