An addendum to my last post

Honestly, the book is sitting there on the shelf, I ought to have thought to check it out before writing my previous post. Talk about reinventing the wheel...

SECRET GARDEN Derived from The Secret Garden (1911) by Frances Hodgson BURNETT, the term refers to a private world which becomes something of a personal Paradise surrounded by an impressive reality. In Burnett's novel the place is a walled garden amid the bleak Yorkshire moors; the garden, imbued with the youthful zeal of the children, becomes a place of recovery and regeneration. An SG is thus any place of escape or retreat that provides a personal haven for the protagonist. The SG may be a WAINSCOT or POLDER in our own world, or in an OTHERWORLD or even elsewhere in TIME. It became a standard MOTIF in CHILDREN'S FANTASY, where most SGs are literally gardens... It was in recognition of the SG as a key motif in children's fiction that humphrey Carpenter (1946- ) titled his study of the golden age of children's literature Secret Gardens (1985). 

In ADULT FANTASY SGs are a similar retreat from everyday life, though may not necessarily prove to be such a haven.

The Encyclopedia of Fantasy, ed. John Clute and John Grant 

On the other hand, I was pushing a little at the edges of their definition. On reflection, I was conscious of pushing a bit hard to make Charlotte Sometimes fit my pattern. If it doesn't quite fit, then it still has affinities with the trope. Perhaps all timeslip texts do? Certainly it is more complicated than the simple 'eden' which we find in the Secret Garden. After all, what is the attraction at the heart of the notion of slipping back in time? Whether for the character, for the writer, or for the reader? It doesn't have to be anything as straight forward as a simple idealising of the past, but desire and pleasure are certainly mixed up in the notion.

Marianne Dreams though, is much closer to their use of the term in the context of adult fantasy. None of the examples given in the encyclopedia for it's use in 'adult' fantasies really convince me, which is why I think I actually prefer it that we can see this more complex version of the trope appearing in the context of fantasy written for children. It's years since I read it, but I suspect that Alan Garner's Elidor might fit the pattern. There are probably other examples out there.

Secret Gardens (The Gold Age of Children's Literature 8)

Catherine Storr, Marianne Dreams

Confined to bed, as a consequence of a long-term illness, a young girl entertains herself by drawing a picture of a house, which she then finds she can enter in her dreams. When she then draws a picture of a boy in the house she creates a companion for herself, Mark, a boy who, like Marianne, is also unwell. Unlike with Marianne, whose illness is never named - it seems more a storybook illness, allowing a long convalescence during the which the story can unfold - we eventually learn that he is recovering from Polio. Not just a creation of Marianne's imagination, he also corresponds to a boy in the real world who is, like Marianne, being tutored by a Miss Chesterfield who passes on news of her companion, whom Marianne otherwise only encounters in dreams.

The narrative follows the interaction between the two children in this peculiar landscape, created out of a child's act of drawing. Marianne gradually fills in the details of the house, and supplies food and games for her new friend. Unfortunately, early on, after an argument with Mark, she also draws a number of rocks with single eyes to keep Mark entrapped. The narrative eventually resolves itself into their attempt to escape these frightening, haunting figures which now people this barren landscape.

Mariano's attempts to help Mark build up his strength and escape, parallels his real world recovery from the effects of polio. It reminds me a little of Frances Hodgson Burnett’s The Secret Garden, specifically Colin's recovery from his unspecified illness (another storybook malady, more symbolic than real). Thankfully, Catherine Storr never descends to Hodgson Burnett's levels of sanctimoniousness about her character's illness. In place of a narrative informed by Christian science, we have something which feels - what - Jungian? Therapeutic, at the very least. The destination of their escape, a lighthouse - as with everything else, drawn by Marianne for Mark - seems symbolic of recovery, it's light piercing the eternal gloom of the dream landscape and temporarily blinding the nightmarish jailers. And the form those jailers take - rocks with single cyclops eyes - is something literally out of a child's nightmare - Marianne's.

I know almost nothing about Jung's theories, beyond a vague outline, so perhaps I'm stretching my argument here. Although, at the time she wrote her novel, Catherine Storr was married to the psychoanalyst Anthony Storr (her fiction published under her married name), who clearly had an interest in and knowledge of Jung's, as can be seen just from a glance at his bibliography, so there's no reason to suppose that she wasn't familiar with such ideas.

Perhaps it's just that any narrative of recovery, especially one which is couched in such fantastical, symbolic forms, is going to have a therapeutic note to it. It's certainly a powerful tale.

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There's an idea, though I can no longer remember exactly where I first encountered it, that a common trope of English children’s fiction is that of the ‘secret garden’. It derives from the title of Frances Hodgson Burnett’s famous novel of course, but refers to all the many hidden spaces and worlds which can be found in so much children’s fantasy. It’s close in some ways to Philip Sandifer’s trope of the ‘portal to fairy’ which he deployed in his epic examination of Doctor Who: the notion of a door or portal through which the protagonists pass, exiting the mundane world for one of fantasy and adventure. C.S. Lewis’ wardrobe leading into Narnia, basically, which easily maps onto the Doctor’s Tardis, and no doubt other children’s fantasy. But it’s there in The Secret Garden too, I think. Gardens by their very nature have natural boundaries, the passage through which can easily be freighted with literary, or even religious significance, if we think of the passage from the Garden of Eden in Genesis. Hodgson Burnett’s characters must first discover the means to enter the garden of the novel’s title, passing through an initially locked door into the space where they will achieve their own personal growth and restoration of health.

