Fionavar

Re-reading The Summer Tree, the first book in Guy Gavriel Kay’s Fionavar Trilogy is both a delight and a puzzle.  The delight I’ll explore shortly, but the puzzle?  The puzzle is why I am drawn to books like this, stories about elves and magicians, other worlds and fantasy kingdoms, books that are often in several volumes, books that require a preface giving the names and relationships of the thirty or more key characters about to appear.  It isn’t the complexity, which at times can be a might frustrating:  who was Na-Brendel again?  Yes, I’m fudging here.  The answer is clear.  These books are the stuff of dreams, the tantalising if foolish and momentary belief that all this could happen to me, pulled out of a humdrum earthly life into an amazing adventure, thrilling, risky, and yet fulfilling.

How many pages did it take for Kay to grab my attention?  Precisely one!  Chapter 1 of The Summer tree begins like this:

In the spaces of calm almost lost in what followed, the question of why tended to surface.  Why them?  There was an easy answer that had to do with Ysanne beside her lake, that didn’t really address the deepest question.  Kimberley, white-haired, would say when asked that she could sense a glimmered pattern when she looked back, but one need not be a seer to use hindsight on the warp and weft of the Tapestry, and Kim, in any event, was a special case.

White-haired Kimberly, a seer;  the Tapestry; and she was a special case.  Phrases like that tend to ensure I’ll read on, and just a few pages later we are at the University of Toronto and people are going in to a lecture theatre to hear a paper being presented at the Second International Celtic Conference.  Dave Martyniuk is there, feeling uncomfortable, (his brother is a speaker, but the topic’s not his thing), and then he sees Kevin Laine, Paul Schafer (both of whom he might prefer to avoid), and meets Kim Ford and Jennifer Lowell.  Whoa, it’s complicated already.

A couple of pages later, we learn that high up in the hall, effectively invisible, there are two observers, a dwarf and an older man.  They watch the five – they are the five, whatever that means, and the older man looks carefully at each one.  When he is studying Paul Schafer, Paul finds himself pulled away from the inside of the hall, and finds himself in a forest, confronting the ‘haunted eyes of a dog or a wolf’.  As he looks round, he sees a tall man, with great antlers of a stag on his head.  You might not be lost in this story at this stage, but I was, and was again when I reread it.  I don’t mean lost in the sense of confused, but rather entranced, and I have to know what is going on.  Once again, I won’t be satisfied until I reach the end of The Darkest Road, the final book in the trilogy.

Some books when you read them again are familiar, comfortable even.  When I reread The Hobbit recently, it was like an old friend.  I knew the shape of the book, and felt comfortable with the knowledge that I could already see the journey we were about to make.  There would be details that I hadn’t remembered, but it was as if I knew the underlying shape of what was to come.  Kay manages to make that harder, in part because he keeps throwing in details, presentiments, warnings and irrelevancies at every stage.

It is rather like trying to follow a magician’s tricks.  You know what you are seeing has been carefully constructed, and you know what you want to see is being hidden.  This trilogy is worse in the early stages because what you want to see is there, to be picked apart from all the other information, but everything in front of you has its place.  It is far too tricky to follow it all.  It is as if Kay wants to keep you reading, and then, every so often, go ’Ah, now I see what that meant.’  Isn’t that a literary jigsaw puzzle of the best kind, bits and pieces embedded in the narrative, waiting to be pulled out and used later on?  Perhaps it reflects the structure of the books:  there’s much to be covered in the early sections, often as background, only to make sense when you have it all available to you, once the story has progressed.

There is a wonderful section early on when one of the five who has crossed into the world of Fionavar, Paul, plays chess with the King.  It’s a game that is fascinating in itself – youthful aggression played against older wisdom and patience.  But it is also a preliminary to a long and important discussion, as Paul learns about some of the complexities of the world he has entered.  We also pick up hints and understand that the two women are to play key roles in the future: Kim has some kind of connection to Ysanne, a seer; and Jennifer’s beauty will draw to her a key figure.  We learn about the Summer Tree, where a king must go and die.

It is as if we are getting some outlines of a complicated three-dimensional sketch.  As each tentative line is added to the picture, it becomes more complex, not less.  As we get deeper into the story, we begin to worry some of the things we thought were clear are not.  And, to pursue that sketch analogy, it is now apparent that some of the lines are green, some are red, some are indistinct and uncertain.  This is an intellectual game.  What is really going on?  What is true? Dangerous games, for sure, and just as intoxicating as the events you read about.  Guy Gavriel Kay can write:  if Tolkien swept you up with adventures, Kay has the same ability to construct compelling events, but also has the same skill to entrance you.  Even now, as I’m writing, I want to keep reading.

Let me ask again:  why are stories of this kind so compelling?  I wonder if they represent some kind of progress in our thirst for fiction.  When we are young, the stories that entrance us are only gently complex.  In The Wind in the Willows, much of the story is an account of friendship, leisure and small adventures.  Toad is foolish, but not excessively so.  Rat is heroic, but manageably so.  Mole is loyal, but not blindly so.  And Badger is wise, but not oppressively so.  There are dramas and excitements, but they are at an easily appreciated pace.  Even the battle at Toad Hall is easily won, and without much bloodshed.  Similarly Alice, in Wonderland’, goes through amazing changes, and confronts difficult people, but there is a sense it will all be resolved and nothing really frightening will take place.

The next step up, for boys when I was that age, are adventures with more of an edge.  Treasure Island is my best example.  There are real fights, real dissensions, and the risk of being marooned, of death, of disaster.  At the same time we meet people who are more than just nasty:  some of the characters are frightening, some are evil, and some are paradoxical.  Long John Silver is sufficiently complex to make him a memorable character, a mixture of good, caring, manipulative and downright dangerous.  From there it is only a short step to Bilbo Baggins and the dramas of Lord of the Rings.  Now our heroes are complex, and they face very real dangers.  People die, and these include characters that you had come to love.

I think the Fionavar trilogy takes us to the next stage.  It isn’t just that the story is complex, just as it was with Tolkien. It’s not just that we are meeting varieties of evil, and horrible challenges.  Now we face another development, where even the heroes are themselves complex, their actions often foolish or self-serving.  More to the point, you realise they have some critical flaws, and that they won’t always be ‘heroic’.  We’ve reached the point where, as adults, we are reading about individuals who are closer to ourselves, flawed, confused, driven by unsettling passions, tempted in various ways, and weak enough to lead them on to places and relationships they should have avoided.

As I reread the Fionavar trilogy, I felt Guy Gavriel Kay was offering me two books.  One is a marvellous, complicated, twisting story, concerned with overcome evil and risks to the world.  As in all stories of this kind that get us involved, things go wrong, mistakes are made, and for a lot of the time it seems like evil will triumph.  If not sitting on the edge of our chair, we are certainly thrilled, worried, occasionally flattened, and sometimes delighted.  Like many of the excellent fantasy books I’ve read, it is a compelling adventure.

However, the ‘other book’ is about the key people.  Dave Martyniuk, Kevin Laine, Kim Ford, Paul Schafer and Jennifer Lowell are very real.  They are driven by muddled emotions as much as by logic.  They have their personal flaws ad predilections.  You want them to triumph, but every so often you groan.  How could he have done that?  Is she really that oblivious to how she’s seen?  Like friends over the years, they become both close and yet frustrating.  These people might be in a book, but there are moments when you feel like giving them a serious talking to, and other times when all you can do is despair.

As older adults, we want story and person:  we like a complex twisting set of events.  We like the unexpected, the challenging, and the sense that everything might go really bad before – almost by the thinnest of threads – everything is pulled back from the brink.  But without those people, those very real characters, that wouldn’t be enough.  Is Dave really that blind to what is happening?  Is Kim aware of what will happen to her?  With a really good author, we are, as we are reading, partly inhabiting the people of the story.  Well, I am, as I groan at a choice that’s been made, or smile at a moment when love or understanding breaks through.

Compelling fantasies offer a subtle way to think about ourselves and those around us.  Novels set in our world, exploring complex relationships also do that.  But fantasies give us a freedom to step out of the self and enjoy experiences that are no longer ‘typical’.  They can invite us to ask questions about our motivations and expectations, about what we value and what we assume.  They have the advantage that is all at a distance, but, for me, they are no less personal.  In the case of some excellent fantasies I am reduced to tears at various moments.  How could that have happened?  I often feel I should shake myself at moments like that and remind myself ‘it’s just a story’.  But literature isn’t just a story, it’s a window, a window into humanity and a window into ourselves.

To use the word ‘window’ seems to suggest that this is all about looking at ourselves, using a story to make us reflect:  is this something I would have done?  Have I made mistakes like that?  However, fantasy does far more than tell ‘good stories’ and sometimes make us look back at our own mistakes and misunderstandings.  That makes the role of fantasy sound like a reflecting board, but it offers far more.  It is also a means to stretch us, to pull us out of the happy reflective times sitting in a comfortable chair with a novel on our lap.

No, really good fantasy doesn’t just entertain, it makes demands of us.  Like all really good fiction, we are being invited to learn, to reflect, but also to change, to see more possibilities in what we might do.  I don’t mean that it suggests we should start looking in the back of cupboards in the vague hope our wardrobe will offer a doorway to a fantasy world.  CS Lewis was helping his younger readers understand more about the adult world they were entering.  Others provoke more than simple understanding (and even Lewis managed to sneak in some Christian thinking, and a place for God in his readers’ eyes).

Good novels do more than offer escapism, and a sense that our world is acceptable by suggesting all the nasty, exciting and alarming stuff taking place somewhere else.  No, they keep reframing and rethinking what we think we know.  Lewis did an excellent job in helping his characters, and hence his readers, appreciate some of the complexities of the adult world, and, most important that what was happening in Narnia was also happening in Hull, or Bermondsey or Adelaide. Situations change as you grow older, and you have to take on roles and responsibilities that once seemed irrelevant (the stuff your stuff parents did) as you move through adolescence.

Kay takes that further.  As in any novel, he presents the reader with real interpersonal dilemmas and misunderstandings.  The twist of his fantasy in that it does something more, in that it allows us to imagine our way past present and future relationships in the world we ‘understand’ on to worlds, and therefore ways of understanding and behaving, which sit outside our experience.  That’s why magic matters:  it creates something new.  In Fionavar, magic is uncertain, dangerous, and yet it also holds out the promise that we can do more, be more than are today.

Fionavar offers another important perspective, as excellent novels often do, it allows us to imagine who we might do mor than out current lives suggest, to get us ‘breathe out’ as it were, expanding our world to offer space to what isn’t really or possible, and yet which is important if we are going to grow past the prosaic.  It isn’t surprising that children, as they grow up, delight in the possibilities of these other worlds.  Rather, the problem is that as children grow up, they – what’s the phrase – set aside childish things.  I would like to catch up with Paul one day and explain to him how his vision in Corinthians is essentially conservative.  What did he suggest?  “When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things” (I Corinthians 13:11).  The idea of becoming grown up in Corinthians is limiting, entering and succumbing to the confines of adult world.

I’d much rather adults read books like to Fionavar Trilogy, and so many of the other excellent storis like them.  I want adults to retain their fascination with fantasy, not as mere stories, but as explorations of what could be, how our visions are compromised by our careless ‘sensible thinking’, and how our ability to remain interested in what might be is actually keeping us alert to possibilities and the benefits of escaping from sensible thinking – well, I concede, at least some of the time!

As far as I am concerned, Guy Gavriel Kay’s Fionavar trilogy is one invitation alongside many others to keep on seeking something more.  It is a reminder that our aspirations and hopes are often wrong or at least confused.  However, it is also a series that reminds us there are alternative paths to explore.  I might be getting older (just a little!), but I never want to lose that aspiration to seek another way, to step past increasingly out-of-date conventions and restrictions, and try something new to help us do better than we have in the past – both individually and in society as a whole.  Right now we are witnessing political parties and national leaders who are dragging us back to familiar and traditional ways of behaving.  I can’t think of a mor important time to toss all that stuff aside and find ways to take new steps forward, to want to create better ways of living for our friends and families, and to want to keep improving society.  Kay has it right:  it’s often messy, sometimes riddled with failure, but the desire to change and grow must be supported.  Read the Fionavar Trilogy and allow fantasy to help you keep the radical mid-set alive.

All Souls

Some might expect that a blog headed All Souls will be concerned with All Souls College at the University of Oxford. While that is a fascinating place, it is not the subject of this set of comments (well, it is, marginally:  you’ll see a little more on this later).  This is a quite different All Souls, the name given to a trilogy of fantasy books written by Deborah Harkness, the first of which appeared in 2011.  However, the series does begin at the University of Oxford, with an American academic receiving a collection of old manuscripts, each of which contains some alchemical illustrations.  Dr Diana Bishop is visiting Oxford to complete a research project on experimentation back in the 17^th Century.  Her interest was in showing alchemists weren’t just about trying to turn lead into gold, but actually establishing systematic experimentation, the beginnings of modern science.

The opening paragraph of A Discovery of Witches gives a little hint of the journey we are about to commence:

“The leather-bound volume was nothing remarkable.  To an ordinary historian, it would have looked no different from hundreds of other manuscripts in Oxford’s Bodleian Library, ancient and worn.  But I knew there was something odd about it from the moment I collected it.”

To an ‘ordinary historian’?  ‘But I knew there was something odd about it’?

Antennae already up, it took just a couple of pages before we were about to go deeper into this tale.  Diana Bishop is in the same part of the library as Gillian Chamberlain, and walking past her as quickly as she can, Diana’s “skin tingled as it always did when another witch looked at me”.  Gillian is hoping to get Diana to spend some time with her ‘sisters’ as the Autumn equinox is just a few days away, a time for Wiccan celebrations.  As with so many novels, a few pages further in  and we have reached in decision point:  is this book for me?  It took just one more sentence describing Diana’s musing to convince me: “In kindergarten I’d asked my friend Amanda’s mother why she bothered washing the dishes with soap and water when all you needed to do was stack them in the sink, snap your fingers, and whisper a few words”!  Diana was counselled by her parents to be careful about magic and who she spoke on the topic.  Yes, I was hooked.

I can see a second admission might be needed.  Not only is this about witches, nor life in a distinguished all-male college, but I do know it is fantasy.  I don’t believe in witches; not do I believe in vampires – who represent another key element in this trilogy.  But then again, I didn’t believe in hobbits, or Luke Skywalker.  Loving fantasy and science fiction isn’t about believing any of it is true, in that sense, but worthwhile fiction of any kind is about relationships, events, consequences, fate and unexpected outcomes, and Deborah Harkness delivers on all of these.  It’s not surprising.  She is an American scholar and novelist, best known as a historian.   She  is a professor of history and teaches European history and the history of science at the University of Southern California.  The advantage of her professional life is obvious:  she is able to include enough convincing ‘faction’ in her writing to make her stories work.

Indeed, some elements of her novel sprang directly from Harkness’ own life: she has revealed she spent many hours engaged in research in Oxford University’s famous Bodleian Library, and that in the course of her work she discovered an ancient – and long-lost – book of spells, the Book of Soyga.  The Book of Soyga, also titled Aldaraia, is a 16th-century Latin treatise on magic, and apparently it contains incantations and instructions on magic, astrology, demonology, as well as all sorts of astral phenomena, explanation of the various phases and houses of the moon, and the names and genealogies of angels!  Equally and similarly suspiciously relevant (!), the book contains 36 large squares of letters which studies have been unable to decipher.  Otherwise unknown medieval magical treatises are cited, including works known as liber E, liber Os, liber dignus, liber Sipal, and liber Munob.

