"...suggested an English surrealism..."

The light fittings all suggested an English surrealism; cast iron bouquets of garden flowers, enamelled to pale and powdery colours, the whole construction appearing to float from the powder blue ceiling.

Michael Bracewell, The Crypto-Amnesia Club 

Paul Magrs - Marked for Life

Start with details which take me back, which situate the novel in time and place. It was the 90s:

Mark wanted to explain to her: It's not a joke, love. This is where you begin to be catered for. Your Local Education Authority takes pains to shoehorn you from this point on; starting with this desk and this chair, horizons to suit your current size. Later there'll be free school dinners, field trips, exams, then either a student grant or a flat of your own. Sally had turned up her nose, burst into tears.

They were outside the subdued window display at Woolworth's and Mark gave a slow twirl.

Iris put the telly on. Christmas programs, Something brash on ITV, foreign cartoons on Channel Four, opera on Two, and on One a sit-com Christmas special shot abroad. 

Nobody has a mobile phone, either.

Written only twenty years ago, and yet it almost feels like ancient history.

So, by this point, I've now read what feels like a reasonably representative spread of Paul Magrs's work. And they're all firsts of one kind of another: his first effort to write Doctor Who (The Scarlet Empress); his first Effie and Brenda novel (Never the Bride); and now this, his first first, if you like. His first novel, and the first of his Phoenix Court trilogy. A series which appears to be linked as much by setting as by recurring characters; the place name Phoenix Court is never mentioned in his debut, suggesting that the succeeding books came more as an afterthought - what do I do next? - rather than stemming form any fully formed plan at the outset.

But to come back to where I started, this feels very much a novel of the 90s, not just in it's details, the time in which it's set, but also in its politics, in the way it's an utterly queer book, with a climax that ends with a happy family which is constructed rather than natural.

But to back track again: the title refers to Mark, tattooed from head to toe, who - thanks to a major traffic accident involving his lover Tony - ends up married to Sam. Sam has a lover, Bob, a policeman whom she also met as another consequence of that accident in which her best friend died. When Tony, who was thought to be in prison, sending provocative letters to his former lover, kidnaps Sally - Mark and Sam's daughter - everyone's lives end up being thrown into the air to reassemble in a slightly different form form by the novel's finish.

The attitude reminds me a little of what I find in Pedro Almodovar's films. Not just the queerness. The resilience: no matter how painful the events a character goes through, ultimately they'll survive, and pick themselves up. Also involved are Sam's mother Peggy and her lover Iris Wildthyme. Iris, of course, went on to reappear in Magrs's Doctor Who work - a source of irritation to some fans from what I can gather - before spinning off into her own line of fiction. Playful and mischievous, there she's a self-conscious parody of the Doctor, described by Philip Sandifer as an archetypal fag hag. Here though she's a much more Rabelasian figure, a one time novelist who boasts of being hundreds of years old. Her age roots this very modern story in an older landscape - rural and cyclic - buried beneath our ragged modernity. Iris is not a time lord here - the model is Virginia Woolf's Orlando, explicitly referenced in the text - although she does have 'capacious' pockets, a legacy of a childhood spent reading Target novelisations, which Magrs acknowledges in his afterword to The Scarlet Empress.

Less camp, more queer. Although arguably those are related concepts? I can't claim to be an expert. But yes, as I've said already, this is a very queer book. Mark's marriage to Sally is described as a second coming out. Iris is a character who seems quite determined to transcend any boundaries she encounters, whether we believe her stories or not. There's more magic elsewhere in the narrative. Since Mark last knew him, Tony has become invisible. The magic realism feels representative of the queer lives at the novel's centre. As I understand it, Queer politics and theories appear to contain a utopian element, which can feel both inspiring as well as difficult to reconcile with ordinary lives. Here the magic, the queerness, is rooted in a very mundane North of England, and somehow things do work out. Which is just lovely.

*

It was the 90s: I've said somewhere else on this blog that I've come to realise recently how the culture of the 90s was deeply pessimistic, a landscape of serial killers and child abuse and other horrors. But I'm also now coming to realise how it was also a culture marked by a self conscious hedonism, and of an opening to difference: what I've recently seen described as the 'hope of a cosmopolitan and syncretic civilisational politics'. Undoubtedly this also gave rise to a fair amount of silliness and dubious propositions or beliefs, but I'm now realising that I miss that hope. It would be nice to think there was something positive we could salvage from that decade.

