Magical Classics: 'The Wolves of Willoughby Chase' by Joan Aiken

Katy Moran explores Joan Aiken's disturbing yet entrancing classic

A grand house, a pack of hungry wolves and two brave and resourceful girls – this is the opening to one of the most magnificent children’s books ever written: a tapestry of skulduggery and deception, petty forgery and outrageous bravery, woven together with shining golden threads of thought-provoking fantasy. It’s also a tale of innocence and experience that William Blake would have been proud of.

Within seconds of the first meeting between Bonnie Green and her terrifying new governess, it is clear that Miss Slighcarp intends to rule Willoughby Chase with an iron rod. Bonnie’s days of ice-skating in the frozen park and bouncing on the window-seat cushions in a cosy, firelit nursery are unmistakeably numbered. It is no surprise, then, that Bonnie dreads the moment her parents will leave home to embark on their ocean voyage, but she must take comfort in the hope that a friendlier climate might improve her mama’s health, and in the knowledge that soon her cousin will soon arrive from London to keep her company. 

Miss Slighcarp

Ensconced in the chilly carriage of a train hurtling north, ever closer to Willoughby Chase, Sylvia Green has problems of her own as – horror of horrors ­– she is joined in the carriage by a fellow passenger, the alarmingly genial and kind Mr Grimshaw. His very presence means that genteel Sylvia cannot even nibble one of the hard, tiny bread rolls her dear Aunt Jane packed for the journey, and propriety certainly forbids accepting one of the oozing violet cream pastries Mr Grimshaw is so eager to press upon her. But outside the train carriage a fiercer danger stalks the snow and ice, for the wolves are baying with hunger and desperate enough to attack, and it quickly becomes clear that Mr Grimshaw is not quite what he seems. Joan Aiken is tremendously skilled at pinpointing the very real fears of children: Sylvia’s anguish at having to share her train carriage with a jovial and chatty stranger struck a deep chord with me when I was a child, and was a more frightening notion than Miss Slighcarp and the wolves combined. Mr Grimshaw’s dripping, sugary cakes were especially disturbing – so tempting, and yet every child knows never to accept food from strangers. Oddly, I didn’t find the wolves attacking the carriage scary at all.

The wolf attacks

The Wolves of Willoughby Chase is not only a classic, it represents a new beginning, and I think it may contain one of the first examples of steampunk in children’s literature. I first discovered the novel when I was about ten or eleven years old, but I had no idea that I was encountering the first flowering of a genre that was to rule children’s fiction in later years. I do remember being fascinated by a matter-of-fact foreword explaining that the action takes place in a Jacobean period of history that “never happened”, with a fictional King James III on the throne, and a newly opened Channel Tunnel the unintended conduit of hungry wolf-packs from mainland Europe. The real Channel Tunnel was still under construction when I first read the novel, and I still remember trying to picture what it would be like filled with horses and carriages. In fact, one of the first things I loved about The Wolves of Willoughy Chase is the way Joan Aiken renders the real world just a little bit strange and unusual. The grandeur and opulence of Bonnie’s home is already an exciting contrast to the genteel poverty of the life Sylvia has just left behind, as well as the more humdrum world of most children reading the book, but of course it doesn’t end there. There are wolves. This just doesn’t feel like fantasy of the same ilk as the wonderful novels by Tamora Pierce that I gobbled each week at the library, because of course it’s not. In truth, Aiken’s flights of fantasy are perhaps more strictly magic realism – they are always used to make a point, to escalate a moment of fear. The wolves of Willoughby Chase come to embody the danger gathering around Bonnie and Sylvia as Miss Slighcarp destroys their world piecemeal – it’s as if the wolves and the steampunk Channel Tunnel that allow them to exist in the novel actually represent the girls’ loss of innocence, and perhaps also a loss of innocence on a wider, social level as the action moves from the rural grandeur of Willoughby Chase to the harsh, dark world of industrial Blastburn.

Joan Aiken’s use of fantasy and steampunk is a lesson in kind for any author – she uses these elements with such obvious pleasure, but the wolves and the other touches of fantasy don’t exist purely for their own sake – they lend wings to the story as a whole, intensifying emotion and crystallising moments of tension with the kind of authorial magic that is utterly compelling, and which only emerges once or twice in a generation. I’m delighted to have made the discovery that The Wolves of Willoughby Chase was just the first in an entire series. I only wish I had known the rest of the books as a child – still trailing clouds of glory, as William Wordsworth might have said, more or less, anyway. It really is no exaggeration to say that I would give this book to any child. 