The best fiction is always close to fact!  Deborah Harkness clearly drew on her academic work as a historian of science. There are various references to real alchemical processes as well as to a multitude of historical figures, particularly from the Medieval and Renaissance periods. Furthermore, I read that the inclusion of Elias Ashmole and his collection of rare alchemical manuscripts gives the novel a solid historical foundation.  Guess what: central to the story, Ashmole 782 is a real alchemical text that is missing from the Ashmole collection.

I doubt you will read the trilogy just because I liked it.  I doubt you will read it just because the author has an extensive and relevant knowledge about the time and its works.  Books about witches, vampires and demons are clearly in a distinct category:  many people won’t read them, and many others find this area of fantasy not to their taste.  However, if you are one of that happy minority who enjoys such stuff, it’s a great story.  Perhaps I should tell you a bit more about the content, first.

A Discovery of Witches is the first instalment in the All Souls trilogy.  Diana Bishop is a Yale history of science professor who is conducting research at the University of Oxford, and, incidentally, is a witch. However, she has rejected this aspect of her life since the death of her parents when she was seven. She has not learned to practice witchcraft and has minimized her interaction with other witches.  When she is researching in the library, she requests a book from the archives as part of the material on which she’s writing a paper.  This is the document called Ashmole 782, a medieval manuscript, also known as the Book of Life.

It has been missing for over 150 years., but when she asks for it, it appears and is delivered to her desk.  As soon as Diana touches the ancient manuscript, her powers as a witch are activated. Frightened by her clear supernatural connection to Ashmole 782, Diana quickly returns the book. It appears, however, that her discovery had already caught the attention of other creatures, some of whom were in the library.  In no time a all, a series of events unfold that slowly brings her witch heritage and family back into her life.

The second key person in this story is Matthew Clairmont.  He is a vampire who has spent at least 150 years looking for that same book.  He is also a researcher at the University of Oxford, and I should also add, for the sake of clarity, that among his positions at the university he is a Fellow at All Souls College (but that position is not central to the story!).When word travels that the book is in Oxford, he races over expecting to see the book but instead, he encounters Diana Bishop.  Without getting into too much detail (and hopefully encouraging you to read the book) Matthew’s vampiric protective instincts set in, and he makes it his responsibility to ensure Diana’s safety.

The word ‘safety’ is an interesting one.  As the story progresses, a forbidden romance starts to bloom between the vampire and the witch, forbidden between two different kinds of creature.  As she learns more about Ashmole 782, Diana Bishop finds that for her own safety and for the well-being of magical creatures, she must re-think her avoidance of magic and the worlds of witches, vampires and daemons.  With Matthew Clairmont’s help, she sets out to discover more about her powers and gain control over her magic.  Central to the story is a series of questions about the origin of all supernatural species, and author Deborah Harkness does an excellent job in drawing on alchemical and historic sources for reference, some real, and some given verisimilitude by her knowledge of the area.

In case you haven’t guessed, I found the story compelling.  Fantastical, sure.  A romantic drama.  Certainly.  Set in locations including Oxford, remote parts of France, the ‘witch country’ of Massachusetts, and other delightful settings, it is persuasive and intriguing.  According to Harkness, the novel began as ‘a thought experiment’ after she noticed the plethora of novels surrounding vampires and magic at an airport bookshop.   She realised people still wanted to  read about the same sorts of subjects as they would have in the past, including the supernatural. “In some ways I think their popularity right now is about our feeling that we still want there to be magic and enchantment in the world,” she suggested. “Magic provides a way of still having room for possibilities, an unlimited sense of what the world offers. Magic is always there when science is found wanting.” (quoted in the NZ Herald, 17 November 2012).

Am I trying to persuade you to read the All Souls Trilogy?  I guess I am, so I will add critics have praised Harkness’ attention to detail and history as “rare in paranormal romance novels”. One review described it as a “rare historical novel that manages to be as intelligent as it is romantic [and] it is supernatural fiction that those of us who usually prefer to stay grounded in reality can get caught up in.” (Steve Bennett, Steve, in the February 17, 2011, San Antonio Express-News). Another critic commented “its erudite references to the leather-bound boards of incunabulae and secret ingredients in medieval inks make it a welcome relief,” and Margot Adler inn NPR called it “a tour de force, an artful and unusually skilled blending of hard science, history and the supernatural.” (in January 2013).

Time to get back on track.  I know some readers are more willing to read fantasy stories set in other worlds, everything from Lord of the Rings onwards.  That was the path that took me to Ursula K Le Guin and A Wizard from Earthsea.  It was a short step to then read Susan Cooper’s The Dark is Rising, then Harry Potter, Inkheart, His Dark Materials, and so many more.  Fantasy in other worlds is now a huge area, and A Wrinkle in Time, and The Lion, the Witch and The Wardrobe seem like stories from another time, authored back in the distant past.  It’s a genre that keeps me happy, and there are always new writers and new worlds to explore:  right now it’s The Poppy War, The Fifth Season, and even more recently several Greek myths retold.

However, All Souls sits in a distinct category.  Partly this is because the setting is this world.  However, it is a version of this world, and by the time we get to the second book in the trilogy we are in a version of this world 400 years earlier, (and some unkind people might even suggest that Oxbridge today is more like the way the world was back in the past!).  It seems to me there are two ways fantasy writers link ‘our time and world’ to the one that they have constructed.  In many cases, there is a way in which the protagonists can slip from the here and now to elsewhere, a doorway (in the back of a cupboard), a magical phrase, or just simply taking a step forward.  The other alternative is to make it clear that the ‘other world’ has always been around us, and it’s just that we haven’t seen it.

Stephenie Meyer understood that well.  Her romance fantasy series about vampires and werewolves starts in a high school parking lot when one student’s car almost drives into another’s.  Almost without noticing, you are being sucked into this adventure.  So, that nice looking boy is more than you first thought, as Isabella Swan discovers.  Then, almost seamlessly you realised that not only is Edward Cullen considered sexy looking, but he is a vampire.  It’s not great literature, but Stephenie Meyer knows how to add twists and other possibilities into a romance, enough to capture a gullible reader like me.  I can’t remember why I started to read Twilight (perhaps I took it out from the library, or more likely, picked it up at a second-hand bookstore) but there was enough there to ensure I would go on to read the second book.  After that, I had to finish the series, and almost breathed a sigh of relief when I got to volume four, Breaking Dawn.  I didn’t need to see the movie version.

All Souls is another romantic fantasy.  However, Deborah Harkness has an edge over Stephenie Meyer: her trilogy is stuffed full of people, events, documents and accounts that are historically based, many of them almost true, as, indeed, is much of the background.  The curious thing about  this is that all that credible stuff isn’t the reason I enjoyed All Souls.  I’ve read the trilogy a couple of times, and enjoyed it as fiction, with the historical verisimilitude mere background.  As for the antics of witches, daemons and vampires, well their fictional antics are fun, but quite unconvincing … although Harkness is very clever in the ways in which she manages to slip in all sorts of real and pseudo-science.

Perhaps I am asking the wrong questions.  I was rereading All Souls at the same time as I was reading a series of novels by Deanna Raybourn.  Her Veronica Speedwell series is great fun, too, about an unlikely 19^th Century pair:  Veronica is a lepidopterist and together with her taxidermist ally Stoker, is in the business of getting into solving crimes (often with considerable dangerous adventures part of the process).  What links these two series?  They are both set in the past, historical novels if you like;  they are both romances;  they both involve puzzles, murders, and solving complex issues. They are complementary to my other area of leisure reading, murder mysteries.

Ah, there’s the other clue.  If I look at those murder mysteries, which are the ones I like more than most?  First up on my list are Wimsey, Dalgleish, Lynley, Strike, Rebus, Kincaid and James.  I’d better stop there (the list could get very long), but almost all of them have a strong personal romance theme in them too.  It seems I love mystery and fantasy, but especially if there is a strong romantic element, too.  Currently I have been reading The Dales Detective Series by Julia Chapman, thoughtfully available through the local library.  The stories are fine, but the additional twist is the not-quite relationship between suspended detective Samson and website writer Delilah (yes, I know, but the silliness of the names seems to work!).  I’m a romantic!

Given this, how could I not like the All Souls trilogy.  It seems to have been written for a person who likes mysteries, romance, and the academic world.  Starting in an Oxford college (why Oxford, I keep asking myself), a scholar researching strange historical manuscripts and doing so with an audience of vampires and witches, and then toss in the romantic element, and it seems destined to meet my leisure reading loves.

Now I have to face one more question.  It seems Deborah Harkness has written a new book (probably the first volume in another trilogy), involving some of the same characters.  Am I going to put in a request at the local library for this new book.  At this point, I don’t think I am.  Why not?  I enjoyed the shape of the story in All Souls, and it felt complete.  There’s a risk the next cycle won’t be as good.  I think I’m happy with what I’ve read and will wander off looking for a new series by a new author.  Any suggestions?

The Railway Children

Remembering children’s books is a serendipitous exercise.  In my case, some are established favourites, and so Pooh, Rat and Mole and Alice will always be close to me.  The same is true of the Rev. W (Wilbert Vere) Awdry books about Thomas the Tank Engine and the others in his railway series.  Other characters and stories float in and out of my attention without any clear or obvious reason.  So it is with The Railway Children.  In fact, I should be honest, because what I remembered first, and just recently, was the movie, which came out in 1970.  It was a family film, with just the right mixture of fun, sad moments, and excitement – and it had trains!  The two actors who played the daughters were especially memorable.

I recently learnt that Sally Thomsett, then aged 20, was cast as Phyllis, the youngest of the three children, despite the fact that when it was being filmed Jenny Agutter, who played her older sister, Roberta, was actually two years younger than she was (I should add that it worked visually, as Jenny Agutter was tall for her age, and Sally Thomsett short).   Sally Thomsett was forbidden to reveal her age during production, not allowed to smoke, drink, drive a car, or be seen in public with her boyfriend.  The bizarre result was that the crew treated her as they would a child (giving her sweets), while addressing the younger Jenny Agutter as they would an adult!

I’ll return to the film later, but I recently reread the book, which was first published in 1905.  If I could remember the film and its characters, the book was less easy to recall, and to settle down with it again was a revelation.  Like so many very good books for younger readers, it is easy to forget how well it was written.

The opening was deceptively simple:

“They were not railway children to begin with. I don’t suppose they had ever thought about railways except as a means of getting to Maskelyne and Cook’s, the Pantomime, Zoological Gardens, and Madame Tussaud’s. They were just ordinary suburban children, and they lived with their Father and Mother in an ordinary red-brick-fronted villa, with coloured glass in the front door, a tiled passage that was called a hall, a bathroom with hot and cold water, electric bells, French windows, and a good deal of white paint, and ‘every modern convenience’, as the house-agents say.

There were three of them. Roberta was the eldest. Of course, Mothers never have favourites, but if their Mother HAD had a favourite, it might have been Roberta. Next came Peter, who wished to be an Engineer when he grew up; and the youngest was Phyllis, who meant extremely well.”

Did I say ‘simple’.  Two paragraphs in, and we are already on alert: ‘just ordinary suburban children’ and ‘Phyllis, who meant extremely well’.  Young ears listening, or slightly older eyes reading would be on alert.  Ordinary children?  Meant extremely well?  As for an adult reader, you could already sense that some of this text was going to be directed at you!

Part of what makes a really successful children’s book is that it also appeals to adults – whether a parent or just an older reader. There are two techniques. It can deliberately include adult materials or sections, almost as a book within a book. Alternatively it can be far more subtle, allowing an older reader to see more. Done this way, the book exists at more than one level. The Railway Children is definitely in this second group.

At the first level this is a heart-warming adventure, with moments of excitement, moments of sadness, even scenes where an older reader will allow some tears (several in my case).  It is undoubtedly the kind of story that will grip a younger audience, even today despite the older style, set in the early 20th century rather than 21st.  Indeed, it was appreciating this timeless character that offered the basis for an excellent film version in 1970.  Unsurprisingly, though it was an excellent adaptation, it did lose just a little in translation from book to movie.

At another level, this apparently simple adventure story achieves a great deal more than drama and excitement.  In part it is because of the book’s style, old-fashioned certainly, but also engaging.  Here’s a moment from later in the book:

“I hope you don’t mind my telling you a good deal about Roberta. The fact is I am growing very fond of her. The more I observe her the more I love her. And I notice all sorts of things about her that I like.

For instance, she was quite oddly anxious to make other people happy. And she could keep a secret, a tolerably rare accomplishment. Also she had the power of silent sympathy. That sounds rather dull, I know, but it’s not so dull as it sounds. It just means that a person is able to know that you are unhappy, and to love you extra on that account, without bothering you by telling you all the time how sorry she is for you. That was what Bobbie was like. She knew that Mother was unhappy—and that Mother had not told her the reason. So she just loved Mother more and never said a single word that could let Mother know how earnestly her little girl wondered what Mother was unhappy about. This needs practice. It is not so easy as you might think.

Whatever happened—and all sorts of nice, pleasant ordinary things happened—such as picnics, games, and buns for tea, Bobbie always had these thoughts at the back of her mind. ‘Mother’s unhappy. Why? I don’t know. She doesn’t want me to know. I won’t try to find out. But she IS unhappy. Why? I don’t know.’ She doesn’t say, and so on, repeating and repeating like a tune that you don’t know the stopping part of.”

Nesbit was clever, weaving the story with ‘author’s reflections’.  Today we are more likely to expect a story to stay ‘on track’, but there were writers who did like to communicate directly with you (and some still do).  As in the example, it is like a privileged moment, where you are able to stand back from events and share in this brief interlude of reflection.  Nesbit realised that rather from detracting from the story, it enhanced it.  This was before cinema and television, and she was giving us the alternative to a story appearing on a screen:  time and events were moving forward in the text in front of you, but you could pause for a moment, and reflect with the writer on what had been happening, on the characters in the story, and on the hidden thoughts of the children.  It was the use of this technique that conspired to make Roberta ‘real’ in a way that fed your desire to have a special insight into her.

To be clear, The Railway Children is an adventure story.  After their unexpected move from a house in London and middle-class wealth to poverty and a house in the country, the children have escapades.  Some are dramatic, and some are simply the result of living in a new world of expereinces, where village life, gardens, trains and local commerce become engaging.  There are dramatic moments, ranging from discovering a refugee to a boy having an accident, from sickness and a canal boat fire to a landslide on the railway line.  Yet all the excitement is balanced with sharp insights about children growing up, all combined with the teasing, snappy responses and moments of guilt that are central to being around your siblings.

Nesbit also addresses the relationship between children and adults well, especially when Roberta, Phyllis and Peter find themselves involved with other people in the village.  Some interactions are uncomfortable, some clouded by misunderstandings and false assumptions, and some by wariness.  However, one curious aspect of the story is that it is mainly concerned with the three children and several adults:  for the most part, other children are largely ignored, at least until they rescue the injured Jim.  Even then, spiky moments between his rescuers and a man in the signal box close to the station take up an important part of the events.  If Jim hadn’t required nursing, he would have disappeared from the story quickly (and with it, any potential emotional interest for Roberta!).

The three children in The Railway Children aren’t perfect, nor would any reader expect them to be.  What makes Nesbit’s approach clever is that she manages to show the good and the bad, but at the same time offer a commentary, as if she wants you to do more than follow a story.  Here’s is Peter deciding to upset his sisters with an explanation – as he saw it – of setting a broken bone:

“I’ll tell you what they do,” said Peter. I can’t think what made him so horrid. Perhaps it was because he had been so very nice and kind all the earlier part of the day, and now he had to have a change. This is called reaction. One notices it now and then in oneself. Sometimes when one has been extra good for a longer time than usual, one is suddenly attacked by a violent fit of not being good at all.