Eric Ambler - The Levanter

Another review from amazon:

Eric Ambler – The Levanter

Perhaps this is only my own ignorance of the genre, but an unreliable narrator is not something I would have expected to find in a spy story. Not that this is exactly what we get, but still, the competing perspectives of the three narrators in this novel mean that central protagonist Michael Howell is nicely de-centred, and we quickly learn that we shouldn't quite trust his opinion of himself. For despite what the back cover would have us believe, he is not really apolitical, being complicit with Syrian government officials long before the mechanics of the novel's plot involves him with Palestinian terrorists. 

Nor is this exactly a spy story either, with the spies largely kept to the margins of the narrative, the focus remaining on Michael Howell, for whom the text is an attempt to exonerate himself from charges his unwilling involvement has brought about from the international community, and on the terrorist leader Ghaled. Ambler's depiction of Ghaled has the feel of an authentic portrayal of a fanatic, a man who despite his devotion to his political cause is also clearly guilty of overweaning pride and arrogance, not only a terrorist, but also a manipulative gangster. He is neither a monster, but nor is there any attempt to 'explain' his murderous actions by resort to cheap psychologising. 

Whilst Ambler is excellent at maintaining the ambiguity of his characters, and in conveying the details of Howell's business dealings, Arabic society and the Palestinian/Israeli conflict as it then was in ways that rarely feel forced, if I have one criticism it's that I didn't get much of a feel for the various locations where the story takes place. The cover of No Exit Press' edition is wonderfully evocative, but some of that was missing from a narrative which is otherwise a little terse, detail being conveyed as much through dialogue as through sometimes rather plain description. This could of course be considered a strength. Ambler has little time for cheap exoticism, but is instead chiefly concerned with the morality and actions of his deeply flawed central character, and with how Howell contrives to deal with the intricate trap which he has found himself in.

An interesting novel, which shows how Ambler was as much interested in probing the subtleties of character and motive as he was in composing a thrilling narrative.

Tove Jansson - The Summer Book

This is another review I originally wrote for amazon. A happy book:

Tove Jansson – The Summer Book

The eternal moment

It’s a small point perhaps, but the publishers of this marvellous, slippery novel would have us believe that the two characters at the story’s heart ‘while away a summer together’. Yet in fact, if we examine the openings of the early sections we find that it really takes place ‘One time in July...’, ‘One morning before dawn...’, ‘One Saturday...’, and most tellingly ‘One summer...’. All of the novel is like this, existing in the moment, describing not one, particular summer, but simply ‘summer’. It is the experience of being on the island during the summer for these two emotionally tightly bound characters. The story never really goes anywhere, very little ‘happens’, we are merely shown the ordinary day to day lives of little Sophia and her grandmother, and their connection with the tiny world within which we see them, and consequently of course, so much ‘happens’. Other characters might occasionally impinge onto this idyllic edenic world, but almost the only speech we hear is from the two at the centre of the story. Thus, Sophia’s father, about whom we hear a great deal, and who is presumably there with them on the island for much of the story, is never heard to speak.

This is a masterpiece, a healing book, one of the few works of literature I’ve encountered which, despite the darkness which lurks at the edges of the narrative such as the death of Sophia’s mother which is alluded to once and then never mentioned again, actually seems to describe happiness.

The Golden Age of Children's Fiction (4)

Susan Cooper, Silver on the Tree

The final book in a series that I could have read as a child. Frankly, I really should have done, but for some reason I never came across this series. It's exactly the sort of thing I liked though, ancient mystical forces appearing in a rural English landscape. Welsh landscape in this case, which is oddly appropriate to me now that I actually live in a Welsh landscape myself. Not that I had any inkling about that move when I was reading the Susan Cooper's series throughout what is now the year before last.

It being so long since I read it, this post has obviously been hanging around unfinished for some time.  It's one of several, and my current plan for the blog is either to finish or else give up on this handful of unfinished posts, and then hopefully start posting a little more regularly. As here, more recent reading will likely intrude. Like most plans, it will no doubt prove to be unrealisable.