It appears to be quite a flexible trope. If I remember this correctly, I encountered it in the context of a piece about J.K. Rowling and Harry Potter, which definitely works: as we all know Hogwarts is a secret world reached through a hidden doorway in King's Cross station. I’ve also found myself wondering if this isn't a trope that I’m finding within many of the children’s fantasies from the 50s and 60s which I’ve been reading over the last few years. I’m thinking specifically here of Tom’s Midnight Garden, Charlotte Sometimes, The House of Green Knowe (which I didn’t get around to writing about, despite my good intentions). It’s most obvious in Philipa Pearce’s book: Tom literally steps over the threshold of his backdoor at night into a wonderful garden of the past. This actually underlines a significant difference though. What for Hodgson Burnet was a symbol of growth and unification with the world - both social and natural - which exists beyond the child characters’ sense of self has here become much more private, even solipsistic. Although he is sharing it with someone else, the experience of entering this hidden space remains Tom’s private engagement with the past.

In The House of Green Knowe it’s the eponymous house which serves as the magical space, hidden away from a threatening modernity. In order to reach it, the oddly named Toseland initially has to cross the barrier of floodwaters, which for the remainder of his Christmas holidays are the comforting barrier which help keep the rest of the world out, while he explores both the history of the house and his own family history through a series of ghostly encounters. Toseland's relationship with the past, both national and mythic is a sanctuary, keeping not only modernity at bay, but also an evil, storybook gypsy, the narrative's one source of conflict. I call her a 'storybook' gypsy, because that's exactly how she appears to me: a trope which bears little relationship to the real people we call gypsy's, although I am fully aware of the troublesome nature of that. As a gypsy, she is both the cultural and ethnic 'other' which is rejected by the national English past, the past which Toseland and his grandmother have continuity with through their ancestry.

Put like that, it feels like overly harsh with what is after all, a lovely children's fantasy. Yet, that reading is there. Much as I love it, and fully intend to read the other books in the series, I can still recognise that The House of Green Knowe is a deeply consolatory fantasy.

In comparison, both Charlotte Sometimes and Marianne Dreams feel far less consolatory. If anything, they're far more solipsistic, the secret worlds entered through sleep and dreaming. Charlotte Sometimes gestures at an alienating slippage of identity, and the world Charlotte travels back to and becomes trapped in is hardly a consolatory one, mostly dreary and unpleasant, overshadowed by the final stages of the First World War. If this is a secret garden, it is one which is despoilt, and to be escaped from.

Marianne Dreams is harsher still, since it isn't just Mark who needs to discover the resources within himself in order to fully recover from his illness. It's also Marianne who needs to learn to be a better person. It's her initial fit of pique and irritation with Mark which causes her to create the jailers in her dream in the first place. It's very nicely judged. She's never portrayed as a particularly unpleasant child - a bit self-centered, perhaps, but no more than most children can be - instead, her actions are the result of thoughtless anger, the sort of thing which we can all be guilty of at times. Marianne's desire to aid Mark in his struggle then is partly the result of her need to apologise and to atone for her earlier actions.

The magical space in which Marianne and Mark find themselves then, is intimately intertwined with the real, material world. It's a space in which they are both tested and ultimately learn to become better versions of themselves. Here, the 'secret garden' is located firmly within the self. Which is perhaps only to restate how the trope of the secret garden works. In contrast to the 'portal to faerie' as theorised by Philip Sandifer - where the portal is a doorway to a more magical, adventurous world - the 'secret garden' is ultimately always bringing the child characters face to face with themselves.

The Golden Age of Children's Literature (7)

So, first of all, lets take a quick look at the cover, illustrated by one Janina Ede, an artist with whom I am otherwise unfamiliar:

I really don't have very much to say, other than, isn't it just gorgeous? The sort of neo-romantic illustration that feels very tied to its period. Or so it seems to me, at least. Also the sort of illustrative tradition which has been largely replaced by computer generated imagery. It's gorgeousness is added to for me by the fact of my copy being such a beaten up second hand volume. It's very materiality redolent of an older period of publishing children's literature.

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Unlike some of Penelope Farmer's other books, Charlotte Sometimes is still in print, if only because of the song it inspired by Robert Smith. It's actually the second of two sequels to the earlier The Summer Birds, although chronologically the second of the sequence. I'm fairly sure I may have encountered her work in my first year of secondary school; a later novel, Thicker Than Water, sounds familiar from it's description. Unlike Tom's Midnight Garden, with which it has features in common, this is not a book I even tried to read as a child, but certainly it's one that I wish I'd read.

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It's another timeslip tale from post-war England. It gives me the sense I might be on to something in my earlier post when I tried to suggest that the past - or in the case of Tom's Midnight Garden, specifically the Victorian past - must still have felt 'close' to many people in the period in which this type of story appears to have been so popular. In the sense at least that so much more of the material fabric of the Victorian period must have remained visible than it does now after so much redevelopment of British cities. It was in the post-war period that saw the large scale destruction of much of this materiality through redevelopment, in addition to the scar that bombing during the war had already left on many of our cities.

