The Daydreamer (novel)
First edition
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| Author | Ian McEwan |
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| Illustrator | Anthony Browne |
| Country | United Kingdom |
| Language | English |
| Publisher | Jonathan Cape |
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Publication date
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1994 |
| Media type | |
| Pages | 144 |
| ISBN | |
The Daydreamer is a 1994 children's novel by British author Ian McEwan. Illustrated by Anthony Browne. The novel was first published by Jonathan Cape. It draws its plot directly from the Rankin/Bass movie, The Daydreamer (1966) in which a young boy daydreams and enters a world of Hans Christian Andersen stories. It is considered to be McEwan's first book for children, or second if taking into account the picture book Rose Blanche (1985). Critics praised McEwan's imagination, but noted that the book had high "sweetness-and-light levels".
The book comprises seven interlinked stories about a young boy, Peter Fortune, whose daydreams place him into various fantastic situations: he discovers a cream that makes people vanish and makes his family disappear; conquers a bully on the thought that life was a dream so he had nothing to lose but to wake up, transforms into a cat and fights off a new tabby stray, transforms into his baby cousin and experiences the joys of being a toddler, a doll and gets his arm and leg ripped off to match a mangled doll, and, in the last story, an adult in which he discovers how boring adults are compared to kids. He is 10 years old at the start of the novel and 12 at the end.
The novel was first published by Jonathan Cape and has been translated into several languages. It has been reprinted by Vintage, amongst others. It is considered to be his first book for children, or second if taking into account the picture book Rose Blanche (1985), both illustrated by Anthony Browne.
McEwan read the stories to his children as he wrote them. In an interview he compared his child self to Peter, saying he was "quiet, pale, dreamy" and was someone who preferred having close friends.
Eva Maria Mauter in her 2006 MA thesis Subjective Perspectives in Ian McEwan's Narrations writes that The Daydreamer gets neglected in treatment about McEwan's works because it is a children's novel.
David Malcolm in Understanding Ian McEwan (2002) writes that in the novel Peter, in his unconstrained world, moves between ordinary and impossibly fantastic situations. He compares it to First Love, Last Rites (1975), McEwan's first collection of short stories, because they both contain exciting, frightening, and loose worlds.
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