Katy Moran  is the author of several YA historical fantasies including Bloodline and Bloodline Rising , set in Britain and Constantinople in the Dark Ages, and Spirit Hunter, a tale of danger and forbidden love along the ancient and mysterious Silk Road.  Katy has also published Dangerous To Know, a modern love story for the festival-going generation. Her latest YA novel Hidden Among Us (Walker 2013) is a compelling faerie fantasy set in contemporary Britain, and I can highly recommend it.

Picture credits: cover and artwork from 'The Wolves of Willoughby Chase', copyright Pat Marriot 1962.

 

Magical Classics: "The Three Royal Monkeys" by Walter de la Mare

As far as I'm aware, this is Walter de la Mare’s only full length book for children.  Published in 1910, its original title ‘The Three Mullar-Mulgars’ was - presumably - so unhelpfully baffling even by early twentieth century standards, that by the time I read it in the 1960’s, it had been given a new and more explanatory title.  Even so, I think it’s not particularly well known.  Which is a pity.  As a child I was entranced by it , and I still think it’s wonderful.

To explain the impression it made on me, here is a bit of personal history.  I began seriously writing stories when I was ten. I’d read all the Seven Chronicles of Narnia, and I knew there wouldn't be an eighth.  (‘The Last Battle’ was such a betrayal.  The end of Narnia?  Noooooooooo!  And I wasn’t fooled by all that ‘heaven is Narnia, but better’ stuff, either.  There was no better place than Narnia.)

So my first 'book' was called ‘Tales of Narnia’: fan-fic before the term was invented.  My second – a full-length effort – was an historical novel which owed something to those of Mary Renault.  Then, from age 13 to 15 or so, I wrote another ‘book’ of short stories which I called ‘Mixed Magic’ (it really was mixed; some quite good, some terrible), derived mainly from two more beloved writers, E. Nesbit and Elizabeth Goudge.  Round about age 15 to16 my fourth m/s was heavily influenced by early Alan Garner (children encounter mysterious stranger in dripping English woods, pursued by minions of the triple Moon Goddess; standing stones and indifferent golden-faced elves figure largely…) – but my fifth, written in my late teens and early twenties, by which time I was beginning to find my own voice, owes a great deal to the enchantment I found in de la Mare’s ‘The Three Royal Monkeys’.  I called it 'The Magic Forest' (and went on to write a sixth full-length m/s, also unpublished, before eventually getting myself into print with ‘Troll Fell.  And I enjoyed every minute of all of it.)

The Portingal in his hut

The quality I found in ‘The Three Royal Monkeys’ which I was trying to reproduce in my fifth opus, was a rich, exotic beauty, tinged with pathos and melancholy, relieved by sure touches of comedy.  This is how it opens:

On the borders of the Forest of Munza-Mulgar lived once an old grey Fruit Monkey of the name of Mutta-Matutta.  She had three sons, the eldest Thumma, the next Thimbulla, and the youngest, who was a Nizza-neela, Ummanodda.  And they called each other for short, Thumb, Thimble and Nod.  The rickety, tumble-down old wooden hut in which they lived had been built 319 Munza years before by a traveller, a Portugall or Portingal, lost in the forest 22,997 leagues from home.

After the Portingal dies, a Mulgar or monkey comes to live in the hut, where he finds:

... all manner of strange and precious stuff half buried – pots for Subbub; pestles and basins for Manaka-cake, etc.; three bags of great beads, clear, blue and emerald; a rusty musket; nine ephelantoes’ tusks; a bag of Margarita stones; and many other thing, besides cloth and spider-silk and dried-up fruits and fishes.  He made his dwelling there and died there.  This Mulgar, Zebbah, was Mutta-Matutta’s great-great-great grandfather.  Dead and gone were all.

But one day a royal traveller arrives, Seelem, ‘own brother to Assasimmon, Prince of the Valley of Tishnar’, accompanied by his servant.  Seelem becomes Mutta-Matutta’s husband, but after thirteen years he leaves her, returning to his heritage in the beautiful valleys of Tishnar. Seven years later, on her deathbed, she urges her sons to follow their father.

It was hot and gloomy in the tangled little hut, lit only by the violet of the dying afterglow. And when she had rested a little while to recover her breath she told them … they were, as best they could, bravely to follow after him. In time they would perhaps reach the Valleys of Tishnar, and their uncle, Prince Assasimmon, would welcome them.