“I’ll tell you what they do,” said Peter; “they strap the broken man down so that he can’t resist or interfere with their doctorish designs, and then someone holds his head, and someone holds his leg—the broken one, and pulls it till the bones fit in—with a crunch, mind you! Then they strap it up and—let’s play at bone-setting!”

I’ve put the part of the paragraph which is ‘out’ of the story in an italic font.  It’s an explanation for the children listening to the story, and it’s a commentary aimed at parents too.

Incidentally, within a couple of pages, the three children are playing at setting bones, with Peter the recipient of their efforts.  It comes to an end when the doctor, who has been setting a real broken bone elsewhere in the house, enters the room and sees what they are doing.  He points they’re being a bit insensitive when the boy upstairs is in real pain.  It’s an unexpected scene.  Sadly, the chapter ends in a place where modern views confront the ‘dated’ text – as the doctor explains to Peter that women are ‘softer’ than men, and that men should be careful, adding “a man has to be very careful, not only of his fists, but of his words”.

Should sections like that be edited today?  The version I was reading was the version currently available in Books, the Apple online library.  Perhaps modern print editions are different.  I find it hard to answer my own question about editing.  Before I respond to my query, a slight detour takes me over to commenting on The Railway Children on film, although I should admit I have only seen one version.  I know there was a new adaptation for television in 2000, and a sequel, The Railway Children Return, appeared in 2022.

That 1970 film version of the story was an absolute delight.  In addition to the actors playing the children, Bernard Cribbins was just perfect for the Station Porter, Mr Perks (perfect as Perks!).  The setting, the acting and the style of the movie caught Nesbit’s story well.  Of course, it was a movie, and so we lost some of the subtle style when it appeared on screen, and certainly we no longer had that extra voice, offering insights and asides that made the book so successful, at least as I saw it.  The other effect of the film was the usual one:  now Phyllis and Roberta are fixed images in my mind, they are Phyllis as portrayed by Sally Thomsett and Roberta by Jenny Agutter.  As far as I’m concerned, the old rule still works:  read the book first, and then allow a later movie or television series to be an alternative version, it can be equally enjoyable (as it was in this case), but it’s not the same.

Written 120 years ago, there are plenty of commentaries that have been written on Nesbit and on The Railway Children, some of them concerns about past values and behaviours.  Born in 1858, Edith Nesbit was a prolific writer.  She wrote more than sixty books for children, and more than 30 for adults.  Perhaps less well known, she was a co-founder of the Fabian Society, a socialist organisation that was later to link up with Britain’s Labour Party.

Her personal life was complex.  In 1877, aged just 18, she met Hubert Bland, a bank clerk.  They married when she was  seven months pregnant in 1880, but they didn’t live together immediately after their wedding, as he remained with his mother.  Their marriage was tumultuous.  Nesbit was to meet another woman who believed she was Hubert’s fiancée and had also had a child of his.  If that wasn’t enough, she then discovered that her friend, Alice Hoatson, was pregnant by him.  She’d already agreed to adopt Hoatson’s child and allow her to live with her as their housekeeper.  Despite discovering the truth and quarrelling violently with her husband, she allowed Alice Hoatson to continue residing with them in the dual roles of housekeeper and secretary.  Hoatson became pregnant by Bland a second time, 13 years later.  Once again, Edith was supportive, adopting Hoatson’s other child, John.

Despite her unconventional private life, in more recent decades criticism has been directed at her ‘Victorian’ values.  In a New Yorker article published in September 2022, the comment was made that Nesbit’s books were at times “blighted by racist and colonialist language and anti-Semitic tropes” (by author Jessica Winter).  I don’t know how to respond to this.  She was the family breadwinner, and, famously, as the father in The Railway Children observes “Girls are just as clever as boys, and don’t you forget it!”.  However, she wasn’t a champion for women’s rights, although Winter concedes that that this was because “She opposed the cause of women’s suffrage—mainly, she claimed, because women could swing Tory, thus harming the Socialist cause.”  Then Winter goes on to add, “And, most crucially her …  books are constructed from a blueprint that is also a kind of reënactment of the author’s own childhood: an idyll torn up at its roots by the exigencies of illness, loss, and grief.”

After reading the book twice more, and watching the movie, I’m sure those are all valid observations.  Perhaps I shouldn’t wander into this dangerous territory, but my weakness is that I accept books like these as they are, stories that reflect a past that we view today with a jaundiced eye:  I still love The Railway Children, just as I love the works of other writers whose lives and books reflect values that are uncomfortable echoes of the past.

If I was to become too unrelenting, I’d have to give up a lot more than The Railway Children.  Pride and Prejudice depicts a world and values long gone, and far from one we would want to entertain today.  I suppose what this reveals is that I am willing to abandon what I know is the way things should be, and enjoy alternative worlds and times.  It’s a willing suspension of belief I adopt when reading fantasy and science fiction, and no less important when I read novels from a century ago or more.  Through novels I can live in other worlds for a while, without compromising my values and concerns about society today.  They make my life richer, in part by allowing me to imagine how things could be and have been different; and in part by helping me appreciate how much we have achieved by the beginning of the 21^st Century.  Sadly, I guess I have to end by adding, “how much we seem to have achieved”.

Losing the Middle Ground

The search for meaning is a never-ending quest.  In part, it is what drives us to keep on learning, asking questions and attempting to make sense of what others are saying and writing.  However, it is not just a matter of research and logic.  I suspect many of you are like me, hoping to find some significant signs of change, especially at auspicious dates like a birthday, or the beginning of a new decade or century.  What has happened, we ask ourselves?  What has changed, what is different?  It is an easier task when we look backwards, as we can see the evidence in major shifts, like those brought about by Newton’s Principia in 1687, or Einstein’s critiques of various classical theories in physics in 1915 (although neither of these were at the turn of a century or even a decade!).  Actually, time distance is often important, as current theories about things like black holes and dark matter might also mark key turning points, but they haven’t been around long enough to become clearly understood.

Anyway, I guess science is easier, because there are ground-breaking experiments and key observations that have had a real, measurable impact.  Other changes, changes in the culture, are harder to pin down.  The shift from ‘photographic’ painting to impressionism and then to modern art took place over decades.  As for the novel, where do we stop when we look backwards?  Does Murasaki’s The Tale of Genji mark a key stage in literature?  Or do we have to go even further back, to tales and legends from centuries before, like those Chinese stories about the nine-tailed fox from at least 2,500 years ago.  Perhaps it is easier to find examples of major changes by looking at the cinema.  There’s Citizen Kane back in 1941, with its stunning examination of capitalism, or La Dolce Vita and its critique of indulgent hedonism, or Taxi Driver, or Apocalypse Now, or The 400 Blows, or Raiders of the Lost Ark, or North by Northwest.  So many possibilities, but were any of these turning points, or simply progress points in a complex changing medium?

Perhaps I’m asking the wrong question.  In culture, maybe what matters is what captures the zeitgeist, helping us understand this is where we are, or where we might be heading.  Now we confront a rather different challenge in that there are so many contributions to culture, many weighted with apparent insights, while others only turn out later to have real significance.  Again, we need perspective, to be able to stand back and understand how immediate events are related to others, and the underlying developments they illustrate.  Easy to say, but hard to achieve at present when the politics of Australia, the US, and others seem to be headed to increasing polarisation.  Right now cultural conversations appear steeped in opposition.

I imagined a possible test might be to look at current news topics.  In early April 2024, (the 9^th), my quick check through leading stories revealed the following.  In Australia (I used the ABC as my source) the leading reports covered ‘punishing’ electricity tariffs; problems with hip transplants, scammers at work; lies and deceit over events in Gaza (the tone now shifting away from supporting Israel); housing affordability out of reach; together with critiques of Trump (!), petrol prices going up, various crimes, and problems with roads and rail lines.  Next, for the US perspective, I checked The New York Times, where lead articles covered the war in Gaza (reports on disasters on both sides); the Vatican evidencing doubt over the ‘dignity’ of various gender issues; Chinese ‘outrage’ over a tv series (the 3 Body Problem); Trump, ‘deepfake nudes’, more Trump, killings and war in various places.  Finally, the UK’s Guardian:  yes, Trump’s there again, as is Gaza, ‘controversial changes to child protection scheme, NZ increasing visa restrictions, and the ‘tone deaf’ Melbourne City Council.

Of course, there was much more (a lot about a solar eclipse that couldn’t be seen in Australia or the UK (and tricky in many parts of the US because of cloud cover).  However, the overall approach was clear in all three news sources.  The emphasis is on people suffering, people treated unfairly, people fighting, people disagreeing for one reason or another.  That mythical visitor from outer space would conclude that it wouldn’t be worth invading Earth.  It’s full of miserable, divided and aggressive humans.  Why, even the weather reports are discouraging.

Surely it was different 60 years ago.  I managed to find a copy of The New York Times online for 9 April 1964.  It was a bit of a shock.  There was so much text, even on the front page!  The headline stories concerned an agreement to end a dispute at the NY Stock Exchange over trading rules; a Wisconsin primary for the presidential election later in the year favouring George Wallace; General MacArthur lying in state at the Capital’s Rotunda (and photograph); with an article lower on the page about his view the British had vetoed his plans for winning the Korean War; a second article with photographs concerning a test launch of the Gemini spacecraft; and several smaller articles on strikes and actions in the US and overseas.

In Australia, I found a Canberra Times for 9 May 1964.  There the major article on the front page was Labour winning local council elections in the UK!  There was also an article about a summit planned between Malaysia and Indonesia; a gang fight in Melbourne; the amputation of a Croatian migrants legs following a bomb explosion in Sydney; and two ‘startling’ shooting incidents in Canberra (no-one was hit).  I guess Canberra was a quieter place back then.  Sadly, accessing The Guardian in 1964 required payment, but I did glean this was the time of Beatles hysteria in the US; ‘Cassius Clay’ won the world heavyweight crown; The Sun tabloid newspaper first hit the streets; and there were debates over the ethics of using ‘the pill’ (yes, that one!), whether or not the UK was in the Edwardian or ‘jet age’, and whether factory farming had come to stay as part of the agricultural revolution.

At first glance, the sixty-year gap wasn’t that great.  Newspapers then and now seem to have a mixture of real news and more reflective pieces.  Much was taking place on economic, political and technological fronts.  However, reading the articles made it clear that the ‘tone’ was different.  Perhaps I was too easily swayed, but it appeared that journalists were less strident in their reporting, even, (dare I say it), stories were better balanced.  Then, as now, newspapers had to sell, and so stories tended to have an emotional character, but doing so by trying to add excitement rather than offering a very partisan perspective.  Back then, newspapers were competing among themselves, but they weren’t also trying to stand out against television, let alone the increasingly complex world of today’s online information.

Has technology that has changed how people write and report or has there been another shift?  Perhaps yet another perspective comes books.  I chose two well publicised and popular books written in 2011.  Quite different, and neither was particularly significant.  Neither was particularly well-written, nor destined to be memorable.  One was aimed at a young audience and has reported 25,000 in sales.  The other book might have been aimed at young adults:  it has sold  150 million copies and probably had many, many more readers.  Neither is a ‘great book’ but they suggest an alarming narrowing of culture and perspectives in the  21^st Century.

The first was written by Richard Dawkins.  The Magic of Reality was an important staging post in explaining science, technology and genetics, aimed at children: “Magic is a slippery word: it is commonly used in three different ways, and the first thing I must do is distinguish between them. I’ll call the first one ‘supernatural magic’’ the second one ‘stage magic’ and the third one (which is my favourite meaning, and the one I intend in my title) ‘poetic magic’ […] I want to show you that the real world, as understood scientifically, has magic of its own – the kind I call poetic magic: an inspiring beauty which is all the more magical because it is real and because we can understand how it works. Next to the true beauty and magic of the real world, supernatural spells and stage tricks seem cheap and tawdry by comparison. The magic of reality is neither supernatural nor a trick, but – quite simply – wonderful.”

Dawkins’s intent is clear.  In our search for meaning, science has the answers.  You want to know what things are made of, and how they came to be like that.  Forget myths and fanciful stories: we can describe the nature of matter in a way unimaginable 100 years ago, and the path of evolution that ends up with human beings.  He explains the ‘selfish gene’though a thought-experiment.  He imagines we have a complete set of photographs of all one’s direct male ancestors (why males?) stretching back from now to millions of generations in the past.  Comparing one generation to the next would see little difference, but “your picture and one from 185 million generations back the two would be startingly different, perhaps your ancestor would seem to be some kind of fish-like animal.”  Genetic change is slow and continuous.  A child is the same ‘species’ as their parents, but species evolve over time.

If a young person is confused, Dawkins has it sorted.  Science has the answers, and here is the evidence, lots of it, to prove the point.  The book’s subtitle is “How we know what’s really true”.  True believers in science know there are no miracles.  This is the way things are, and this is how they got that way.  Bought as a birthday or Christmas present, The Magic of Reality is far from magical.  The underlying story is tough and realistic.  It reflects Dawkins’s own childhood.  Brought up in an Anglican environment, “I was religious, impressed with the complexity of life and feeling that it had to have a designer, and I think it was when I realised that Darwinism was a far superior explanation that pulled the rug out from under the argument of design.  That left me with nothing” (from a 2003 Guardian interview ).

A sometimes-combative exponent of the role of genetics in understanding evolution, Dawkins has explained ‘all life evolves by the differential survival of replicating entities’, (survival of the fittest).  Youngsters reading The Magic of Reality in 2011 are now adults, and the relentless scientific perspective has led them into an even more demanding world.  The rise of AI has prompted questions about the definitions and limits of consciousness.  A cognitive scientist, David Chalmers, has provoked us to wonder where this technology leads:  “If at some point AI systems become conscious, they’ll also be within the moral circle, and it will matter how we treat them.”  From there it’s a small step to rejecting the idea technology is a neutral space devoid of moral judgments and spiritual implications, and that technology is preeminent.  It’s not hard to understand the comments of young Callum, close to the intended age for the book who said: “Miracles don’t exist. Simple as that. The Magic of Reality hasn’t changed my views on anything.” (in The New Scientist, 17 September 2011).

Dawkins’s world is one of impersonal scientific instruments and the methods of logic.  My second book is quite different, a fiction where the instruments are whips and handcuffs, and the methods painful.  It’s challenging to recall now, but when E L James’ book Fifty Shades of Grey appeared, it was a sensation.  I remember understanding its impact seeing women (almost exclusively women) in a tube train on the London Underground openly reading about Christian Grey and Anastasia Steele.  I’ve often wondered if some forgot to get out at their central London station destination and ended up in Theydon Bois or Morden.