Penelope Farmer's beautiful, subtle novel doesn't go back quite as far as that, but the transportation of it's heroine to the end of the First World War literalises this sense of the nearness of the past through it's means of timeslip. Charlotte only needs to sleep in a particular bed in her boarding school dormitory in order to switch places with Clare, another young girl at school in 1918, towards the end of the War, and whom she physically resembles. Each night the two girls find they switch places. Consequently each of them has to navigate a social environment which is subtly unfamiliar, highlighting the changes between the past of 1918, and the present of the late 60s that Charlotte longs to return to once she finds herself trapped in the past. Since the novel is told entirely from Charlotte's perspective, we only hear Claire's voice through the entries in her diary which she leaves for her replacement, but while the social world and rituals of a school enables them to survive, both girls clearly struggle to adapt to the unfamiliar time in which they find themselves.

Looked at over literally it feels just a little unlikely that a bed would really survive four decades of use and still be residing in the same room, but that enables the book to achieve the little narrative suspense it has. Whilst the room in which the bed resides is a dormitory in Charlotte's time, in 1918, Claire and her younger sister Emily are sleeping in a sick room, before they move to the stern foster home they were supposed to be have been billeted with initially. It's this move which traps Charlotte and Clare in the wrong time periods, necessitating Charlotte breaking into the school, which she still attends as a day girl, in order to sleep in the bed and be returned to her own time.

The sister of one of the girls, Emily quickly realises that her sister is being replaced every other day. One of the things which is most fascinating about the novel is the sense in which much of our identity is socially created through the pressures and expectations of the people surrounding us. The author has apparently related this uncertainty of identity to her own experience of being a twin, but it doesn't feel nearly so specific as that. Surely most of us run up against this at some point in childhood, the realisation that you are expected by family and friends to behave in certain ways, and hold particular interests, because that's what they've always expected from you. It's an almost existential moment, the realisation of just how hard it can be to change oneself in the face of others' expectations.

The choice of 1918, towards the end of the war (victory is announced late on in the narrative), that Charlotte travels to, also feels unusual. When depicted in fiction, or at least this is my sense, the home front of the First World War is usually seen from the point of view of the returning soldier on leave, unable to make those he's returning to understand precisely what he is experiencing in the horror of the war. Inevitably perhaps, if the focus of most fiction of the war is concerned with the experience of the soldiers. Here, we see something very different, the experience of all those ordinary civilians left behind, making do in a depleted world, ground down by years of a conflict which is taking place elsewhere. The closest the narrative comes to the experience of the soldiers is a long line of returned injured men derailing from a hospital train, beautifully illustrated by one Chris Connor.

In this, the illustrations are a fair match to a narrative which is concerned with small moments of individual perception and ordinary life, and with a sense of a lived past, which is still, just, even without the magic of a time-slip, able to be glimpsed in the world of the late 60s. Right at the end, a passage illuminates this feeling beautifully:

The bus went by modern, noisy roads. But when it came to the river and crossed over the bridge into the town, just for a moment, looking down the river, Charlotte could almost have believed it was the past, 1918, again. The pigeons and ducks and gulls there looked no different, nor did the faded, once elegant buildings with their elaborate cornices. The stucco was cracked, the gardens full of weeds, just as they had been then, after four years of war.

It's hard to imagine that you could make such a comparison these days. The houses would all have been restored, the gardens no doubt better maintained in preparation for some national gardening competition, the village likely a dormitory town for the city of London. The school might not even be a school any more, but perhaps converted in to some other use. The village would look 'old', but remain only a simulacrum of a past that we might imagine could once still be fully experienced.

An unfinished 'review'

My first post of the year, in February no less, and it's a fragment of something which I never finished. And now I never will, because it's opening section refers to contemporary events which are now no longer current.

I've put 'review' in scare quotes in the post title, because I'm not sure how many of the posts on this blog could really be described very accurately as 'reviews'. Or even if that's what I'm intending to write. I do worry that some of what I write is little more than a conversation with myself, and will hold little interest to anyone reading. But then I don't have much sense of an audience for this blog ('Hi!' if you are actually reading), and I don't think I post frequently enough to actually attract much of an audience.

Part of the reason why I don't post as much as I'd like is because I've increasingly found that should be relatively short appreciations become much longer pieces in the writing, taking up more time than I can really devote to them. That's certainly part of what happened here; I barely even start to talk about the book.

Still, I think I am trying to engage with an important point here, however ineptly. It's an idea which I've often come across, that the person of an author - whatever unpleasant opinions they may hold, or whatever unsavoury things they've done - should make no difference to one's appreciation of a work. In principle I agree, and it's surely necessary up to a point. But the experience of encountering a work where we know something about the person who created it will surely always colour our responses. And as a consequence, we might refuse to read something, or listen to a particular band, or watch a tv show or film. It's not that I think that's somehow wrong or even right, it's just inevitable, part of the filter we use to navigate the culture which is available to us.

So, anyway, for what little it might be worth:

William Mayne – A Game of Dark 

The decision to read some writers, whether we like it or not, make moral demands upon us. Of course, in principal, I agree with the proposition that creative works should exist independently of the people who create them. The fact that you disapprove of the behaviour of any particular writer shouldn’t automatically disbar them from writing a novel you consider to be a masterpiece. It should never be a reason not to read an author.