“His country lies beyond and beyond,” she said, “forest and river, forest, swamp and river, the mountains of Arrakkaboa – leagues, leagues away.”  And as she paused, a feeble wind sighed through the open window, stirring the dangling bones of the Portingal, so that with their faint clicking, they too, seemed to echo, “leagues, leagues away.”

The rest of the book follows the brothers’ difficult and magical journey.  Nod, the youngest, is ‘a Nizza-Neela, and has magic in him’; and he is the possessor of the marvellous Wonder-Stone, which if rubbed when they are in great danger, will bring the aid of Tishnar to them. 

Nod and the Wonder-Stone

And who is Tishnar?  There are many mysteries in this book, and she is one of them, with a whole chapter at the end dedicated to her.  She is ‘the Beautiful One of the Mountains’; ‘wind and stars, the sea and the endless unknown’.  She it is who instils in the heart a sense of longing; she brings peace and dreams and maybe, in her shadow form, death.

At any rate, the brothers’ journey is precipitated when Nod accidentally sets fire to the hut. In the fairytale tradition of the foolish yet wise younger brother, he makes many mistakes, but he is also the one who saves his brothers from the many predicaments they find themselves in, as they trek through the deep moonlit snow of the winter forest – escaping the flesh-eating Minnimuls, tricking the terrifying hunting-cat Immanâla, riding striped Zevveras, the Little Horses of Tishnar, finding friends and losing one another, quarrelling and making up.

It’s a deeply serious quest, an epic journey with no hint of tongue in cheek despite the fact that the protagonists are monkeys.  Delicately, de la Mare explores the transience of beauty, the poignancy of loss, the immanence of death: and his characters blaze all the more brightly in their course across the impermanent world. There’s a lovely chapter in which Nod meets, and loses his heart to a beautiful Water Midden (water maiden) to whom he entrusts his Wonder-Stone.  Here is the song he overhears her singing ‘in the dark green dusk’ beside a waterfall:

Bubble, Bubble,

Swim to see

Oh, how beautiful

I be,

Fishes, fishes,

Finned and fine,

What’s your gold

Compared with mine?

Why, then, has

Wise Tishnar made

One so lovely,

One so sad?

Lone am I,

And can but make

A little song,

For singing’s sake.

If you haven’t read this book before, and if you’re looking for something at least as good as The Hobbit, this is for you.

Tishnar

 Picture credits: all illustrations by Mildred E Eldridge for 'The Three Royal Monkeys'

Magical Classics: SHE, by H Rider Haggard

 Katherine Roberts on the eternal fascination of She

I first read this book when I was about 10 or 11, after discovering it on my mum’s secret bookshelf. I’d outgrown pony stories and wanted something a bit more exciting. I was halfway through the story by the time Mum found out I had the book, by which time she was too late to stop me from reading the rest… I was too wrapped up in the fascinating tale of “She Who Must Be Obeyed” and had fallen in love with H Rider Haggard’s rather-too-old-for-me but still heart-throbbingly handsome hero Leo, believed by She to be the reincarnation of her long dead ancient Egyptian lover.

“It’s a bit of a horror story,” warned my mum. “But a good adventure, I suppose.”

I’d already worked that out for myself! The golden Leo and his Uncle Holly, accompanied by their faithful manservant Job, had already left boring old England for Africa, where they had been shipwrecked, shot big game (the story was first published in 1887, when these things were less politically incorrect), been kidnapped by the People Who Place Pots on the Heads of Strangers, and taken to the lost land of Kôr, where they meet the enigmatically veiled Queen Ayesha, known to the local tribes only as “She Who Must Be Obeyed”. Along the way, our hero Leo nearly drowns, is rescued from the jaws of a giant crocodile, gets eaten alive by mosquitoes, is wounded in a fight, and gains a tribal wife called Ustane… and that’s only a quarter of the way through the story!

The early chapters back in England promised even greater magic, according to a script translated from a shard of an ancient Greek vase:

“Then She did take us, and lead us by terrible ways, by means of dark magic, to where a great pit is, and showed to us the rolling Pillar of Life that dies not… and there did She stand in the flames and come forth unharmed, and yet more beautiful.”

And also it seems, immortal, although her attempt to persuade her beloved Kallikrates to join her in the fire fails, since he is in love with another woman. So Ayesha kills him in a fit of passion, after which she is doomed to live alone for two thousand years until she finds his reincarnation in the flesh… none other than our young hero, Leo!

How could I not read on?