If The Magic of Reality offered a testament to the the primacy of science in understanding our world, so Fifty Shades of Grey was a demonstration of how little we have progressed in understanding relationships, especially between men and women.  Fifty Shades, along with the following two books in a trilogy, is often described as a ‘dark romance’ novel.  As romance, the three books contain a series of predictable if dramatic plots, but they are ‘dark’ because they explore complex and unsettling emotional relationships, nicely spiced up with unconventional sex.  More to the point, they are frighteningly misogynistic

At one level the story is a fairly conventional rich boy meets poor girl fantasy.  They fall in love.  There’s some ‘kinky fuckery’ (perhaps the best bit of the book is that nice phrase!).  Sadists are likely to go too far, and nice boys who become sadist can probably be saved, even if they cause a fair bit of drama and pain along the way.  But how can Fifty Shades of Grey be linked with The Magic of Reality?  The Magic of Reality suggests the centrality of science is the only way to make sense of our world; Fifty Shades presents a regressive view of interpersonal relationships, with masochistic sexual practices reinforcing sexual inequality .  Is it part of the ‘sexual freedom’ debate that engaged so much attention and behaviour in the second half of the 20^th Century?  Far from it.  Despite her steps to take some control, Anastasia Steele remains a ‘submissive’, a poor and beautiful girl in thrall to a dominating rich man.  It’s a familiar story:  a man with power and money, the woman a willing partner.  The book legitimises softcore sadism – because women enjoy it!  Oddly enough, both James and Dawkins have written books making clear ‘this is the way the world is’.

In picking these two books there is another key point to be made.  Dawkins was part of the slow and steady process where science has become the only basis for explaining our world.  That perspective has reached the point that now we are willing to read books suggesting we have no free will, that our lives and our perceptions are determined.  It’s not that ‘miracles don’t exist’, but that anything and everything is the result of physical processes.  Emotions are the result of chemicals in the body, triggered by reactions that, at heart, are about genetic processes to ensure the survival of the fittest.  Science doesn’t just make our lives better, find treatments for illnesses, creates better environments; it reveals what ‘really’ drives us.

James is addressing a far more uncertain environment.  Interpersonal relationships, gender, sexual preferences, all these are part of a confusing mass of shifting views.  We might feel we are long way from the supposedly conventional lives of  people before the Second World War.  Today, we are aware that people have a variety of sexual preferences, we recognise that some groups are disadvantaged or even maligned, and we’d like to think that we can create a better world.  However, dark romance has its other regressive message, and its continuing popularity reveals further perspective.  In 2024, it is still the case that, to an alarming extent,  men remain dominant, aggressive and controlling; women are expected to be subordinate and accepting.  Little has changed over the centuries.  If Shades of Grey explored some dubious sexual practices, its larger impact was to reinforce the traditional model: men dominate, women submit.  Science progresses, alarmingly so.  Sexual relations stagnate, alarmingly so.

If two largely forgotten books from 2011 speak to a theme, that theme is ‘beware’.  The Miracle of Science sells a vision, that science is the exciting means by which we will live in a wonderful continually improving world.  Really?  Today, we’re confronting the manipulative world of AI.  Shades of Grey imagines a world in which we will enjoy diverse and exciting sexual relations.  Really?  More than a decade later, sexual oppression continues to flourish.  Each in its own way, these two books offer a depressing vision, where we’re going to be to be controlled by impersonal science or by warped visions of love and relationships.  Where’s the middle ground?  I try to stay sane by reading mysteries solved by Lacey Flint, Parveen Mistry or Adam Dalgleish.  OK, but that’s escapism, and I know it’s not enough.

Hummingbird

When I was growing up in London, birdwatching was one of my hobbies.  A very amateur ornithologist, my principal concern was to tick off more and more birds on my ‘life list’, identifying the species listed in my Field Guide to the Birds of Britain and Europe.  It appealed to me: bird watching combined the challenge of completing a collection, the opportunity to go off to new places, and a solitary pursuit!  Inevitably, the list of birds seen grew, despite the fact that trips because less frequently as I began my secondary education.  Then in no time at all I was married, had children, and time for ornithology dropped down and down.  I kept my copy of Peterson’s Guide, however.  After all, it contained my checklist.

Then I moved to Australia.  That was a shock, not the move, but the discovery there was a whole world of new birds, and some that might have seemed exotic in the past were now everyday.  There were cockatoos, parrots of all shapes and sizes, and even that amazing creature, the black swan.  I bought another book to help me identify birds in Adelaide, then in Melbourne, and wherever I went on holiday.  However, I didn’t tick new sightings off on my list.  I didn’t even start an Australian checklist.  Instead I became fascinated by some birds.

Now I was more interested in just watching.  There were Splendid Blue Wrens in the garden, and I loved them, as they dashed in close by the living room window.  As quickly as they appeared, they would disappear again.  Brief, slightly tantalising visits.  At the other extreme, there was a pair of Wedge-Tailed Eagles that would circle about our house when the Sheldrakes moved outside Melbourne.  From time to time I’d get out my binocular, and watch them lazily circling above the valley, waiting for that moment when one would plunge towards  the ground, incredibly quickly, to pick up an unsuspecting rabbit for lunch.

Then I moved to the United States.  By this stage in my life, checklists and even an attempt to seek out various birds was lost.  Too late.  However, early on, I discovered there were humming birds where we lived, if only there for the warmer months.  The Ruby-Throated Hummingbird generally spends the winter in Central America, Mexico, and Florida, and migrates to Canada and other parts of Eastern North America for the summer, and to breed. It is the most common hummingbird variety in eastern North America, having population estimates of about 35 million. Within a year of arriving, I had bought a hummingbird feeder, a plastic dish with a bright red cover, which I suspended from one of the beams in our upstairs pergola.  The cover was decorated with flower shapes, and in the centre of each flower was a hole.  My task was to fill the dish with sugar water (in a 1:3 ratio), put the cover lid on the bowl, suspend it, and wait.

I’m not sure if it was the colour or the faint smell of that sweetened water, but before long the hummingbirds arrived.  The door to the pergola from the living room was mainly made of glass, and I could watch my visitors.  Eventually I became bolder, and would sit outside, away from the feeder and watch.  The next year I took my camera out with me and started photographing hummingbirds both in flight and on the feeder.  I put up a second feeder.

I guess I was a naïve observer, at least to begin with.  I knew those Ruby-Throated Hummingbirds were the only variety I would be seeing in North Carolina.  The hummingbird is native to the Americas, and there are more than 350 varieties that have been described.  However, the great majority of these species lived south of where I was based, and especially in the central and the northern parts of South America.  Not that I cared about such matters.  I loved the ones in my garden.

They are small birds. The body is about 8 cms long, and the wingspan is around 10 cms.  The sexes differ in feather coloration, with males having a distinct brilliance together with the ornamentation of their head, neck, wing, and breast feathers.  The most typical feather ornament in males is what is called a gorget:  below the beak this is a bib-like iridescent neck-feather patch that changes colour and brilliance depending on your viewing angle.  As I am sure you have already realised, this isn’t to entrance birdwatchers, but to attract females and warn male competitors away from one bird’s territory

However, I soon discovered I was naïve in another way.  Hummingbirds are very territorial.  As with many bird species, the colourful males are distinctive, and it didn’t take me long to realise there were two males that would come to my feeder.  One of the two considered my pergola and its feeders as ‘his’, and he was extremely aggressive.  He, and ‘his’ females, would rest in one of the trees across the lawn, close to the small pond at the bottom of our garden.  I don’t know where the other male hid, but he would sneak over to the pergola and take a couple of sips of sugared water if he got the chance to do so, before the other male appeared and chased him off.  Sometimes he couldn’t even get to the feeder.

Ruby-throated hummingbirds are described as solitary.  Adults are not social, other than during courtship, which is described as “lasting a few minutes”.  Then the males buzz off and the female is left to care for her offspring.  Both males and females of any age are aggressive towards any competitors.  They defend their feeding territory, attacking and chasing other hummingbirds and any other threats that dare to enter.

As part of their spring migration, birds fly from Mexico across the Gulf, arriving first in Florida and Louisiana.  Some of these then travel further north, including to North Carolina.  Their migration is impressive, as it is an 800 km non-stop flight over water.   The birds can double their body mass in preparation for their Gulf crossing, using up the whole of their fat reserves during the 20-hour non-stop crossing, given food and water are unavailable.

Wikipedia reveals “Hummingbirds have one of the highest metabolic rates of any animal, with heart rates up to 1260 beats per minute, breathing rate of about 250 breaths per minute even at rest, and oxygen consumption of about 4 ml oxygen/g/hour at rest.   During flight, hummingbird oxygen consumption per gram of muscle tissue is approximately 10 times higher than that seen for elite human athletes.  (all this amazing data comes from research by J L  Hargrove, reported in the 2005 volume of Nutrition Journal (issue 36)).

They feed frequently while active during the day. When temperatures drop, particularly on cold nights, they may conserve energy by entering a state rather like suspended animation.  Given the uncertainty of weather, I had put up a couple of nesting boxes for the hummingbirds, but I soon realised that only one was used in my garden!

Perhaps I should have explained about the name ‘hummingbird’.  These tiny birds aren’t silent fliers.  Their name derives from the humming sound their wingbeats make while flying and hovering to feed or chasing other hummingbirds. Apparently, humming serves a number of purposes, in particular alerting other birds of the arrival of a fellow forager, potential mate, or intruder.  The noise is made by the rapid wingbeats (around 50 beats per second), and they sound a bit like a child’s musical toy.  The sound they make is distinctive, quite unlike the whine of a mosquito, let alone the buzz of a bee.  Disconcertingly, there is another sound you hear when an intruder appears:  one bird will ‘buzz’ another, and the wings may actually touch, producing a snap.  I have to assume that this might lead to wings being damaged, but I never saw any evidence of that.

Did I say ‘disconcerting’?  The sound was alarming, and I wanted to find some way to warn the other male who kept invading the pergola that he should buzz off and cause trouble elsewhere.  It was quite obvious that the intruding male was a poor learner – or was addicted to the sugar water.  It didn’t matter how off he was chased off; he would return.  A puzzle I can’t answer is about the females.  Some (well, one at least) were sometimes (rarely) allowed to use the feeder, and on a few occasions I would see both a male and a female sipping up the sugar water at the same time;  however, an outsider female was chased off immediately, and I seldom any allowed to drink actually managing to get more than a quick sip.

Despite the aggressive behaviour shown to outsiders, ‘my’ hummingbirds were remarkably tolerant of me.  It didn’t take long for them to ignore me sitting in a chair less than ten feet away from the feeder.  It took a little long for them to accept the camera with its lens directed toward the, but eventually, and somewhat cautiously, that was accepted too.  I must have taken scores of photographs of hummingbirds feeding and in flight.  I fact, it was a bird in flight that provided some of best images, and I have used shots of hovering hummingbirds in calendars over the years.

The more you study hummingbirds, the more fascinating they become.  Overall, their relatively compact bodies combined with bladelike wings enable them to fly in any direction, or  hover.  Their legs are short,  with no knees, three toes pointing forward and one backwards.  I have learnt they don’t walk on the ground or hop, but rather shuffle laterally, using their feet to perch (and to grab feathers of opponents!).  Moreover, they use their legs rather like pistons, pushing them up to gain some thrust as they begin to fly, and then they tuck their feet under the body, creating a sleek body suitable for aerodynamics!

That’s not all.  Studies of their brains suggest they have in enhanced ability for perception and processing of fast-moving visual stimuli encountered during rapid forward flight, when insect foraging, in competitive interactions, and during high-speed courtship. They have a fourth sensitive visual cone in their eyes (humans have three cones in their eyes) that detects ultra-violet light, helping with their colour discrimination, and it is believed this may play a  role in flower identity, courtship displays, territorial defence, and predator evasion, as they would be able to see as many as five non-spectral colors, including purple, ultraviolet-red, ultraviolet-green, ultraviolet-yellow, and ultraviolet-purple.

Finally, as you might have guessed, hummingbirds are overwhelmingly nectarivorous, and they are the only birds for whom nectar typically comprises the vast majority of energy intake, with their long, probing bills and tongues which ensure their rapid take up of fluids. They are capable of extracting over 99% of the glucose from nectar feedings within minutes and have co-evolved in complex ways with flowering plants; thousands of American  species can only be pollinated by hummingbirds.  Flowers which are attractive to hummingbirds are often colorful (particularly red), open daily.  However, it’s not just nectar they seek.  Most, if not all, supplement their diet with the consumption of insects.

Though not as insectivorous as once believed, and far less so than their relatives, such as the swifts.  About 95% of individuals from 140 species in one study showed evidence of arthropod consumption,  while another study found arthropod remains in 79% of over 1600 birds from sites across South and Central America. Typically, they pursue small flying insects, but they also eat spiders, pulled from their webs.  In fact, spiders are a common prey item, along with flies, wasps and ants.  However, nectar is still the major source of food.  Estimates based on time budgets and other data, suggest the hummingbird diet is generally about 90% nectar and 10% arthropods by mass.  That ties in with another observation.  Hummingbirds do not spend all day flying, as the energy cost would be prohibitive; the majority of their activity consists of sitting or perching. Hummingbirds eat many small meals and consume around half their weight in nectar (up to twice their weight in nectar, if the nectar is 25% sugar) each day.

Despite all that eating. I still think of hummingbirds as slight, little wisps in the air.  Perhaps that is one of the reasons they pop up in literature.  The Hummingbird’s Tale is an Amerindian story told by Pierre Rabhi:

One day, a long time ago and in a faraway place, or so the legend goes, there was a huge forest fire that was raging in the countryside. All the animals were terrified, running around in circles, screaming, crying and helplessly watching the impending disaster.

But there in the middle of the flames, and above the cowering animals, was a tiny hummingbird busy flying from a small pond to the fire, each time fetching a few drops with its beak to throw on the flames. And then again. And then again.

After a while, an old grouchy armadillo, annoyed by this ridiculous useless agitation on the part of the hummingbird, cried out “Tiny bird! Don’t be a fool. It is not with those minuscule drops of water one after the other that you are going to put out the fire and save us all !”

To which the hummingbird replied, “Could be, but I’m going to do my bit.”

Not just offering us a story about patience and perseverance.  Here’s D H Lawrence, who wrote a poem on the topic of ‘Hummingbird’:

I can imagine, in some otherworld
Primeval-dumb, far back
In that most awful stillness, that only gasped and hummed,
Humming-birds raced down the avenues.

Before anything had a soul,
While life was a heave of Matter, half inanimate,
This little bit chipped off in brilliance
And went whizzing through the slow, vast, succulent stems.

I believe there were no flowers, then
In the world where the humming-bird flashed ahead of creation.
I believe he pierced the slow vegetable veins with his long beak.

Probably he was big
As mosses, and little lizards, they say, were once big.
Probably he was a jabbing, terrifying monster.

We look at him through the wrong end of the long telescope of Time,
Luckily for us.

What an extraordinary image.  A monster hummingbird with its long beak and buzzing wings, it sounds like something in a fantasy novel.  An addition to demons, ghosts, flesh-eating monsters, now I have to worry about hummingbirds six feet long, ready to suck my blood!  Thank you, Mr Lawrence.  Why couldn’t you have stuck with Kangaroo and Lady Chatterley’s Lover?

Across the Nightingale Floor

I can no longer remember what led me to read the first book in Lian Hearn’s trilogy Tales of the Otori.  I suspect I found Across the Nightingale Floor in iBooks (now just Apple Books), and it looked like a story I would enjoy.  It was more than that, of course.  The story was set in a country like Japan, apparently in the past, and with a strong element of what Philip Pullman calls ‘low fantasy’, where “realistic settings and characters experience and are altered by their encounters with the mythical and the other-worldly”.  I can’t help it, but it’s a fictional form that I love, from S A Chakraborty’s Daevabad Trilogy to Christelle Dabos’ Mirror Visitor Quartet.  And then there’s the real classic, Monkey, or to be more precise Journey to the West, the extended, glorious and at times very funny account of the legendary pilgrimage of the Tang dynasty Buddhist monk Xuanzang, accompanied by Sun Wukong (Monkey), along with Zhu Bajie (Pig) and Sha Wujing (Friar Sand)!