In practise, however, I don’t think it’s nearly so simple. We all make such decisions, and provided we don’t attempt to make this into a grand principal, disapproving of others for enjoying a work we have forbidden ourselves for whatever reason, then I don’t think there’s anything wrong with this. These are personal decisions we make for ourselves, one of the many ways in which we decide what we’re going to read, or listen to, or watch. 

Until a friend posted a link to a news story about the singer, I’m not sure I’d even heard of the band lostprophets, but I can well imagine that many fans are revaluating their relationship with the band’s music. For all that that seems unfair on the other musicians involved who have committed no crime. I’ve made a couple of similar decisions just recently. When I heard of how Noel Fielding had inspired an incident of cyber bullying on twitter which led to a young woman attempting to take her own life. And recently the comics blogosphere has been made aware of writer/artist Brian Wood’s repeated sexual harassment of women at comics conventions. In both cases, the individuals only compounded things through their responses. Noel Fielding deleted his incriminating tweets, whilst Brian Wood issued a poor apology which failed to even address all of the complaints against him. 

So I’ve gotten rid of my Mighty Boosh DVDs, but on the other hand I’m still reading the Conan the Barbarian comic which Brian Wood is writing. I’ve actually given some thought to this, justifying it to myself that I’ve liked much of the art on the series, as well as his writing, and besides, there’s only a few issues to go. Yes, it’s a pretty mealy mouthed justification, but then who, apart from myself, am I trying to justify these decisions to? I don’t pretend to be morally spotless, and if I wanted to find a reason for not reading something, I’d be much better off looking at the text. 

I’m not comparing the behaviour of any of these individuals, or explicitly judging one worse than the other. In practise any such decision is going to be taken in isolation, partly effected by other considerations. Perhaps I just don’t like The Mighty Boosh as much as I thought I did when I first saw it? Perhaps as a man I just don’t believe or value the complaints of a woman making claims of sexual harassment? Well, actually I do, and if I am going to read the last few issues of his Conan series, then I’m still not going to seek out any of Brian Wood’s work in the future without feeling rather ashamed of myself. It’s probably fortunate that I’m not interested in many of his other comics anyway.

These are individual decisions I’m making. In both cases, it’s really only my own choice that they call for an ethical decision in the first place. I could just ignore these issues if I wanted, and I don’t think that would make me a bad person. So my opening sentence is incorrect. Books only make demands upon us through their contents. The specific acts of any writer only affect us if we come to know about them, if we allow them to do so. In practise, it’s messy, because while we most likely read plenty of books written by people we disapprove of, it’s only when we come to know about specific things, or specific statements, which cross what for us is a line on acceptable behaviour, that we’re going to want to make such a choice.

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William Mayne is another writer I never encountered as a child, but The Game of Dark certainly fits fairly comfortably alongside the kind of children’s fantasy I did enjoy. As far as I can tell from a brief survey of amazon, all his work is now out of print, so anyone reading him now, as an adult, is going to have to go looking for his work, and is almost certainly going to know about the nature of his crimes before they read, or even re-read anything he’s written. Clearly a collective decision has been taken between publishers, librarians and parents, and given the nature of his crimes, that’s not at all surprising. 

I picked this up in a charity shop for 50 pence, but of course I knew who he was when I did so. Obviously, nobody with any conscience could approve of the crimes for which was convicted, so if we read a book by him, then we’re choosing to not make an ethical decision. Assuming there’s an ethical decision to be made. It’s not as though a book can have this effect. The fact that he’s now dead somehow makes this easier. 

If I had tried to read The Game of Dark when I was a child, I do wonder if I would have finished it.

And there I broke off.

The Golden Age of Children's Literature (6)

Neil Gaiman, The Ocean at the End of the Lane

Although Neil Gaiman has published a number of books written specifically for children, this is obviously not one of them. Yet one of the things which really fascinated me about this novel is it's connection to children's fiction. It's not only written from the point of view of a child, it also feels like it's structured like a children's story. In the interview included at the back of the book, Gaiman notes himself that while previously he's always had a instinctive awareness of what kind of audience he's writing a particular book for - whether for children or adults - in this case he initially found himself unsure and had to consider which audience he was writing for.

Perhaps I'm over-reaching here. The narrative viewpoint is actually a little more complicated, since it's presented as the memories of a nameless, adult narrator, who comes across the farm in rural Sussex which he used to live near to as a boy in the aftermath of his father's funeral. And plenty of adult books have been written from the point of view of a child - just think of Dickens. Still, Gaiman manages to capture the perspective of the little boy so successfully, and the fantastic events he encounters do feel like could they easily slot alongside such classic English fantasies as The Weirdstone of Brisingamen and Susan Cooper's The Dark is Rising series.

