Gather Neverland: J.M. Barrie, The Du Mauriers, And The Dark Side Of Peter Pan Imagined By Piers Dudgeon Readable In Version

exploration of the world of JM Barrie, the du Mauriers and the "dark side of Neverland"! Fascinatingly suggestive but doesn't quite deliver I hated this book.
My favorite book is Peter Pan, This book was so uncontrollably biased against Barrie it made me sick to my stomach, It twisted his bright imagination into something devilish, I DO NOT recommend this book to anyone, I have no respect for the author, This felt a bit like in the last book of the Harry Potter series, "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows", where Rita Skeeter writes an unauthorized biography of Albus Dumbledore.
Yeah, it felt just as disgusting as that while I read this book, except it was in real life,

It isn't exactly new to suggest writers have problematic lives: many are drunks or drugaddicts Hunter Thompson, Ernest Hemingway, Tennessee Williams, Edgar Allan Poe, F.
Scott Fitzgerald, etc. , many kill themselves Hunter Thompson, Ernest Hemmingway, Virginia Woolf, John Berryman, Sylvia Plath, Jerzy Kosinski, Richard Brautigan, etc, because they're loners and odd they usually face constant rejection in real life and even the literary world Madeline L'Engle, C, S. Lewis, Margaret Mitchell, Rudyard Kipling, F, Scott Fitzgerald, Dr. Suess, George Orwell, Stephen King, etc, I could probably go on forever, . Methinks they're going to have issues, Also, many don't feel comfortable with people their own age, they hang out with children, who are more accepting Lewis Carroll, alias Reverend Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, J.
K. Rowling, and Beatrix Potter. J. M. Barrie is among that last group,

While interesting, this book seems filled to the brim with answers to situations that were pulled together by stretching any facts that were found and using fictional works as honest sources to fill in the rest.
It can be said that writers base their work on real life you can go through the facts of their lives, piece together what they may have been feeling at the time, and then read their work as they supposed wrote them and see if a bit of themselves shine through the writing.
But I doubt anyone should take the fictional work as fact, I hope this Dudgeon fellow never attempts a biography of Stephen King, Clive Barker, Neil Gaiman or Shakespeare, for that matter: he might try to convince readers that they had been to the world of fairies and haunted meat locker trains based solely on their writings.


While plausible, I doubt anyone will fully know what happened to Barrie's brother, David, The fact that the author of this book dares to insinuate that his death wasn't an accident, but seems to have been a premeditated murder on the part of Barrie so that his mother would love him more, seems like a stretch.


The author worked with Daphne du Maurier and seemed to have been a friend of hers, But the minute she wanted to keep something secret, he pounced on it, like a vulture, Now it seems that everyone and their dog has written a biography of Ms, du Mauriers, but this guy seems to have gone too far with his 'research' and assumptions, But, also, if this is how this guy treats his recently deceased friends, I hope to God I'm never one of them,

While there are a lot of tragic circumstances surrounding the du Mauriers and Mr, Barrie, I don't think he meant them to be unhappy, much less kill themselves, He kept watch over them and paid for their schooling after their parents died, That doesn't sound like an uncaring Svengali, I think he was an odd, little man who was very lonely, Tragedy happens and life sucks,

If the author had really wanted to state that the boys had had their lives drained from them, I find it odd that the Llewelyn Davies boys that killed themselves were either really young Michael where hormones were raging so feelings were muddled and confused as many psychologists would say and he was away from home and he had someone else doing it with him so as to ease the tension and fear and not go it alone, and the other one Peter waited

untilyears after Barrie's death to throw himself under a moving train.
This theory just doesn't hold muster for me,

In the end, I couldn't finish this book, I got about a fourth of the way through the mire of this muckraker's 'biography', Maybe some people find trashing a dead man's reputation fun and titillating, but I'm still of the opinion that you have to have actual source material instead of hearsay before you can be published.
Very Interesting Suppositions Many Secrets Are Still Not Revealed

Piers Dudgeon has obviously done his research and clearly has some strong feelings about the kind of influence that JM Barrie had over his 'lost boys' and their cousin Daphne Du Maurier.


I too find the Du Maurier family history fascinating and this book intrigued me, Dudgeon has certainly made some important correlations and offers many insights into why certain events unfolded they way the did for the LlewelynDavies and Du Maurier families, many times the reason seems to have been JM Barrie.


This book is not the flattering portrait of a brilliant author, instead Dudgeon paints a dark and frightening picture of a master manipulator who intimidated adults, used children to satisfy his own warped purposes and was fixated on death.
The author suggests the reason for Barrie's fascination with death relates to the circumstances surrounding the death of Barrie's brother when he was a child.


If you are a fan of Daphne Du Maurier you will find Dudgeon's analysis of her work very interesting to say the least.
Before she died Daphne placed a fifty year moratorium on publication of her adolescent diaries which have been described as 'dangerous, indiscreet and stupid'.
What happened in the life of the young Daphne that couldn't be revealed untilWe get some ideas from reading Dudgeon's analysis, He has examined the writings of George, Gerald and Daphne Du Maurier and JM Barrie, In addition he includes excerpts from letters and interviews from family members and friends of the Barries, the Llewelyn Davies and the Du Mauriers.


I found it all very, very interesting and I have to say that some of this, no, much of this made my skin crawl.
Dudgeon has created a convincing picture of a cunning and ruthless predator who slowly and methodically destroyed Sylvia Llewelyn Davies' marriage and after her death took her children from their family.


I highly recommend this for Du Maurier fans,
I felt like I was reading footnotes taken by a person who was reading biographies of three separate people, It was full of author speculation and phrases such as "one can assume that, . " and "it's probable that " As I was reading I did go back and forth between giving itorstars, I went withbecause as the book was coming to an end, I found myself getting less and less interested, It did, however, spark my interest enough to seek further reading on my own of Du Maurier novels, From the jacket,

As D, H. Lawrence once wrote: J, M. Barrie has a fatal touch for those he loves, They die.

Shudders. .