Am I getting off track?  Back to Across the Nightingale Floor.  You won’t be surprised to learn that what I can tell you is that within a few pages, I was hooked.  It was a drama built around a love story (or three?), packed with fantasy, story twists, adventure, and frequent apparently insurmountable challenges.  What wasn’t there to like.  I suppose that means a second confession is required:  I am a sucker for romances, especially those set in other worlds where the main characters are constantly unable to get together, and even flung to places far away from one another.  Should I add the Sarah Maas’ Throne of Glass books, Garth Nix Old Kingdom novels, or Andrzej Sapkowski’s Witcher series?  Oops, I’m losing the thread again, and I’d better get back to Tales of the Otori.

Across the Nightingale Floor is set in a fictional world during a time that seems part of the Sengoku or Warring Sates period, back in the 15^th and 16^th Centuries.  We’re not in Japan, but it appears this story is taking place in a nearby land.  Suitable for teenagers (and Peter Sheldrake) the two key people in this story are Tomasu, a sixteen-year-old boy and Kaede, a fifteen-year-old girl.  Tomasu is a member of The Hidden whose family is slaughtered while he is away from the village and off exploring.  Once he returns to his destroyed home, he is spotted and tries to escape from the leader of the murdering Tohan clan.  By chance, Tomasu is rescued by lone wanderer, Lord Shigeru, who we later discover is a senior member of the Otori clan.  Shigeru takes Tomasu with him to protect him from any pursuers, and later he adopts him, renaming him Takeo to hide his Hidden roots.

As soon as they reach Lord Shigeru’s home in Hagi, life gets complicated.  Treated as an Otori, he is educated, trained, and eventually meets Muto Kenji, the master of the Muto clan, who reveals Takeo’s father was the most skilled assassin of the Kikuta, known as the greatest family of the Hidden Tribe. Once Kenji has revealed Takeo past to him, he starts to train him in the arts of the Tribe.  Meanwhile, clan politics are imposing on Shigeru’s life, and he has been told to marry Shirakawa Kaede as part of the process of political alliances and intrigues dominating relationships among the tribes.

Takeo and Shigeru travel to Tsuwano in Tohan territory to meet Kaede (who has been held hostage since she was seven).   She is under the protection of her kinswoman Lady Maruyama:  guess what, this is the woman with whom Shigeru has had a secret relationship for almost ten years.  If you’re getting confused at this point, the story is proving to be like one of those puzzles, where once you open one box, you find another inside, and once you open that one …

It is tempting to keep going, but I don’t want to cover too much of this first book, let alone books two and three that follow, (but, if you’re tempted, the second book is Grass For His pillow, just saying …).  There are plenty of murders, fights, trickery and more, and with all that in the background Takeo begins to learn the powers he has from his Kikuta heritage.  Perhaps I should add is that by the end of the book Takeo and Kaede are separated, and Takeo is taken away to learn more of the skills of his tribe: fulfilling a promise he had made to help Shigeru.  An unconscious Kaede remains in the care of Muto Shizuka.  Yes, if you want more, the second book in Tales of the Otori, again, is Grass For His Pillow!

What is a Nightingale Floor?  They are floors that make a chirping sound when walked upon. These floors were used in the hallways of some Japanese temples and palaces, notably in Kyoto.  They were built in such a way that they could amplify the natural squeaks made by dry wooden floors, built with the flooring nails placed carefully to rub against the flooring clamps, thereby causing chirping noises.  While an information sign in Tokyo’s Nijō castle states that ‘The singing sound is not actually intentional, stemming rather from the movement of nails against clumps in the floor caused by wear and tear over the years’, Hearn decided to use the idea that the squeaking floors were used as a security device in his novels, since they made it certain that no one could sneak through the corridors undetected.

Despite visiting Japan on several occasions, I have only been to Kyoto twice.  It’s a surprising omission, as it is generally regarded as a tourist destination and, more to the point, a centre for Japanese traditional culture.  However, I first learnt about a Nightingale Floor when I read Hearn’s novel, and I hadn’t been aware of them when I was Kyoto.  Now I’d like to go back there, see and hear one, and find out a little more on the topic!

It isn’t only Nightingale Floors.  There is something about Japan and the stories about the country in the past that attract me.  It’s the mixture of medieval traditions, exotic locations and the existence of various kinds of magic I find alluring.  I suppose I should add that the characters, or at least the ones I read about in novels, are always amazingly skilled, resourceful, and able to overcome seemingly impossible adversities.  When I was a child, it was the adventures of Dan Dare and his colleagues in the weekly Eagle comic.  Now its Takeo, Kaede, and others.  It’s not because I want to live like them:  I prefer to read the adventures safely ensconced in Canberra, thrilled from a safe distance.

In part the attraction has to do with a Westerner’s simple (mis)understanding of samurai, reinforced by novelists like Jin Yong, whose Legends of the Condor Heroes (A Hero Born, A Bond Undone), who described them as truly fearsome warriors, yet men of unquestioned loyalty and principle.  Today through novels like those of Jin Yong the word ‘samurai’is closely associated with a warrior class, most members of a clan and under the control of a traditional lord, trained in both fighting techniques and in military tactics and grand strategy.  However, the really strong influence on people like me was Kurosawa’s 1954 film, the Seven Samurai. Set  in 1586 in the Japanese Sengoku it’s the story of a village of desperate farmers who seek to hire a group of seven ronin (the term used to describe masterless samurai) in order to have them combat the bandits who kept returning to steal their crops.

Alas, I eventually discovered that much of that thrilling stuff was largely fiction.  While some Samurai were solders, changes took place over the decades and by the time of the Tokugawa shogunate they had become courtiers, bureaucrats, and administrators rather than warriors. With no warfare from the early 17th century, it seems they gradually lost their military function and became aristocratic bureaucrats, and their ‘daishō’, the paired long and short swords became a symbolic emblem of power rather than a weapon used in daily life. They served as role models for the other social classes, becoming scholars, shifting their activities from military to political administration.  Ah well, so it goes!

There is another tradition in Japanese fiction, and one that was as attractive as anything to do with samurai, and this is one comprising writers who focus on murder puzzles.  I say ‘puzzles’ because the twist that Japanese mystery writers emphasise is playing with what best be described as intellectual puzzles.  Among these, Yukito Ayatsuji’s book The Decagon House Murders is a classic example of the ‘locked room’ approach.  More recently, I’ve become entranced by Keigo Higashino, and his rather obtuse policeman, Detective Galileo.  In various books Galileo seems hardly engaged, just chatting to people, but in his best stories – Salvation of a Saint, Silent Parade, The Devotion of Suspect X – you hardly care because you know he is going to piece together what really happened.  That is also true of his other series, centred around another policemen, Kaga.

I think it might be time to do a little investigating of our own.  Let me introduce you to Gillian Rubinstein, an English-born children’s author and playwright, who moved to Australia in 1973.   Now known as a prolific children’s writer, her first novel was Space Demons, which appeared in 1986, and was to herald many stories for children focussed on fantasy and growing up, as well as more challenging novels for young adults, especially Beyond the Labyrinth and Galaxy-Arena.  Commenting on her interests, she once wrote: “I am interested in the end of childhood and the beginning of adulthood, and so the parents have to be absent in my stories for one reason or another. In many ways teenage is an artificial age that our society has constructed. In pre-technological societies puberty marked the beginning of adulthood. I think people are resilient if they are given power over their own lives”. She’s been an award winner, and in 1999 visited Japan as the recipient of a University of Melbourne Asialink Fellowship.

It wasn’t her first time in Japan.  Back in 1993, she had visited there and thought she would like to write “a fantasy set not in an Anglo-Celtic world but one based on medieval Japan”.  Despite her concern that she might be viewed as arrogant in writing about a culture that was not her own, she let the idea ‘simmer’, while reading and researching about the history and culture of Japan.  With the 1999 grant from Asialink she was able to begin writing Across the Nightingale Floor that October, while staying in the Akiyoshidai International Arts Village in Yamaguchi Prefecture.  Yes, Lian Hearn is Gillian Rubenstein!  Wikipedia reveals “The name ‘Lian’, comes from a childhood nickname and ‘Hearn’ apparently refers to herons which are a prominent theme in the series”.

Gillian Rubenstein has also revealed that her first book was ready to send to her agent in August 2001, and by that time she’d already written a first draft of the next two books, Grass For His Pillow and Brilliance of the Moon.  Let me quote from her one more time:  “Since the early success of Across the Nightingale Floor I’ve been able to let go the other forms of writing I used to do. It coincided with a move from the city to a small coastal town, as well as a decision to withdraw from all other literary activities until the series was finished”.  She changed, and we benefitted.

What is it about the novels of Gillian Rubenstein, writing as Lian Hearn, that attracts me?  Is it “medieval traditions, exotic locations and the existence of various kinds of magic … [and] that the characters, or at least the ones I read about in novels, are always amazingly skilled, resourceful, and able to overcome seemingly impossible adversities”.  Yes, but there’s more.  Many stories have those elements, and yet some offer something more.

I read many books in 2023, and, unsurprisingly given my somewhat obsessive character, I kept a record of every one of them.  A relatively small number, around a couple of dozen, are non-fiction books, ranging from Mary Beard on Rome, Sarah Bakewell on humanists through to Jim Robbins on birds, and Ed Yong on animal senses. The (large) number of others can easily be allocated into three groups.  By far the greatest number are murder mysteries, and most of these are set in the UK.  I’m not sure if that is because of a personal preference for British detectives and police investigators, or because the UK is the centre of detective fiction writing.  Perhaps that’s a topic for another blog.  Most of the rest are fantasy, although there are a few science-fictions in there, too.

Looking more carefully at the fantasy authors and titles, a couple of observations are inescapable.  From time to time, I get locked on to a specific author, and then read everything he or she has written.  On last year’s list, first place goes to Terry Brooks, and his series of adventures set in Shannara.  I read sixteen of those in 2023, some bought second-hand at the Lifeline Book Fair, although most were borrowed from the library.  I recovered from Shannara around July last year.  Next, I moved on to Megan Whalen Turner, and the Queen’s Thief series of six books set in Attolia, to be followed by Scott Lynch’s series about Locke Lamora (only three books so far, and I’m anxiously awaiting the next ones in the series).

Well, that’s the obsessional part.  The other is that I really do love books set in another world, much like our own, but at an earlier time, with magic, swords, spell and very sharp knives (but no machine guns, howitzers or hydrogen bombs).  There is a tantalising aspect to some simpler, earlier time, when there was courtesy, consideration and conventions governing life and relationships.  Sadly, there is another side to these settings which is the adventures usually are focussed on some kind of noble elite and everyone else is poor and exploited.  Not good, Sheldrake.

Am I reaching back to a lost world, a simpler world, even if it was a hierarchical and exploited one?  I like the romance of sword fights, daring adventures, (often unrequited) passion and petticoats.  Above all, I love magic, the kind of magic that is everywhere, the kind of magic that isn’t dramatic so much as embedded in otherwise mundane life, magic to be understood, respected and practiced with care.  Science can allow us to do so many things, but magic is way beyond the mundane, magic is strange, and magic has that underlying characteristic that it can’t really be fully controlled or understood.

To put it differently, the magic in the stories I love is the kind of magic is only just beyond what we can do.  It is Takeo crossing the nightingale floor and then, mysteriously, being able to disappear, to be in a room but be invisible, or being able to project a version of himself in another part of a room.  It’s the kind of magic you feel you can touch, almost, just there, just beyond your fingertips.  It’s the kind of magic that the contemporary world has abolished, but back in the medieval world of the Otori it was still present.  Too old to enjoy a novel aimed at teenagers or slightly older?  Nonsense.  Why don’t you accept Lian Hearn’s invitation, by quietly crossing the nightingale floor, start diving into the captivating adventures of the Otori, and enjoy relishing an escape into the world of ‘if only’.

Earthsea

Returning to a favourite book after several years is often a pleasure.  In relation to Ursula Le Guin’s Earthsea trilogy, that’s an understatement.  I had forgotten how seriously outstanding these books are.  I should explain that most of these comments concern the first three books, A Wizard of Earthsea, The Tombs of Atuan, and the Farthest Shore, those written between 1968 and 1972.  There are three other books in the ‘Earthsea Universe’, written much later, but the original trilogy stands out as a set in its own right.  Oh, as I will explain a little later, there is an important transition between the first and second books, even though they were published just two years apart (the third book came out two years later again).  It was a transition that mattered greatly to Ursula Le Guin.  However, some scene setting first.

The Earthsea books take place in a world of islands, most small, identified in various groupings, and surrounded by a vast ocean.  This is a pre-industrial world, and one in which magic is a central part of the way of life.  Many people possess one or two of the various kinds of magical skills, skills which can be used in agriculture, building, shipbuilding and even in entertainment.  Those who possess the most advanced gifts are sent to the school on the small island of Roke:  graduates will become staff-carrying wizards.  There are people from various races living within Earthsea, most ranging from black-brown to red-brown complexions, the only white-skinned race living in the Kargad lands to the north-east, which is also the only region where we are told magic is banned.

If your mind is full of the Lord of the Rings trilogy, with wars, battles, armies and alliances, this series is quite different: an advance warning, I’m going to summarise much of the three books.  We are going to learn about power, about spells going awry, and terrible risks, but the focus is on individuals, and A Wizard from Earthsea begins with a boy, Duny, living on the island of Gont, down towards the southern end of the various island groups.  His aunt is a witch, and she recognises he has great power, but all she can do is teach him the few basic spells she knows.  However, when Gont is attacked by raiders, Duny manages to summon a white fog, which confuses the attackers, and allows the men to beat off the invasion. This act comes to the notice of a local, powerful magician, Ogion, who takes him on as an apprentice.

Ogion is careful and methodical, teaching him how to use magic wisely.  He reveals Duny’s ‘true name’ is Ged.  We discover that Ged has some real character flaws.  He is impatient, and he is easily encouraged to show off.  He manages to summon a dangerous shadow to show off to a girl, and Ogion has to deal with it.  He asks Ged if he would prefer to continue his studies with him or go to the Wizard School on the island of Roke.  Ged can’t wait to get to get to Roke, where he makes friends but also manages to fall out with another student, Jasper.  Jasper challenges him, and Ged responds, summoning an extremely dangerous creature from the other realm, one which he can’t control.  The archmage of Roke manages to drive this shadowy denizen away, but at the cost of his own life.

That success masks a more worrying problem for Ged.  Although he recovers from wounds received in battling this ancient evil creature from the other world, he learns it will return, and is determined to possess him.  Ged becomes an accredited magician and, hunted, he moves from one location to another.  At one point he confronts a dragon, successfully gaining agreement the dragons will leave a group of islanders alone.  Still evading his shadowy creature, he returns to Gont, where Ogion explains he has to face it.  The book ends with Ged eventually and successfully dealing with the creature he’d summoned into the world.  It’s an exciting story, the more so because we understand that Ged was foolish and easily tempted while he was a student, and yet we also appreciate he has depths of power almost beyond his own understanding.  To be clear, the adventure is subordinate to the exploration of character.

I mentioned earlier that the second book is quite different, and although Ged plays an important role in The Tombs of Atuan, the events centre around a young high priestess, Arha, the lonely guardian of a set of shadowy and complex Tombs.  In an Afterword to the first edition of this second book, Ursula Le Guin tells us “It was the first book I wrote with a woman as the true central character.  [Her] character and the events of the story came from deep within me, so deep that the subterranean and labyrinthine imagery, and certain quality, are hardly to be wondered at.  But the darkness, the cruelty, the vengefulness.”  She goes on to explain that the final section of the story was a way of tearing down the “whole primitive, hateful idea of the feminine as dark, troubling, weak, and evil.”  From The Tombs of Atuan onwards, women have held the central place in all her books.