One thing which many children's fantasies have is a villain who is clearly an adult, and who in some ways represents the threat to children which can be represented by the adult world. The character which the novel's magical villain Ursula Monkton most reminds me of is the Other Mother in Coraline, a novel which was written and published for children. There's also something to her of J.K. Rowling's Delores Umbridge from the fifth Harry Potter book. The threat which all three of these characters represent is surely very similar. They're all in the position of authority figures - teacher, mother, nanny - but they're also clearly 'wrong'. They represent a perversion of the authority which a child instinctively ought to be able to trust. This is made most clear at the point when Ursula is pursuing the narrator across a rainswept field at night and is described as representing, 'the adult world with all its power and all it's secrets and all its foolish casual cruelty.'

That's a brilliant description, and it also gets at why this isn't really a book for children. It's all in the telling of the tale. As Gaiman himself notes, this is a book which is partly about the 'powerlessness of being a child'. I don't imagine that's something very many children need to be reminded of, but I can imagine it's something a lot of adults all to often forget very easily.

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The other thing I noticed, and perhaps this is only because the next book I've chosen to read is the English edition of The October Country, is just how clear a debt Gaiman owes to Ray Bradbury's work. He's talked in more than one place about its influence on him, so I suppose it shouldn't be much of a surprise to me. The thing is, although I was familiar with his name from early adolescence, I only discovered Bradbury's work for myself as an adult when I finally sat down with a copy of The Martian Chronicles and realised what I'd been missing. So it's only now that I can see how not only Gaiman, but many of the  science fiction, fantasy and horror writers I loved as an adolescent and since were all clearly influenced by him. Even J.G. Ballard, a writer who you would think was almost a polar opposite in terms of the interest and focus of his work, owed something to Bradbury's work in his early stories.

There's also the magical Hempstock family, who certainly have something in common with Bradbury's Elliot family, even if it's not a direct influence (there's also the influence of Pratchett's witches, and probably umpteen other things I'm missing), here transplanted to the rural Sussex of Neil Gaiman's childhood. Something of the rhythm of the half sentence I've quoted above also seems to show the influence of Bradbury's linguistic tumbling. I imagine that it's an influence which has been subsumed very early on, so that it's probably something which even Gaiman himself doesn't always recognise. After all, it's also a very Gaiman sentence!

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Philippa Pearce, Tom's Midnight Garden

This is one children's book that I know I did try to read when I actually was a child. I forget how old I was exactly, but I know that I was already aware that this was a 'classic', and that therefore it was something I ought to read. Alas, I gave up after only a few chapters, finding it rather boring.

As a consequence, I didn't watch what is apparently a much loved and fondly remembered adaptation for the BBC in 1989. I think one of my brothers must have done, because I do have several memories of scenes from it: a sunlit garden verging on something paradisal, and a young friend to enjoy it with.

In fairness to my younger self, I can understand why I might have found it rather boring. There's very little in the way of plot. Sent away to stay with his aunt and uncle because his brother has measles, young Tom finds himself able to slip back in time when he crosses the threshold of the backdoor at midnight when the unreliable grandfather clock strikes thirteen. Their flat is part of what was formerly a country house in the late 19th century, and it is the lost garden to which he returns each night. What follows is more a series of episodes strung together, as Tom explores the garden and in the process befriends a lonely young girl, Hatty, one of only two people who are able to see him. In the 19th century past, Tom appears as a ghost, unable to leave any mark on the world in which he finds himself. With effort, he's even able to push his way through doors.

The transition back to the past is evoked manner a marvellously eerie manner. We do eventually find a sort of explanation for it, but it's one which is satisfactory only in purely emotional terms. It's simply the narrative means by which two lonely individuals are able to meet and play together, alleviating some of their unhappiness. And that play is threatened not only by the end of summer, but by the fact that Hatty grows older throughout their meetings. Tom never returns to the same time, but drops in on Hatty as grows into adolescence. The later times to which he returns are not the paradise of summer, but an icy winter wonderland of the great frost. Hetty is not only older, but Tom is gradually growing less distinct for her. Several images of the 'thinning' of fantasy to evoke her transition into adolescence. Ultimately we're left with a sense of loss, but it's a very appropriate sense of loss for a children's fantasy since it's only the loss of childhood play which we all experience.

Since that narrative of loss is tied to the transition between an 'aristocratic' 19th century garden and post war reality in which Tom lives, in which the garden has been built over, it's not surprising that some critics have complained that the book idealises that world as a 'lost paradise', obscuring the reality of poverty found elsewhere in Victorian society. It's a view which I have some sympathy with, especially nowadays when we have a popular culture which contains more than it's fair share of representations and pastiches of the Victorian past. Neo-Victorianism is an actual thing, an object of academic study.

On the other hand, I'm a little suspicious of critics who criticise fictions for what they don't contain.  Nor am I convinced that a fictional representation of the Victorian period which does acknowledge the horrors of poverty can't also be idealising. And I'm not sure that the 19th century world to which Tom travels is quite as idealised as some appear to think.

Hatty is an orphan, having been taken in by a considerably unsympathetic aunt who clearly resents the presence of a poor relation in her home. She's left out of the games of her three older cousins, only one of whom appears to have any real sympathy for her. Hatty is eventually lucky; she meets a farmer who is successful and prosperous, and who provides her with everything she could want during their married life together. But it's easy to imagine that life might gone very differently for her if she hadn't been fortunate enough to meet her farmer. And the loss of the garden is explained not simply as the fault of modernity, but as a result of the failure in business of Hatty's cousins who gradually have to sell off their land, eventually losing everything. It's not simply an idealised world that we're presented with here, but rather its a world which is contingent, lodged in time.

