David Robinson: Dividing line between children and adults is not an easy one to cross

ASKED whether he would ever write a children’s novel, Martin Amis said last year he would only consider it if he had a serious brain injury.

The divide, he implied, with inimitable offensiveness, is indeed as great as that. Can a children’s writer of Rowling’s calibre leap across it in the other direction?

The omens aren’t great. Among the small ranks of the similarly stellar, CS Lewis and JR Tolkien never wrote novels for grown-ups, and Philip Pullman’s 2010 The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ hardly stands comparison with the His Dark Materials trilogy.

Sometimes what children most love in an author – and with Rowling it is surely the completeness and the sheer detail of her imagination – isn’t something that adults particularly prize.

But don’t write off her next novel just yet. Because for every AA Milne – stuck writing for children and unable to get back to writing plays for adults – there are novelists such as EB White, Roald Dahl, Penelope Lively and Salman Rushdie who proved it was possible to write brilliantly for both.

In Rowling’s adopted city of Edinburgh, that dividing line frays into invisibility. Robert Louis Stevenson wrote as well for adults as he did for children, and so does former resident Anne Fine, above, even if her grown-up novels don’t receive the attention they deserve. But whatever obstacles Rowling’s “grown-up” novel is to face, that at least won’t be one of them.