*

But I really did want to write a final piece about this series, and the last book seemed to the right place to do so, since it's where all the characters introduced throughout the series are finally brought together. As satisfying as the ending is with a resolution the supernatural conflicts between the 'Dark' and the 'Light' which stretches throughout the series, it's not perhaps the strongest entry. Although the first book was published in 1965, with the following volumes taking place over the following seasons/year, yet it feels as though time has moved on in other ways, and we're now in the mid-70s. Or at least that's the way it feels to me, with an encounter early on with a moment of everyday racism in the tormenting of a Sikh boy Harry Singh that seems to belong more to 1977. That period which encompassed the immigration of Asians from Kenya as well as economic/industrial decline, coming after Enoch Powell's infamous 'Rivers of blood' speech in 1968, and after the 1973 oil crisis.

Once again, we have the ambiguity of precisely what the nature of the threat is that the dark represents. At times it's equated with the nationalist fear of historical attacks on England, yet elsewhere it seems to a more general sense of evil. Equally, as I've said before, the supernatural is never an excuse for human evil. The ignorance and racism of Harry Singh's tormentors as well as their bigoted father is only a means for the supernatural to enter and influence their lives, rather than being the source of their evil.

This is also in keeping with a fantasy in which magic is not only something kept apart from the world, but also kept to strict rules. This is most obvious in the climax to The Grey King where Bran and Will Stanton are tested by representatives of the Dark and the Light, balanced by a member of the 'High' magic, one of several forces which exist apart from the warring factions of the Dark and the Light. Similarly there is a long section in which our heroes are travelling through a magical landscape - the 'Lost Land' - in which they are occasionally threatened by a representative of the Dark. Yet there's something lacking in his threat. The Dark is as bound by the rules of this world as is the Light, and with so much of the action seemingly foretold, there's never any real feeling of a convincing threat. Of course we know with a story of this kind that 'good' will eventually triumph, but if there is no sense that the opposing force could ever achieve victory, then it can ultimately feel rather hollow.

In contrast, the earlier novels, perhaps because they aren't intended to conclude anything, are rather more effective in portraying the Dark as a credible power. They also have more space to investigate more human concerns. The Grey King, the fourth book, with it's depiction of the relationship between King Arthur's son Bran and his adoptive and overprotective father Owen Davies in contemporary Wales, is possibly one of the most emotionally powerful children's novels that I can remember reading. Despite it's supernatural elements, with a hunt for the golden harp which will wake the magical Sleepers in preparation for the final battle, at it's heart it's a very human story about their relationship.

There's a similarly human, and very touching, moment towards the end of Silver on the Tree. The character John Rowlands is offered the choice of whether he should remember the horror of what his wife Blodwen became in the service of the Dark. In fact, all of the human characters eventually choose amnesia. Bran ultimately decides to remain with his adoptive father, rejecting his immortality. Magic is ultimately banished from the world. Whilst the Dark is ultimately defeated, the victory of the Light is ultimately to free humanity from supernatural influence, which also includes the workings of the Light. Although the forces of the Dark are clearly evil in their intent, those of the Light are not always wholly admirable. It gives a real sense of the cost of this conflict, as well as an implicit judgement that it is ultimately quotidian human experience which is most important.

An important message for a children's story to provide. And by 'message', I don't mean anything that's didactic in intent. By it's nature, the 'quotidian' has little moral force. It's - merely, if you like - the experience of the lives we live. One consequence of the use of fantasy is that perhaps part of it's appeal can implicitly denigrate the ordinary lives we lead when we close the covers of the book. After all, what child wouldn't want to discover they had inherited mystical powers as part of magical elite? Or else, find themselves caught up in an exciting adventure? Well, that's the kind of child I was, at least!

So fantasy is given up for the realities of (eventually) adult life, but not until after we've thoroughly enjoyed the adventure.

*

On final point. A contemporary review of Silver on the Tree, helpfully quoted on Wikipedia, compares the series to Narnia, and makes the point most of the assembled heroes are ordinary children who 'do not seem up to the task' of defeating the Dark. Whilst it could be suggested that this a rather condescending view of what are, after all, fantasies intended for a readership of children, it's worth thinking through a bit more deeply. Simply because, in today's world, we have a real world example of children pressed into service in real world wars. Child soldiers are one of the moral horrors of our time (not that children weren't involved in warfare in the past, of course, but was it in quite the same way?). I don't think I'm stretching a point here to find a metaphor in the roles imposed on characters who are children in these kinds of stories.