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Time slip fantasies appear to have been a popular mode in post war children's literature. Perhaps some of the impulse was a desire to escape from what was perceived as a drab post war world. The feeling of just stepping through a door to enter a vanished past literalises the nostalgic motive in a way which is also very moving. I do wonder too if the engagement with the Victorian past is not also down to the fact that in 1958 the Victorian world must have still felt very close. One consequence of two world wars and an intervening economic slump is that the pace of building would have slowed. There would was less desire or ability to replace older buildings. It was the modernist planners of the 60s and their successors who really began that process. So in 1958, many more people than nowadays would have lived in places which were surrounded by fragments of the Victorian past. Not that that has entirely vanished, even now.

It's something which I recognise and feel quite strongly myself, because I grew up in old houses. Ironically, this was because of a grandfather clock which my parents owned, and consequently all the houses we lived in required ceilings which where tall enough to accommodate the clock. Hence they were all houses built in the later 19th / early 20th century. I suppose now I would see that as a privilege, although at the time of course it seemed perfectly normal. And perhaps it was only because I was a child, but the past could feel very close.

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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?

The Golden Age of Children's Fiction (2)

Rosemary Sutcliff, The Silver Branch

The second book in the trilogy 'Three Legions', which I can still remember coming across more than once in my school library. I think I may even have tried to start reading it, but didn't get very far into the first book. It was a copy of the third book in the sequence, The Lantern Bearers, a present in childhood which for some reason I held onto and finally read either during or just after university. So I've encountered them out of order, but really that hardly matters. This isn't much of a trilogy at all, each book taking place at different periods in Roman British history, with little to connect them other the odd subtle link, members of the Aquila family and a silver dolphin seal ring. In fact, if you look at Wikipedia, you can see the series carries on well past this supposed 'trilogy', past the departure of the Roman legions from British shores, up until the Norman conquest, and elsewhere even spinning off into Arthurian fantasy. I shall enjoy following this saga further, as Rosemary Sutcliff really is one of the finest historical novelists I've come across.

It was a rather pompous review of Hilary Mantel's recent Thomas Cromwell novels by James Wood which helped me put my finger on just why Sutcliff's fiction is so successful. I say the review is pompous, because historical fiction, in his words, 'a somewhat gimcrack genre not exactly jammed with greatness', is a genre he clearly looks down upon. This is his accounting for Hilary Mantel's success:

Where much historical fiction gets entangled in the simulation of historical authenticity, Mantel bypasses those knots of concoction, and proceeds as if authenticity were magic rather than a science. She knows that what gives fiction its vitality is not the accurate detail but the animate one, and that novelists are creators, not coroners, of the human case. In effect, she proceeds as if the past five hundred years were a relatively trivial interval in the annals of human motivation.

But that surely, is the measure of success of a great deal of historical fiction? Having so little time for the genre, Woods compares Mantel's achievement to the work of Peter Ackroyd and Susan Sontag. Now, I'm unfamiliar with Susan Sontag's fiction, but I've read a lot of Peter Ackroyd's work, and it seems to me that he is engaged on an entirely different project, his approach to historical fiction being that of a lively pastiche, enjoying the feel of the language. They are entirely literary games, but then he, like I imagine Susan Sontag, is writing historical fiction post-The Name of the Rose, which might be seen as the marker for the new type of historical fiction which started to be written in the 80s. I wish I'd kept a link to the academic book I found online which delineated this tradition of a 'new historical fiction'. The point I think is that it encompassed a new self-consciousness about narrative, and particularly about language. Hence the profusion of literary pastiche. Of course, this development occurred alongside the development of modern 'literary' fiction, with which it shares many characteristics.

Which isn't to say that people didn't carry on writing the older type of historical fiction, particularly in the genres. We even had the creation of the historical crime story. It's just to note that there's nothing 'mysterious' about Hilary Mantel's achievement. It's exactly the same kind of achievement you can find in a novel published for children in the late-1950s. I've no idea if Rosemary Sutcliff's fictional representation of Roman Britain is true exactly, even if I went through and checked every little detail against the known archaeological and historical facts. But it feels true, as if this must be how it felt to be alive at the time, because all of the human motivations and feelings feel wholly recognisable.

What I also recognise is the time in which it was written. These 'Roman' novels are a portrait of an empire in decline written by the subject of another empire also in the process of decline. A theme which becomes more prominent in The Lantern Bearers is the need to preserve the 'light' of civilisation against the darkness of the surrounding barbarism, is introduced here through the character of the self-proclaimed British emperor Carausius, whose motivation for his declaration is precisely that: a self-conscious attempt to halt, if only temporarily, a slide from civilisation into barbarism. It should come as no surprise that Rosemary Sutcliff wrote a book on Rudyard Kipling, and counted him as a major influence.

*

Susan Cooper, The Dark is Rising

When my wife read the Over Sea, Under Stone, she described it to me as like The Famous Five crossed with The Lord of the Rings. A description I loved. She then proceeded to read the entire series over the course of the last week.

