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?