This second book begins with introducing us to a five-year-old girl, Tenar, who was born on the day that the high priestess of the Tombs of Atuan died.  As a result, she is believed to be her reincarnation. She is taken from her family and goes to the Tombs, and her former name is deleted; she becomes ‘Arha’, or the ‘eaten one’.  She is trained in her duties by Thar and Kossil, the priestesses of two other major deities. Thar tells her of the undertomb and the labyrinth beneath the Tombs, teaching her how to find her way around them, and of the treasure hidden within the labyrinth, which wizards from the archipelago have tried to steal.

When Arha asks about the wizards, Thar tells her that they are unbelievers who can work magic.  Arha’s life is lonely, initially focussed on training, and when she turns fourteen she assumes the role of the high priestess in the Tombs.  She has to order the death of prisoners sent to the Tombs by the God-King of the Kargad lands.  They die from starvation, a fate which haunts her each time for a long while after. Her life is increasingly isolated: her only real friend Manan, her eunuch servant.

Ged turns up (I guess you knew he would!), and Arha traps him in the undertomb.  She learns that he has come to the Tombs for the long-lost half of the ring of Erreth-Akbe, a magical talisman broken centuries before, an object necessary to establish peace in Earthsea.  Chance had led him to the other half, and a dragon later told him what it was.  Arha keeps him prisoner in the tombs, but, Kossil learns of Ged’s existence, forcing Arha to promise that Ged will be sacrificed to the Nameless Ones.  Arha realises that she can’t go through with the sacrifice, and has Manan to dig a false grave underground, while she takes Ged to hide him in the treasury of the Tombs.

Arha and Kossil have a public falling out, in which Kossil says that nobody believes in the Nameless Ones anymore.  In response, Arha curses her in the name of the Nameless Ones.  Realizing that Kossil will now be determined to kill her, she heads to the labyrinth and sees Kossil uncovering the false grave.  Running away from her, Arha goes to the treasury and confesses everything to Ged, who has found the other half of Erreth-Akbe’s ring. He explains to Arha that she must either kill him or escape with him.  He tells her that as far as he can see the Nameless Ones demand her service but give nothing and create nothing in return. He tells her his true name, Ged, in return for the trust she has shown him.  She reverts to her original name of Tenar, and they escape together.

When I began rereading the trilogy, I was swept up by A Wizard of Earthsea once again.  It is a compelling story, an adventure, with a powerful wizard.  But Ged is young, and still foolish and immature.  That is part of what makes the story so compelling.  You know he is motivated by jealousy at times, and you know he can act precipitously.  You read on, hoping he will grow up and realise his destiny.  And he does.  In the Tombs of Atuan, it is almost as if we are reading a mirror image.  This time the young person is Arha, and we experience her confusions, longings, and worries.  When Ged appears, he is almost incidental to her story, the deus ex machina, enabling her escape from the dark world in which had been living.  It is another outstanding story, and, once again, you know there will be more.  Even more than at the end of A Wizard of Earthsea, you know the story is incomplete.  One adventure is over, but the longer journey is far from complete.

The Tombs of Atuan is a gripping story.  However, by the end of the second book in the trilogy, an older reader will have realised the novel reveals an important change in Le Guin’s preoccupations.  It is not just about her growing focus on women.  If she wrote the first book with Ged as the central character, now we realise his importance is as a facilitator of change.  Once an adult, Ged enables transitions.  If he ‘grew up’ in A Wizard From Earthsea, so that is true for Arha in The Tombs of Atuan.  She grew up, and Ged was there to enable the transition.

In the third book, The Farthest Shore, the key figure is Arren, a young prince, and this story is also concerned about moving beyond adolescence, with the events centred around his growing up, to the point he becomes the next King of Earthsea and reunites what had become an increasingly fragmented set of islands and archipelagos.  I suppose it goes without saying that Ged will play an important role in Arren’s life.  Perhaps I should add that it is Le Guin’s clear understanding of adolescence and its traumas that makes her books so involving.  We might not be sorcerers, or princesses for that matter, but we certainly understand the frustrations, mistakes and foolishness of growing up!

By the time of The Farthest Shore, Ged is Archmage in Roke.  Around him, he can see there is some strange and terrible change taking place.  Magic is losing its power.  People are becoming sick, apathetic, and unwilling to work.  With Arren, Ged sets out to find the powerful and dangerous wizard who is seeking to destroy the  world, practicing the ‘dark arts’ to remain alive forever.  Through various challenges, they eventually arrive in Selidor, the home of the dragons, the westernmost island in Earthsea.  Even his friend, the dragon Orm Embar, is affected by what is happening, and loses the power of speech.  Cob, the evil wizard, is at the western end of Selidor, at the ‘end of the world’.

After battling Cob on Selidor, Ged and Arren eventually have to follow him into the Dry Land’, the land of the dead.  Ged eventually destroys Cob, but at the cost of losing all his magical powers.  He manages to close the rift in the world that had been causing all the disasters they’d witnessed.  Ged and Arren eventually escape the Dry Land, and return to Roke, where Arren becomes king, and is able to begin the task of bringing Earthsea back together again.

When I first read The Farthest Shore, I think I didn’t appreciate what the story had to offer.  I had been swept up by A Wizard From Earthsea, by Ged’s foolish and boastful behaviour, and the painful path to set thigs aright, for Ged to become a true wizard, and to become both mature and wise.  It was a story for a young man, as I was at that first reading, a story which combed excitement and drama with an insightful account of growing up.  I rushed through The Tombs of Atuan and The Farthest Shore, and, to be honest, didn’t really get them.  In some ways both were darker and the events, important though they were, less compelling.  Now, it is the third book that I find the most satisfying.

This is a story about two people, an older man, who senses that he is reaching the end of his powers, and a teenager, on the brink of realising his destiny.  We watch Arren trying to deal with his own impatience, his loyalty to Ged, and yet his fears and uncertainties.  We travel with the two of them, and much of the time they are only wandering, almost aimlessly.  By the end of the book, Arren has understood that he is about to become king and has gained the insight to rule well.  Ged has achieved all he could, and now wants to go away, back to the farming life he knew as a child.   The book is a masterly exercise in addressing adolescence on the one hand, and the end of a career on the other.

Interestingly, Ursula Le Guin originally offered two endings to the trilogy. In one, after Arren’s coronation, Ged sails alone out into the ocean and is never heard from again. In the other, Ged returns to the forest of his home island of Gont.  In 1990, seventeen years after the first publication of The Farthest Shore, Le Guin finally opted for the second ending , which allowed her to continue the Earthsea saga with the fourth book, Tehanu, a story about Tenar and her adopted daughter Therru.   Ged is almost invisible, quietly going about his tasks with livestock, until late in the story.

Reading the first book in this second trilogy in the Earthsea series raises an obvious question:  what makes the Earthsea books so memorable?  They are adventures, they involve magic, and, somewhat unusually at the time they were written, they give at least as much space to women as they do to men.  In a way we now see as quite familiar, they are set in a whole imagined world, with different races, creatures, as well as all the dangers and benefits of magic!  For a younger reader, especially aged up to early adolescence, they are also familiar.  Key people turn out to be selfish, boastful, bad-tempered, silly and even thoughtless some of the time.  To put that differently, they are ‘real’, even if they live in Earthsea and can practice various magical arts.  In many may ways these people are just like us.

What Ursula Le Guin did was pull off a clever trick:  the characters grow as the stories develop, and we are enabled to grow, too.  Early childish behaviour got Ged into trouble, and learn about consequences, and the costs foolishness impose on others.  We might not become great mages, but we can learn how to be a better person, and what better way than through identifying with a Ged or Tehanu.  If they get angry, we understand.  If they find life’s lessons hard, so do we.  If they learn how to achieve what they can do well, and get past their childish mistakes, we can do all that, too.  We might hurt other people with thoughtless behaviour, but we can grow, love and be loved.  Tehanu is an astonishing book, from a mature author.  For much of the time, little seems to happen, and yet it is rich in depth and insight.

The Earthsea series ends with The Other Wind.  Written 33 years after A Wizard From Earthsea, is the last part of the series.  I know the series of books is sometimes described as two trilogies, but the fifth book, Tales from Earthsea, sits outside the continuing story of Ged, and the later characters in his life, so I’ll stick with the five books.  The Other Wind consolidates the stunning development that had taken place in Ursula Le Guin’s writing.  The first three books were brilliant adventures, written with insight and focussed on the characters as much as the events.  The Other Wind, appearing another eleven years after Tehanu, is a mature, deep work, delving into personalities and relationships.  Yes, there are dragons and magic, and important events take place in the last few pages.  However, this is a masterly analysis of personal growth and character. I couldn’t put it down the second time around.

 The Owl Service

Returning to a book you’d enjoyed many years ago but has been unread since can be an unpredictable experience.  The second time around, especially if it is after a couple of decades or more, can be discouraging.  What seemed such an excellent book several years ago now seems average, even relatively uninteresting.  In other cases, rereading can be more than a little surprising.  Wow, what a story:  it’s one you had only remembered in part, and by this point you’ve forgotten how compelling it was.  There’s serendipity in this.  The first time you might have been at the wrong age for the content, or perhaps the book got lost in the midst of an obsession with other very different titles – perhaps during an all-out binge on murder mysteries a small-scale fantasy is easily forgotten.  If I’ve found rediscovery is uncertain, that sometimes what was exciting and fulfilling at one time can turn out to be prosaic and even rather predictable at another, it is reassuring to find some books do last!

There are several issues that seem to influence the continuing reach and relevance of books from various decades and from various genres of fiction and nonfiction.  In part, this seems to reflect those times and places when writers come together and reinforce each other – deliberately, or by chance.  It is difficult to know what leads to a moment when a country becomes well-known for a category of novels.  In the 1960s and 1970s, the United Kingdom saw a rich vein of writing about the lives of women, especially first-person accounts of love, marriage, children and eventual disillusionment and divorce.  For me, a number of women authors were at the centre of this:  Brigid Brophy, A S Byatt, Angela Carter, Margaret Drabble, Doris Lessing, Iris Murdoch, and Muriel Spark come to mind.  Of course, I have to acknowledge a list like this is more an indication of my age and interests:  there have been so many outstanding women novelists over the years, and I just happened to pay attention to this group at one stage in my life.  In that decade, they were the ‘right’ authors for me.

Another perspective on the books that seem to capture the spirit of the times has to do with the issue of setting.  Fictions set in familiar places and times can be readily accessible, while others repay rereading if the arc of events is engaging and meaningful.  In part this is matter of what makes up an imagined era.  If I am drawn to Peter Wimsey novels, it is partly because Dorothy Sayers writes about an era I don’t know but in such a way as to make it alluring.  Monocles, powerful cars, rich estates, and upper-class mannerisms.  Perfect!

Others, like science fiction and fantasy, depend on being convincing about totally unfamiliar settings as much as in the storyline.  Some writers excel in constructing marvellous, complex and quite believable other worlds.  Then there are those ‘in between’ fantasy novels, where much of the impact comes from the fact the events are close to home, taking place in an almost familiar setting, rather than in some imagined universe quite unlike our own.  There is something rather compelling about an account which is so close it could have happened next door, in another street in your town, or, in the case of The Owl Service, in one of those Welsh valleys to the east of Aberystwyth, a short distance away from where I lived in England but close enough.  It is only a small step from the reality of The Railway Children, set clearly in our world, to an isolated Welsh farming community, even if the place only exists in a novel.  Reading about an almost familiar town, we find we’re in an adventure involving mysterious forces just beyond our own experiences, events that are appear true to life – but not quite.

In his introduction to The Owl Service, Philip Pullman put it well when he observed “Unlike [Alan Garner’s] earlier books, and unlike The Lord of the Rings, the Owl Service is set in our world, the “real” world as we call it.  The fantastical elements irrupt into everyday life:  the realistic settings and characters experience and are altered by their encounters with the mythical and the other-worldly.  This way of writing a story is sometimes known as “low fantasy”, in contrast to the “high fantasy” of the Tolkien sort, where everything is made up.  I think it is a useful distinction, and vastly prefer the low to the high”. He also adds that The Owl Service is a children’s book, but not only for children.  How true.

What makes low fantasy so appealing?  For me, it is the sense that perhaps what I’m reading actually could happen, as opposed to those high fantasies that take place in a world ‘far, far away’.  I like both, but I suspect I am drawn to low fantasy because it often seems on the edge of  believable.  I could have opened that door, I could have slipped and knocked my head, I could have touched that strange knife.  In high fantasy, I find myself in a world that is completely unlike mine, a fascinating place in which to enjoy a series of amazing adventures as they unfold.  In low fantasy, I know these are fictions too, but especially in those stories that draw on what appear to be real events in the past or in a neighbouring town, there is a sense of being really close to the action.  As a non-visual reader, it is additionally persuasive to relate to people and places that I might have seen, actions in ‘recognisable’ settings.

If The Owl Service is set in a farming location near Aberystwyth, well, I’ve been there.  Grumpy men, and old and odd Welsh speakers, sure, I’ve met their equivalent.  A father who wants to make things fine, and ensure everyone enjoys themselves … yup, know all about that, too.  It was like my experience of watching Hinterland, a television drama series. The places, the rain, everything echoed dark and wet days spent on Welsh mountains.  In the same way, while I might have been brought up in a London suburb, Alan Garner’s story is about a place I ‘know’.   It’s not just that it is ‘realistic’.  The Owl Service has a timeless yet immediate character to it.  First published in 1967, it could have been written in 2023.

However, like many of the classic English books of its genre, it is also deliberately uncompromising.  You have to concentrate, deal with dialects and conversations where you don’t know the background.  Stay alert, Alan Garner seems to be suggesting:  if you don’t pay attention, you’ll get lost.  If relationships seem complicated, well, sort them out, and realise that this is the way it is most of the time.  If children are moody, and alliances shift and friendships stumble, don’t be surprised, but rather remember that attitudes and feelings, especially in teenagers, are volatile and uncertain.  Alan Garner has produced an account that reads like the text from a documentary film about family life.  He threw out a challenge to his readers and did so without compromise:  this is a classic from a golden age in British writing for younger readers.

It all seems so innocuous when you start.  Alison is sitting on her bed, feeling hot, with a tummy ache.  Gwyn offers her a book (who is Gwyn?), and then asks if she wants company.  “Don’t put yourself out” she replies, and so he happily leaves, only to be called back as he goes downstairs because Alison can hear scratching, probably a mouse, in the ceiling above her.  Gwyn returns, listens to the noises, which do seem to indicate something in the ceiling, and offers to investigate.  He gets a ladder and goes into the attic, where he doesn’t find any mice, but spots a dusty collection of crockery.   He tells Alison there are a lot of plates there, and she asks him to bring one down.  Dusty old plates?  Most readers are likely to be  hoping for a ghost, or a chest filled with treasure at this stage.  Oh well.