Of course, this is surely part of the attraction to a young reader, the identification with child heroes who can take on such roles. Yet, is that not a danger it self? I'm reminded of a criticism by A.S. Byatt, that Narnia is dangerous because it embodies an uncritical and solipsistic over involvement with fantasy, in which the child protagonist is literally swallowed up by the product of the imagination. Put like that, such fantasies do clearly embody a worrying model for reading. Byatt's complaint is also part of her general distrust of the imagination. It's a distrust she shares with figures as disparate as Alan Bennett and - going further back - Flaubert. I can't help feel that such distrust of the imagination is Protestant in its inspiration. Children - most readers in fact - are for the most part perfectly able to distinguish between the imagination and reality. Part of the attraction of fantasy is precisely the fact that it is fantasy.

Yet that isn't to deny that there is something troubling here in the figure of a child pressed into service in a supernatural conflict. And we do now have one novel which confronts precisely this issue. Alan Garner's Boneland shows how profoundly traumatic it might be to survive such an encounter with the supernatural as a child in its portrait of the deeply troubled Colin Whisterfield. For all that the psychotherapist Colin meets is also a magical figure, and the service she provides seems remarkably quick in it's effects, it's still one of the most convincing portraits of the therapeutic process that I've come across in fiction. Boneland is a novel I'm glad I read as an adult.

The Golden Age of Children's Fiction (3)

Holly Black, Tithe

"She does good Fae."

That at least is my memory of Caitlin Kiernan's praise of Holly Black's series of 'Modern Fairy Tales'. I haven't gone back to her blog and checked, but I think the general sense is right. Her praise emphasised the extent to which Kiernan felt Holly Black avoided elements of kitsch or cuteness in her depiction of the fairy realm, instead providing something of the sense of the danger and violence that lurks in the original depictions of Fairy collected from oral tradition. Precisely what Kiernan aims for in her own work.

This isn't really a children's book. It's Young Adult, a publishing category I don't believe existed back when I was younger. Although I could be mistaken about that, and I certainly must have read books which would now be fitted into such a category. Robert Westall, for instance, who I did read as a child, and not only because we did a couple of his books at school.

Searching out Holly Black's work after reading Kiernan's praise, the first thing I found in a charity shop was a volume of the Spiderwick Chronicles. Which are more clearly 'children's fiction', even though they draw on much of the same material as Tithe does. A series of delightful small hardbacks, whose format feels like a deliberate imitation of Daniel Haddon's Lemony Snicket books. As enjoyable as Spiderwick was, it also felt like a less successful use of the format. Where Haddon played out a variation on the same basic structure in each successive book, the Spiderwick Chronicles felt more like a single tale which had been broken up into five sections. With a little editing, it could easily have been presented as a single tale.

Tithe, which I eventually tracked down, strikes me as post-Whedon fiction. The publication date is 2001, so it at least fits time wise, but I imagine by this point there are plenty of other models for this type of contemporary fantasy that one could draw on. The Sandman gets a mention amongst the many cultural references in the book. Holly Black's habit of using a bit of poetry as an epigraph for each chapter even reminded me of Anne Radcliffe. It's clearly engaging with the wider Gothic tradition more generally.

But whether there was any direct influence or not doesn't really matter. Tithe and Joss Whedon's Buffy certainly have things in common in their approach to using the fantastic within a modern American landscape. There's the same general saviness about their deployment of the tropes. The supernatural figures are both literally themselves, and at the same time clearly deployed metaphorically as symbols standard issues of adolescence. The human characters' reaction to the supernatural eruptions into their lives isn't to worry overmuch, but simply to check it out online and then get on with the plot. The supernatural isn't something to be resisted, it's a part of real material life to be recognised and experienced.

Whilst the plot is fairly easy to predict, there is a real inventiveness to Holly Black's use of fairy, which really does imbue them with a real sense of menace, as well as engaging characters, and a few moments of effective lyricism. It's also really sexy. I was a little surprised at how much Black pushed the boundaries there, but that's probably my own naivety, a result of my jumping straight from children's to what I though were 'adult' books when I was younger, and so missing out on much of what would now be labelled Young Adult. Surely, sex is exactly what many young teenagers are looking for in a book?