In contrast to the first book, here we're thrown into the magic world underpinning the real one within the first twenty pages or so, as Will Stanton, seventh son of a seventh son, quickly learns that he is in fact one of the 'Old Ones', a secret society of immortal beings who protect the world from the forces of the 'Dark'. The main action of the book can easily be reduced to a kind of 'schooling of a sorcerer' as Will learns of his secret heritage through a series of infodumps and collects a series of plot-coupons which will preserve the world for the forces of light until the next time the Dark attacks. That it doesn't feel shcematic is entirely to the credit of Susan Cooper's ability both to tell a story and root it in a richly imagined world.

Whilst the Light is characterised by a patchwork of characters drawn from myths which have attached themselves to the British land - Merlin, Herne the Hunter, Wayland the Smith, even Arthur (or so I assume; he isn't named here, presumably to reappear later in the sequence?), the Dark is largely amorphous, a mysterious threatening entropic force. The characters we meet who are on the side of the Dark only serve it, they don't embody it in the way that those of the light appear do. The character who comes closest to such a role is the mysterious 'Dark Rider' who appears as a Mr. Mithothin (or, 'Myth'-o-thin, embodying the entropic quality of the Dark).

As with the earlier book, there's a wonderful sense here of another world existing behind the cover of the world we see in front of us every day. Here though, we get to see what that world actually looks like, with it's surreal trips into the past. Again, it's not just myth, but the presence of the past which is impinging on the present. I love how so much of this sense of the numinous appears to be conveyed through music. There's so much music in this book: carols (it is set at Christmas), church music, a setting of A.E. Housmann, Greensleeves (which seems to be related to the mysterious tune Will hears at moments of greatest significance), even the Hunting of the Wren. The use of music matches the way in which, whenever magic appears in the narrative, Cooper's writing becomes diffuse, in contrast to the rootedness in a realistic sense of place and character she employs elsewhere. The picture of what's going on becomes a little unclear, like a half remembered song.

*

I know from a piece I read in Alan Garner's essay collection The Voice That Thunders, that one of the common experiences shared by all of the writers who came to prominence in the golden age of children's fiction in the 60s and 70s is that of having grown up with the experience of the Second World War. Certainly, there is something of the spirit of the Blitz in the way in which the Dark is presented:

He saw one race after another come attacking his island country, bringing each time the malevolence of the Dark with them, wave after wave of ships rushing inexorably at the shores. Each wave of men in turn grew peaceful as it grew to know and love the land, so that the Light flourished again. But always the Dark was there, swelling and waning, gaining a new Lord of the Dark whenever a man deliberately chose to be changed into something more dread and powerful than his fellows. Such creatures were not born to their doom, like the Old Ones, but chose it. 

...He saw a time when the first great testing of the light came, and the Old Ones spent themselves for three centuries on bringing their land out of the Dark, with the help in the end of their greatest leader, lost in the saving unless one day he might wake and return again.

My wife (the medieval historian in the family) tells me that the imagery of waves of ships comes straight from Bede and Gildas. I don't doubt that you're right about that my dear, it's clearly an echo of the popular image of the Viking raids, but I also think that such imagery must have seemed particularly apt to someone who had lived through the Second World War as a child and to a readership growing up in it's aftermath (and in Britain the aftermath of the Second World War lasted well into the 60s; in fact, in some ways, culturally we're still living in that aftermath). The evil that the Dark represents is never explicitly defined, allowing it carry a multitude of metaphorical possibilities.

As well as World War Two, they also belonged to the generation which grew up celebrating Empire Day, before it was superseded by Commonwealth Day. They belonged to the last generation for whom the British Empire was an inescapable fact, part of the furniture which made up the cultural background. Will's older brother Stephen is in the British navy, stationed out in the West Indies, where he meets a magic foreigner who gives him one of the essential items Will needs to complete his quest. It's a very odd moment. I mean, what on earth is an avatar of Herne the Hunter doing there? It feels like a somewhat clumsy attempt to make a story which is otherwise intensely focused on the matter of Britain a little more universal.

In the imagery Susan Cooper deploys above, she's also using essentially the same symbolism as Rosemary Sutcliff. Civilisation is the 'light' which has to be protected against the Dark. And these quasi-aristocratic Old Ones are born not made, defending a light which is centred on this island nation. It's appropriate that there's a degree of Royal symbolism floating about the narrative. Which is not to say that it doesn't also complicate and simple assumption about the definition of the British nation and forces of the Light. Arthur, assuming it is he, is described by Merriman as 'part-Viking', suggesting a mingling of the native and foreign. And the forces of the Light aren't always kind. The figure of the Walker, condemned to walk through the centuries because he betrayed his master's trust, is hugely sympathetic; his actions, his choice of the dark, the result of the way his trust had been abused by his former master.

That ultimately, is what is so refreshing about Cooper's conception of the Dark. It is, ultimately, always a matter of choice, not something which is intrinsic to an invading race or person. In time, the invader's settle down. Evil is contingent.

The Golden Age of Children's Fiction (1)

I was in such a hurry to grow up. At least in some things. By about 9 I was reading The Lord of the Rings and haunting the adult fantasy/science fiction shelves of the library. I wanted to read adult books, or so I believed. Like many, for a long time I confused adolescence with maturity. Of course, I now know that there are many books written for children which are far more mature, more literary, than many of the books I must have found in that library section. I know that I read all ten volumes of L. Ron Hubbard’s ridiculous Mission: Earth books. The one positive I can take from those is that it meant I knew who L. Ron Hubbard was when a scientologist approached me in the middle of Brighton attempting to recruit me.