Alan Garner writes brilliantly.  As you read, you sense there is more going on than you can make sense of, that relationships are not just complicated, but some have a history to them that matters. Each time a scene seems to lead somewhere, unexpectedly that issue collapses, and we are back in the familiar.  It is as if the fantasy world is just in the next room, or that one more step outside will take you into a place that only exists in another dimension.  On top of all of that, since the characters include moody teenagers, with parents and other adults trying to deal with their silly behaviour and keep a lid on what might get out of control, this could be happening to people you know, even to your family.  It is such an easily understood world.  The grown-ups want everyone to be sensible, while the teenagers are driven to pursue their own, often overheated, imaginings and desires, way beyond any wish to satisfy parental demands.  The pot is simmering, and we don’t know when it will boil over.

Alan Garner deftly uses two tropes in the story.  First, there is the idea that life goes on normally until, by chance, a number of key factors align, and then a disaster is set in motion.  Only chance can create this combination, but once established, it will work its way to an inevitable conclusion.  The second, related idea is that this is process cyclical.  These events have occurred before, probably several times, and the same disaster next time is unavoidable.  Each cycle will leave people damaged, and yet the underlying sequence remains in place, unaffected, ready to spring into action once the necessary if fortuitous combination of people and events occurs.  If all that wasn’t bad enough, as they grow older the young participants in this repetitive cycle will be around to witness a later generation caught up in the same unstoppable sequence, as if they are on a slow moving but crazy roundabout.

Pullman described this as a ‘low fantasy’ situation, one where “the realistic settings and characters’ experiences are altered by their encounters with the mythical and the other-worldly”.  Welsh settings and traditional stories seem ideal as the elements for an adventure like The Owl Service.  In themselves, they are already ‘fantastical’, and all it needs is an Alan Garner to get the story going.  Perhaps he is just the narrator of a story that exists outside of his imagination:  he is merely a vessel to reveal what is timeless and almost in our world, if not quite.  Garner is adept in telling the story in such a way that what we are reading comes across as some kind of odd but subtle dislocation in the way things are.

The Owl Service touches on a number of themes with delicacy and sensitivity.  Many contemporary novels, especially those aimed at teenagers, put gender relationships, emerging passions, shyness and stupidity central.  Some are written in such a way that they seem to have sidebars pointing out that ‘this is about sex, got it’ or ‘she’s confused about her feelings’ or even ‘this is about class differences’.  All these issues run through The Owl Service, but they aren’t spelled out:  Garner expects you to think, to assume, and sometimes just to guess.  He is a master at not making everything explicit.  The muddles and uncertainties in dialogue are uncomfortably realistic as we try to make sense of various comments.  We aren’t privileged observers of the inner thoughts of the participants;  we have to infer what the youngsters see and what influences them by unpicking conversations and actions.

Let me be clear.  To me, this was one of the strengths of The Owl Service.  I was about to say that this might make it a harder book for teenagers (lacking in the older reader’s world-weary knowledge of life!?), but I stopped.  I don’t think that’s true.  Rather, I think any teenage reader might find it all too close to the life they’re experiencing.  Garner has an ear for the messy dialogue that characterises everyday interactions.  Things unsaid, issues confused, and the occasional slapping down by adults, all this runs through story, and there were times when, on rereading, I groaned at a father’s remark or a mother’s decision.  Dramatic things are happening, but they are doing so in a world where people communicate as inadequately as they do in our own daily lives.  This isn’t some clever plot device, but more the author reminding the reader that these characters are just like you and me.

Alan Garner knows how to tease you.  Enough is going on to draw you into the story, but events are unclear, incomplete, always leaving you with the uncomfortable feeling you’re missing something.  It’s almost a relief when one of the key characters doesn’t understand what another person means or is unable to adequately respond to what’s been happening.  They’re confused, too!  It’s also frustrating as the pages flip past, and you sense the end is coming.  How is this going to be resolved?  You have an unsettled sense that it won’t be clear and settled, that you’ll be left with some issues sorted out, but others not, only to be resolved in a follow-up book (but there isn’t one), just because that is the way of ‘real life’ too:  stuff happens, some things are resolved, some aren’t.

Alan Garner writes ‘crescendo’ style.  The story begins with little action, odd comments and moments of unexpected behaviour, easily passed over.  Slowly but surely, the growing number of odd situations become more important, and the pace starts to pick up.  Towards the latter part of the book, things are happening at high speed, and the eventual and dramatic end comes in the final few pages.  It’s a style that draws you in, and you are almost unwittingly speeding up along with the story.  There’s an explosive culmination of the forces involved, and then the book ends.  He doesn’t bother to explain everything, or even sort out the consequences of the that dramatic finish.  No concessions to readers who can’t keep up, and none for those who can’t work things out for themselves.  Can’t follow everything?  Too bad, ask a friend, or, even better, do a bit of thinking for yourself.

Are you surprised to learn that I enjoyed reading The Owl Service again!  It was surprisingly fresh, even though I could remember the overall story.  I decided to read it a third time.  That second recent reading of The Owl Service revealed how much richer the writing was than I’d appreciated the first time around.  I’d grabbed all the key points and action, but in that additional read I recognised it was like a piece of clockwork, each part carefully, even ingeniously, linked in with others.  Garner’s a fine writer, especially with his ear for real and sometimes confusing dialogue.  Some statements float past the characters, while at other times they recognise they’re missing the point, only to have their response ignored .

It reminded me of some television serials.  Some offer a complete sequence, from opening events to a final conclusion where everything is resolved.  Others end but leave you in the air:  sometimes there’s a trailer for a second series and another ten episodes.  Sometimes it is a device to make you think.  What do you know about these people?  Did you miss some clues earlier which would have allowed you to see how the future was unfolding?  Some television series that end suddenly because the writer couldn’t see a clever way to wind the story up after the big bang.  That’s a kind of resolution, where just about everything is left to you!

A final attraction of The Owl Service is that it’s very visual.  Gwyn going up into the attic, finding the crockery.  I felt I was just behind him on the step ladder.  If the reactions of people are often hard to read, it’s deliberately so.  We are being given a lesson in how we experience the world:  even though we know what someone has said, we often aren’t able to delve into why they said what they did.  This is life as we know it.  Often circumstances mean we can’t check with how another person is reacting or analysing.  Instead we make assumptions.  Later on, we realise their behaviour wasn’t for the reason we had thought.

Philip Pullman was right.  This was low fantasy, all the more compelling as it is set in a Welsh house where you might have stayed on holiday.  A great story?  Maybe.  Tangible, yet involving fantasy, happening just around the corner: certainly.  Loved it – again!

DD17 – A Wrinkle in Time

I guess it is difficult now to understand the impact of Madeleine L’Engle’s book, A Wrinkle in Time now, some sixty years after it appeared.  Today, science fiction and fantasy books for children are commonplace, with new titles appearing every month.  Back in 1962, a story for young people that addressed such themes as light and darkness, good and evil, several worlds in different galaxies and conflicts over love, goodness and the nature of spirituality was out of the ordinary and very exciting.  I bought my first copy, a couple of years after it appeared, as part of a collection I was building up for my baby daughter, relying on the Puffin imprint to ensure I was buying good books.  Naturally enough I read it.  I was amazed and hooked, as well as thinking this was clearly not a book best described as a ‘Young Puffin’!

The premise of A Wrinkle in Time was simple (and seems almost pedestrian today).  Dr Alex Murry, a physicist, has been abducted, and his two children, Meg Murry and Charles Wallace Murry together with their friend Calvin O’Keefe travel through time and space to rescue him, a task which leads them into a battle with the mysterious ‘Black Thing’.  Perhaps not an unusual story in contemporary terms, but it was wonderfully written, and left enough tension and uncertainty throughout to keep any youngster enthralled.  It was to become a multiple award winner, including the Newbery Medal, the Lewis Carroll Shelf Award (an American annual for books were deemed to ‘belong on the same shelf’ as Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Alice through the Looking Glass) and was runner up for the Hans Christian Andersen Award (often described as the Nobel Prize for children’s books).

Early on in the book, we learn that before he disappeared Dr Murry had been working on the ‘tesseract’, which was a fifth-dimensional phenomenon, a ‘folding [of] the fabric of space and time’ which allows for space travel (‘tessering’).  The three children meet three supernatural beings (Mrs Whatsit, Mrs Who and Mrs Which) who offer to help them find their father.  They are tessered through the universe, and their adventures take them to a planet, Uriel, on to Orion’s Belt, and finally to a dark planet, Camazotz.  Teasingly, towards the end of the story, the trio reach Central (the Central Intelligence building!), the core of a group mind agency.  Today, having the equivalent of the CIA appearing in a story is commonplace – and rather boring!

I don’t want to spoil the story for those that read it.  It is fast paced, with just enough disasters and knife-edge moments to keep you on the edge of your seat (well, for those young enough to live like that!).  It has also been subject to many analyses.  Madeleine L’Engle’s memoir explains her book was conceived and written “during a time of transition”, as she and her family moved from rural Connecticut to New York.  She wrote “we drove through a world of deserts and buttes and leafless mountains, wholly new and alien to me. And suddenly into my mind came the names, Mrs Whatsit, Mrs Who and Mrs Which.”  That insight came in the spring of 1959.

When asked for more information in an interview with Horn Book magazine in 1983, L’Engle responded “I cannot possibly tell you how I came to write it. It was simply a book I had to write. I had no choice. It was only after it was written that I realized what some of it meant.”  L’Engle has also described the novel as her “psalm of praise to life, [her] stand for life against death,” but it is also notable for revealing her interest in science, as A Wrinkle in Time includes references to Einstein’s Theory of Relativity and Max Planck’s Quantum Theory, let alone her own invention of the tesseract.

Science was the critical issue in this, gaining increased attention in the media.  Alongside new stories, the decade between 1953 and 1963 saw a burst of creativity in science fiction.  For an English schoolboy, that began on television with an extraordinary television series broadcast by the BBC, the Quatermass Experiment.  Over six half-hour episodes, it told the story of the first crewed flight into space, supervised by Professor Bernard Quatermass, a leader in the British Exerpimental Rocket Gropup.  This was the first science fiction adventure written for a British audience aimed at adults, but immediately devoured by children, especially nine-year old boys like me.

The opening was chilling.  The spaceship which had been transporting the first successful space crew returns to earth, but two of the three astronauts are missing.  The third, Victor, has changed, and we see he’s behaving strangely.  We soon learn that some kind of alien presence had entered the rocket during its journey into space.  The race is on for Quatermass and his colleagues to destroy the alien before it destroys the world.

The success of The Quatermass Experiment was immediate.  It was at the start of a theme that grew over the next ten years.  Science Fiction was hot, and it was scary!  Some series explored journeys into space, and others were focussed on aliens coming to the Earth.  As far as I am concerned, one of the best was the 1961 distinctly weird series A for Andromeda, written by a well-known British astronomer, Fred Hoyle.  I could have suggested that it was the story that made it such a success in my eyes, but perhaps the fact one of its minor stars was a then relatively unknown Julie Christie could have been a little influential, too?

However, just a year after A Wrinkle in Time was published in the US, Dr Who appeared on the BBC.  As a quirk of history, the first episode was broadcast eighty seconds later than intended on Saturday 23 November, delayed because of announcements about President Kennedy’s assassination the day before.  The series had been developed over a year, and was originally planned as a family show, an an educational programme using time travel as a means to explore scientific ideas and famous moments in history.

Early in 1963, one theme being explored was mutations, in this case resulting from a neutron bomb attack, creating creatures to be called Thals.  Rewrites were to see a second group in the story, the Daleks, shift from being the victims of an attack to become the aggressors.  The BBC hierarchy were alarmed, and the proposed programme was rejected as they determined it was not permitted to include any ‘bug-eyed monsters’ in such a series.  That left the team with no choice: “we only had the Dalek serial to go … We had a bit of a crisis of confidence because [management] was so adamant that we shouldn’t make it.  Had we had anything else ready we would have made that.”  Terry Nation’s script couldn’t be abandoned and became the second Doctor Who serial – The Daleks – and any pretence at an educational series disappeared.  Following that serendipitous start, 26 seasons of Dr Who were broadcast from 1963 to 1989; and then a second series commenced after a break and has been appearing every year since 2005.  In all there have been 871 episodes of Dr Who, covering 300 stories.

Looking back at The Quatermass Experiment, A for Andromeda and the early Dr Who series, those first ventures into TV science fiction now come across as rather amateur.  Scenery was often flimsy, sets were often inadequate, (sometimes an eagle-eyed viewer would notice what turned out to be a cardboard wall would wobble), but the stories shared a characteristic with L’Engles’ book:  the events were realistic, frightening, even uncompromising in many respects.  Perhaps the key point was that, despite weaknesses, the adventures were often scary, with a palpable sense of danger, thrilling for the young audience.  More contemporary television science fiction programs are far cleverer in technical terms, but a series like Stranger Things seems less plain scary (but that, of course, might be me compared to a child sixty years ago).

If A Wrinkle in Time seems far more sophisticated than those early episodes of Dr Who, that was not nor surprising given the development of children’s television and the limited money available for productions back in the early 1960s in the UK.  However, L’Engle’s book does illustrate another difference, a difference it shares with C S Lewis’s ‘Lion, Witch and Wardrobe’ series, with the frequent reference to and use of religious symbols and themes.

The novel has a clear spiritual theme, especially with its elements of divine intervention and prominent undertones of theological messages.  In 19881 one commentator, James Beasley Simpson, suggests the overwhelming love and desire for light within the novel is directly representative of a Christian love for God and Jesus Christ (in Humankind – Religion – Spirituality, Boston).  Episodes in the book find the children encountering spiritual intervention, evidence of God’s presence in the ordinary world as well as the world of fantasy.  Madeleine L’Engle’s fantasy works are clearly linked to and indicative of her  Christian viewpoint, in the same way several of C S Lewis’s books contain quite explicit Christian references.  If her writing is more subtle than Lewis’s, that hasn’t stopped L’Engle’s liberal Christianity becoming a target of criticism from conservative Christians, especially with respect to themes in A Wrinkle in Time.

Actually, I find her use of religious references and allusions enjoyable, and far from proselytising.  Among the locations in the novel, Camazotz is the name of a Mayan Bat God and the name Ixchel refers to a Maya jaguar goddess of medicine.  The planet Uriel is described as having  extremely tall mountains, which appears to be an allusion to the Archangel Uriel, particularly as it is inhabited by creatures that resemble winged centaurs!  Incidentally, it is “the third planet of the star Malak (meaning ‘angel’ in Hebrew), to be found in the spiral galaxy Messier 101”, which would place it at roughly 21 million light years from Earth.  L’Engle’s fascination with science is evident.

The theme of a  fight of good against evil depicted as a battle between light and darkness frequently recurs in A Wrinkle in Time, and there are times when the three Mrs Ws reveal their secret roles in the cosmic fight against darkness.  They ask the children to name some figures on Earth, a partially dark planet, who fight the darkness. They suggest Jesus, and  later the Buddha.  In her personal journal referencing A Wrinkle in Time, L’Engle confirms the religious content within the novel: “If I’ve ever written a book that says what I feel about God and the universe, this is it.” (quoted in The Washington Post, November 29, 2018).

Does this matter?  There are many children’s books that draw on religious beliefs.  Today this leaves her open to some criticism, but L’Engle’s fiction for young readers addresses some  important  issues, and she was one of the earlier Post War childrens novelists to focus directly on the deep yet delicate topics that young people must face, such as death, social conformity, and truth.  Like other commentators, I find her stories uplifting because she is able to look beyond the surface values of life from a perspective of wholeness, exploring both joy and pain, uncovering the complex nature of human experience.

