This week brought the headline that a sequel to A.A. Milne’s The House at Pooh Corner will be published this October, written by David Benedictus and illustrated by Mark Burgess. The book, to be published by Egmont, is called Return to Hundred Acre Wood, and, remarkably, over 80 years separate it from the first Pooh book.
Sequels generally have all kinds of expectations attached to them. If the author of the sequel is not also the author of the original (as with Sebastian Faulks and Ian Fleming’s takes on James Bond, or Geraldine McCaughrean and J.M. Barrie’s Peter Pans), the later book demands to be written by someone who is part ghostwriter, part novelist, and 100% faithful fan. Some writers engender more of these heirs than others – see the countless Jane Austen spin-offs that have come out over the years.
I grew up on Milne’s stories of the Hundred Acre Wood, and original illustrator E.H. Shephard’s pictures of the extraordinarily lovable characters that inhabit it: the fantastically glum donkey Eeyore, Kanga and Roo, Owl and his supercilious eyebrows, cute little Piglet and Pooh Bear himself, whose attitude to hunny-tasting I think of every time I open a jar of Nutella. The prospect of Benedictus’ version no doubt makes current Milne-ites suspicious yet excited, mostly for all the children who might be about to find their way into the timeless world of Winnie-the-Pooh for the first time.