Consequently, I know I missed out on many of the classics of children’s literature. Several writers I came across in childhood have been renewed discoveries in my late teens or adulthood: Rosemary Sutcliff, Alan Garner. I can remember my father reading The Weirdstone of Brisingamen to my brother and me. I must have read it and reread it by myself. We saw a theatre adaptation at the little local theatre. Yet I never got more than a few pages into the sequel. That and everything else Garner wrote was a discovery made at university.

One of the qualities that I think makes both Sutcliff and Garner great is that neither of them seem to be writing down to their audience. That their work is marketed to children feels largely accidental. These are the books they’d be writing whatever category their work was placed in. Of course, they also come from a generation when the commercial categories for children’s fiction, although some way along, were still partly in a process of formation.

*

Susan Cooper, Over Sea, Over Stone. That sense of a genre still in formation is similarly present in the first of Susan Cooper’s The Dark is Rising sequence. The sense of the fantastic is present almost from the start, lurking in the background of an apparently realistic account of a family holiday to Cornwall, in which a middle class family who all speak in complete sentences are dropped into a rural landscape in which everyone speaks in dialect. Even the discovery of a fantastic treasure map doesn’t immediately trip things into the fantastic, and by the finish the supernatural elements have only started to emerge into what was an essentially realist narrative, if verging on the fantastic. I assume later books in the series have more magic, but this is still a wonderful depiction of what magic is. Not a violation of the material world, but a subtle adjunct to it.

Clearly, Susan Cooper had no plans for a series when she started the novel. She says herself it was only as she began the second in the sequence that she knew it would be a series of five books. That uncertainty gives the storytelling a wonderful looseness. A feeling that the narrative could spin off in any direction if only they hadn’t found that map… And like Garner and Sutcliff, she doesn’t write down to her audience. There’s an insistence on the detail of the landscape in which the story takes place, likely the product of a writer living in America and looking back with fondness to the place she’s since left, which also creates a wonderful sense of solidity to the place in which these fantastical goings on are occurring. The portrait of the small seaside town and its inhabitants, the hills and lanes, is one of the things which lingers most. It grounds the fantasy, and enhances the feeling of magic in the story. Which is enhanced by Michael Heslop’s scratchy illustrations.

Yes, I would have loved this if I’d read it as a kid. It’s exactly the kind of fantasy I loved. A holiday and a treasure hunt turning into a real adventure. The past as a source of mystery and danger. Of course, as an adult, there’s the odd element I could perhaps do without. The scene early on which leads to their discovery of the map, where they’re playacting a narrative of explorers in a jungle rehearses every racist cliché of fearsome natives you could hope to find. Even this almost feels innocent though. That’s exactly the sort of game we did act out when we were kids, isn’t it? We didn’t know enough to know we were being offensive.

*

Phillip Pullman, The Scarecrow and His Servant. Almost in a reverse to Susan Cooper, where the supernatural emerges into the real world, in Phillip Pullman’s ‘fairy tale’ the real world emerges into the fantasy. According to Pullman, this is the fourth of his stories he designates ‘fairy tales'. All of them take place in a landscape which is already familiar from fairy tale, but personally I felt this at least was closer in spirit to an 18^th century picaresque. And the law case over a contested inheritance feels straight out of a 19^th century novel. That might be the point though. Pullman’s fantasy never really takes us that far away from the real world.

I seem to remember when it came out that someone had absurdly suggested that the characters in the story could be read as a parody of the relationship between George Bush and Tony Blair. The scarecrow is obviously foolish, but essentially loveable. The relationship with Jack, his servant, is surely the model of the wiser underling and his master which ultimately derives from Roman comedy. It’s a fictional trope. And what they’re faced up against are commerce and political corruption which would destroy the landscape and drain its wells because they can only see it as a material thing to be exploited. It’s the real world we’re all faced with, a tragedy which we’re all to some extent implicated in. This is a comedy though, so here there is ultimately a happy solution.

*

Despite my rush to grow up (which in any case ended up taking rather longer than it does for many people), I don’t think I ever quite stopped reading children’s fiction, especially if writers I liked – Terry Pratchett, Neil Gaiman, China Mieville – would write books for children as well as adults. Obviously, I haven’t read that much modern children’s fiction. I’ve read Harry Potter and (clearly) Phillip Pullman, but then everyone has read them, Lemony Snicket and Holly Black.

If I’m currently more interested in reading books that I could have read as a child, this may only be the product of nostalgia. Certainly, when faced with the hideous computer generated art on the covers of the most recent reprints of Susan Cooper’s books, I opted instead to track down older copies from the 1980s, the copy I could have read when I was a child, with painted covers which are far more suited to the narrative’s charms. I also fell prey to one of the problems inherent in some old books. About half way through reading it, the spine broke and the first half of the text broke away from the glue attaching it to the spine. It upsets me that this damage should have occurred from reading it, but since I refuse to acquire any form of electronic reading device such as ebook or kindle (even if I could afford one), then I’m going to have to accommodate myself to such accidents.