While we would not be as surprised finding this in a contemporary book, sixty years ago L’Engle was unafraid to describe Camazotz as a planet of extreme, enforced conformity, ruled by a disembodied brain called IT.  Camazotz is similar to Earth, with familiar trees such as birches, pines, and maples, an ordinary hill on which the children arrive, and a town with smokestacks, which “might have been one of any number of familiar towns”.  The horror of the place arises from its ordinary appearance, endlessly duplicated.  The houses are “all exactly alike, small square boxes painted gray”, which, sounds rather like sprawling American suburbia.  The people who live in the houses are similarly described as “mother figures” who “all gave the appearance of being the same”.

Another element of praise at the time was that A Wrinkle in Time was seen as empowering young female readers.   Critics have celebrated L’Engle’s depiction of Meg Murry, a young, precocious heroine whose curiosity and intellect help save the world from evil.  The New York Times described this portrayal as “a departure from the typical ‘girls’ book’ protagonist – as wonderful as many of those varied characters are”.  L’Engle has been credited for paving the way for other bright talented heroines, including Hermione Granger in the Harry Potter books, and Katniss Everdeen, the heroine of The Hunger Games.  Regarding her choice to include a female protagonist, in her acceptance speech upon receiving the Margaret Edwards Award, L’Engle commented “I’m a female. Why would I give all the best ideas to a male?”

If this seems commonplace today, at the time of the book’s publication Kirkus Reviews said: “Readers who relish symbolic reference may find this trip through time and space an exhilarating experience.”  The Horn Book Magazine added:  “Here is a confusion of science, philosophy, satire, religion, literary allusions, and quotations that will no doubt have many critics.  I found it fascinating … It makes unusual demands on the imagination and consequently gives great rewards.”

Inevitably, A Wrinkle in Time had to end up on the American Library Association list of the 100 most frequently challenged books of 1990–2000 at number 23.  The novel has been accused of being both anti-religious and anti-Christian for its inclusion of witches and crystal balls, and for containing spiritual themes that do not reflect traditional Christian teachings.  On that topic, Madeleine L’Engle should have the last word:  “It seems people are willing to damn the book without reading it. Nonsense about witchcraft and fantasy. First, I felt horror, then anger, and finally I said, ‘Aw, the hell with it.’ It’s great publicity, really”.

I don’t want to overstate the case.  I think A Wrinkle in Time is an excellent book, but I have to concede it is clearly dated.  What made it remarkable when I first read it seems more familiar today.  I believe it’s still an exciting adventure for pre-teens to read, but past that age, I fear there would be yawns and a quick drop in interest.  The almost insatiable desire for something ‘more’ inevitably diminishes the value of what we have from before.  It reminds me of the case of Dr Who, where a brief uptick in audience following the introduction of a female Dr (horror, how could they!!), appears unlikely to sustain the series much longer.

Of course, that is both simplistic and overdrawn.  I suspect that A Wrinkle in Time appears less distinctive now because it hinges around science fiction, and this is a genre that has grown in sophistication in the past few decades.  It is a novel, and relationships play a key part in the story, but perhaps not enough to sustain it.  Those SF children’s books from the past that last and last are ones that touch more centrally on themes that hardly change at all – relationships between family members, friends, growing up, and all the other mess of personal lives.  As just one example, a science fiction book like Becky Chamber’s The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet, succeeds because its marvellous science fiction is an adjunct to a story about relationships, including some that cross species as well as genders.  For me the complexity of relations between people will always triumph over clever technology.

The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time

Looking back twenty years, it’s difficult now to remember the first time I read Mark Haddon’s book, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time (I’ll call it The Curious Incident from now on).  It threw out a challenge to readers:  do you understand what you are reading?  It is a story about Christopher, a fifteen-year-old boy who might have Asperger’s Syndrome, a severe form of autism.  He has a photographic memory, he’s a whiz at science, he just can’t understand other human beings.  Like many people, I had read some articles on Asperger’s, but this was different, this wasn’t a story aboutChristopher, this was a story being told by Christopher.  Six years after it was published, Mark Haddon explained “The Curious Incident is not a book about Asperger’s…if anything it’s a novel about difference, about being an outsider, about seeing the world in a surprising and revealing way. The book is not specifically about any specific disorder”. He explained he wasn’t an expert on the autism spectrum or Asperger’s syndrome.  Perhaps not, but his perspective was exciting.

The Curious Incident is a mystery novel.  Its title refers to an observation made by Arthur Conan Doyle’s detective Sherlock Holmes in The Adventure of Silver Blaze.  In that book a Scotland Yard detective, Gregory, is talking to Sherlock Holmes:

Gregory: Is there any other point to which you would wish to draw my attention?
Holmes:  To the curious incident of the dog in the night-time.
Gregory: The dog did nothing in the night-time.
Holmes:  That was the curious incident.

The Curious Incident was unusual from the start.  It was published simultaneously as a childrens book and an adult book, in two separate editions.  Perhaps as a reflection of that, it won awards both as an adult book (The Whitbread awards for Best Novel and Book of the Year; and the Commonwealth Writer’s prize for Best First Book), and as a children’s book (the Guardian Children’s Writers Prize).  Oh, and one more thing, the book uses prime numbers to number the chapters rather than conventional successive numbers (so the chapters are 2, 3, 5, 7 and so on).  It has been translated into 36 languages from the original English.

Is it important to know the underlying plot?  Basically, Christopher lives in Swindon, England, with his widowed father, Ed.  He’s been told his mother, Judy, died from a heart attack two years earlier. One night, Christopher discovers that his neighbour Mrs. Shears’ dog, Wellington, has been killed with a garden fork.  As he mourns over Wellington’s body, Mrs. Shears calls the police. When a policeman grabs Christopher’s arm, he panics and hits him, and as a result is arrested for assaulting a police officer.  He’s taken to a police watchhouse, put in a cell, but after more is learnt, he is released with a police caution. He decides to investigate the dog’s death, keeping detailed information in a notebook.

A neighbour tells Christopher that his mother had an affair with Mr. Shears.  After finding letters from his mother dated after her supposed death, he becomes distressed and goes into a catatonic state.  This leads to his father confessing he had killed the dog, and admitting Christopher’s mother is living in London with Mr. Shears.  Ed also reveals that he’d killed Wellington in anger, following an argument with Mrs. Shears.  Christopher decides to run away and live with his mother.  After a long, event-filled journey, evading policemen and feeling ill from the trains and crowds around him, he finally finds his way to the home of his mother and Mr. Shears.  His mother decides to leave Mr Shears and returns with Christopher to Swindon.  She agrees to let Ed see Christopher for brief daily visits, who gives him a puppy, promising that he will gradually rebuild trust with his son.

If that was all there was to The Curious Incident, it would never have achieved the prominence it did.  The story is fine, both exciting and emotional at times, but so are thousands of others.  However, it is much more than that.  Where to begin?

The story of The Curious Incident is told by Christopher, and the account of the inner life of an autistic 15-year-old boy is astonishing.  I don’t mean Mark Haddon researched how autistic children think and behave, nor am I suggesting this was based on detailed research.  Indeed, he has made it clear, this was not the case.   Rather it is a careful and compelling exercise in constructing the world view of a boy who is different.  You’re aware of how different things seem right from the beginning of Chapter 2 (the first chapter of the book).

It’s just after midnight, and Christopher sees a dog, lying on its side, clearly dead with a garden fork sticking out of it.  It had been driven in hard, Christopher decides, because the fork hasn’t fallen over.  The dog’s body was still warm.  This first short chapter is followed by an introduction to fact that Christopher has an amazing brain, an amazing memory, but that his focus is on the physical world, not the world of people.  After this brief background, we are back to Christopher and the dog in Chapter 5 (the third chapter, of course).  He pulls out the fork and hugs the dog’s dead body.  Mrs Shears comes outside, screams at Christopher and tells him to put the dog down.  He does, but she keeps screaming and he curls up into a ball.  Incidentally, that chapter was a page long.

Next, we read that Christopher plans to write about the murder of the dog, and we discover he is a student in a special school for children with various kinds of handicap.  By the next chapter, Chapter 11 (are you keeping up with the numbering?), we are back to the dog, and Christopher confronts the policeman who has been called to the scene.  The policeman is hurried in his questioning, Christopher wants to hide from all the noise, and when the policeman touches his arm, frightened he punches him on the nose!  This is when he was taken to a nearby police station.

From Christopher’s perspective, the unfolding scene is making little sense.  Indeed, for the next few pages we read about his knowledge of the Milky Way and prime numbers.  His description of his arrival at the police station is compelling.  He hands over what is in his pockets – the list includes a Swiss Army Knife with 13 attachments, a piece of string, part of a wooden puzzle, 3 pellets of rat food for his pet rat Toby, £1.47 (a £1 coin, a 20p coin, two 10p coins, a 5p coin and a 2p coin), a red paperclip, and his front door key.  He’s escorted to a cell, “a perfect cube, 2 metres long by 2 metres wide by 2 metres high.  It contained approximately 8 cubic metres of air”.  Not knowing what will happen next, he mulls over some (rather extraordinary) escape scenarios.

The next chapter takes us  on another detour, in this case into why Christopher finds people confusing:  some of the time they communicate by non-literal expressions, which he can’t understand, including metaphors.  He knows what ‘metaphors’ means, but he thinks expressions like ‘I laughed my socks off’ or ‘He was the apple of her eye’, are clearly not true in the way they are used, because rather than conveying a picture, these phrases sound like lies.  He takes words literally, and clearly, from that perspective, imagining someone has an apple in one of her eyes doesn’t have anything to do with her liking another person!

I hope these brief snippets convey something of the flavour of the book, as the reader moves between learning how Christopher sees unfolding events, and his thoughts and questions about a variety of topics, often unrelated to the events of the moment.  Twenty-five pages in, we learn Christopher cannot tell lies, and that he is going to write a journal about everything that happens when he decides to look into the dog’s death.  He is going to be a detective.

As we become increasingly familiar with Christopher, we begin to understand two aspects of how he sees the world.  Yes, as I mentioned a moment ago, he is very literal in what he sees and how he understands what he hears.  At the same time, his brain works at high speed:  one moment he is observing an event, and the next minute he is thinking through a mathematical puzzle, or reviewing some knowledge he has acquired.  It’s fascinating, because we realise he can’t forget anything, and at the same time, he makes sense of things using scientific or mathematical principles.  Too much information, however, will overwhelm him, creating painful interference in his head, especially so when he is interacting with other people.  Like a magician, Mark Haddon takes us into Christopher’s world, and, surprisingly quickly, we both understand and feel comfortable as we live inside it.

However, there is another issue we need to understand.  Christopher is physically unable to deal with people.  Those he knows well, his mother and his father, he can talk to, but he avoids touching them, and will scream if they touch him.  As for strangers, they are people to whom he gives a very wide berth.  Any attempted contact, as when the policeman touched his arm, leads to a violent reaction.  He can navigate the world around him, he likes animals (one at a time), but the only people with whom he can interact are those he has learnt to accept.  These include his parents, teachers at his school, and, as his adventure develops, some of his neighbours.  Every interaction is shielded, however, as Christopher takes care to be ready to deal with what he sees as the unpredictable and threatening nature of other people.

Haddon’s achievement is subtle.  After a few pages and almost without noticing, you are absorbed.  Christopher isn’t odd or weird.  Just the opposite,  You feel quite comfortable seeing the world as he does.  In part this is achieved by the frequent swapping between the events of the story and Christopher’s ruminations on various mathematical, cosmological and physical problems.  It isn’t just a matter of balance, though the shifts are carefully alternated.  Rather it is that this structure offers another way in which you begin to slip increasingly easily into how Christopher’s mind works.

I’m not sure if I can convey how this happens.  At one stage we are on a railway platform for five hours, as Christopher is building up the courage to get on a train, a decision slowly made easier as the activity at the station shifts from a typically busy rush hour pattern to having just a few travellers around.  However, we join Christopher in slipping away from observing the changes on the platform to consider such matters as the variations in tadpole numbers year by year, or looking at stars and wondering why people choose to give constellations names, especially as there are so many images that could be fitted to the visible arrangement of stars in the night sky.  It is as if Mark Haddon has taken us on some kind of magical travel, and we find ourselves living in a different world from our own yet doing so comfortably.

When Christopher was on his way to the Swindon Railway Station, for some of the time he was able to see the British Railways sign above the rooftops of town.  However, as he got closer the sign disappeared, often hidden behind by the shops and houses around him.  What to do?  Normally, Christopher would have made a map in his head, but there was too much going on.  He stood still outside a greengrocer’s shop, and worked out a plan:

“I knew the station was somewhere near.  And if something is nearby, you can find it by moving in a spiral, walking clockwise and taking every right turn until you come back to a road you’ve already walked on, then taking the next left, then taking every right turn and so on …”

In case the reader can’t visualise this, Christopher offers the reader a map.  However, as he points out, this is a hypothetical diagram, since he hadn’t memorised the actual map of Swindon, nor did he know exactly where he is.  Instead, he concentrated on his rules, and built up a map of the centre of Swindon as walked.  “that way it was easier to ignore all the people and all the noise around me”.  He arrived at the station.  If that sounds impossible or crazy, try it for yourself.  It works.

The book works.  Mark Haddon could have attempted to describe what autism or Asperger’s is like from the outside.  “Asperger syndrome is distinguished by a pattern of symptoms rather than a single symptom. It is characterized by qualitative impairment in social interaction, by stereotyped and restricted patterns of behavior, activities, and interests, and by no clinically significant delay in cognitive development or general delay in language.  Intense preoccupation with a narrow subject, one-sided verbosity, restricted prosody, physical clumsiness are typical of the condition.” (from Wikipedia).  Clinically that might be useful, but it leaves someone like me at a complete loss as to how a person with Asperger’s experiences their daily life.

However, in saying the book ‘works’ I don’t want to imply this story should be read to help you understand Asperger’s.  That wasn’t Haddon’s intent.  As he said, “it’s a novel about difference, about being an outsider, about seeing the world in a surprising and revealing way.”  I read novels because I enjoy ‘seeing the world in a surprising and revealing way’.

The novels that remain long after I read them do exactly that.  In some cases it is because they tease out the small domestic misunderstandings and assumptions that underpin daily life.  Thank you, Jane Austen.  Others put a story into an unfamiliar context and challenge you to make sense of what is happening, not just as a puzzle (although I do enjoy murder mysteries), but because they illuminate behaviour and expectations in unexpected ways.  Thank you, Becky Chambers.  Yet others toss the trappings and systems of conventional behaviour out of the window and offer a very unexpected perspective on how we think and manage relationships.  Thank you, William Golding.

One review put it well.  “ Haddon does something audacious here, and he does it superbly. He shows us the way consciousness orders the world, even when the world doesn’t want to be ordered”, adding that “the great achievement of this novel is that it transcends its obvious cleverness.  It’s more than an exercise in narrative ingenuity.  Filled with humor and pain, it verges on profundity in its examination of those things—customs, habits, language, symbols, daily routines, etc.—that simultaneously unite and separate human beings”. This comment by Charles Matthews was in the article ‘Narrator is Autistic – Reasoning is Artistic’, (in the San Jose Mercury News back in June 2003.  And, no, I don’t regularly read the San Jose Mercury News – this came from Wikipedia!).

The Curious Incident was published in 2003.  To go back and read it again twenty years later is to find it remains compelling, touching, and even thrilling.  It almost feels like a privilege to see the world as if you are doing so from inside Christopher’s mind.  Mesmerised, you reach the end of the long final chapter, Chapter 233 – and it’s a shock:  you want the story to continue.  We don’t want to leave Christopher at this point.  We want to know more about how his life unfolded.  Come on Mark, do your duty man:  where’s book two?