Ayesha keeps herself veiled because she fears the effect her beauty might have on the mortal men she rules. She unveils only in private, when she curses the mortal woman who doomed her to two thousand years of loneliness:

“Curse her, daughter of the Nile, because of her beauty…

Curse her, because her magic has prevailed against mine…

Curse her, because she held my beloved from me…”

This turns her into a proper storybook villainess, which she soon demonstrates by sentencing the People Who Place Pots on the Heads of Strangers to death for attempting to cook and eat Leo and his friends, instead of bringing them safely to her as she ordered. She also punishes Ustane when the girl tries to nurse Leo after he falls sick, at first merely scaring the girl by turning her hair white, but eventually seeing her as a dangerous rival for his love. Poor Ustane cannot fight Ayesha’s magic and is eventually killed by her in fit of temper. (I cried at that part, and kept expecting Ustane to come back to life at some point, but of course this is an adult story so she didn’t – though I later wrote my own happy ending, where Ustane gets to crawl into the Pillars of Life and comes back to fall into Leo’s arms!)

Freed from Ustane’s love, Leo is at the mercy of Ayesha, until the final test when she asks him to step into the fire and join her in immortality. Leo hesitates, and so Ayesha (thinking to reassure him the flames will not harm him) steps into the fire for the second time… with horrific results.

The spectacle of the fabulously beautiful queen turning into an ancient crone in the space of a few heartbeats must be the “horror” my mum referred to – as a girl, I shuddered a bit, but did not really have much sympathy for the cruel Ayesha, who had killed the innocent Ustane. Now I can see more clearly the tragedy of the ancient queen’s long, loveless life, and her desire to hold on to her power to the bitter end.

As they journey to the secret cavern that contains the Pillars of Life, she explains her plan to accompany Holly and Leo back to England and rule there, brushing aside their objections that England already has a Queen and its own laws that do not include placing pots on the heads of strangers and eating them:

“The Law! Canst thou not understand, O Holly, that I am above the law? Does the wind bend to the mountain, or the mountain to the wind?”

But like many powerful rulers, she takes this a step too far and compares herself to the goddess of Kor, called Truth:

“There is no man born of woman who may draw my veil and live… By Death only can thy veil be drawn, O Truth!”

The truth in Ayesha’s case is a harsh one, as her words turn out to be prophetic. So the villainess expires in her own fire, and the hero survives to fight another day. And, like all the best horror stories, with her last breath Ayesha promises to come again, leaving the way open for the sequels “The Return of She” and “She and Allan”.

SHE, besides being a bit of a horror story and a good adventure, is packed full of deeper meanings that can be found in all the best fantasy. Aged 11, many of them passed over my head – I particularly remember skipping some of the early chapters, when the men are discussing the origins of the clues that send them on their quest, impatient to get on with the adventure! But I’m pretty sure they lodged somewhere in my subconscious, to emerge many years later in my own stories in the form of quests for immortality, such as Alexander the Great’s journey to the edge of the known world in search of the water of life to save his horse, and Rhianna’s quest to bring her father King Arthur back from the dead with the legendary Grail of Stars. Maybe proving that the most powerful themes live on in fantasy fiction for all ages, which makes our genre a lot more adult than many non-fantasy readers believe it to be.

Many thanks to Katherine Langrish for inspiring me to revisit this great story! If you haven’t read any of H Rider Haggard’s work yet, then it’s well worth seeking out SHE as a starting point. And if you’re already a fan, the H Rider Haggard omnibus edition containing all of his 60 novels and short stories is now available as an ebook… one of the first downloads on my Kindle!

***

Katherine Roberts gained a first class degree in mathematics from Bath University, and went on to work as a mathematician, computer programmer, racehorse groom and farm labourer - before her first novel, ‘Song Quest’, won the Branford Boase Award in 1999.  Since then, she has written many works of fantasy and historical fantasy for young readers.  'Grail of Stars', the fourth book of The Pendragon Legacy, a series about Rhianna Pendragon, King Arthur's daughter, will be published by Templar, October 2013. Find out more at Katherine's website, www.katherineroberts.co.uk , visit her blog http://reclusivemuse.blogspot.com

or follow her on Twitter: @AuthorKatherine

Picture credits: All artwork by Michael Embden, from the 1981 edition of “She” published by Dragon’s Dream.  Michael Embden's website is  http://www.michaelembden.com

Magical Classics: 'The Nightingale and the Rose' by Oscar Wilde

'The Nightingale and the Rose' by PJ Lynch

Mary Hoffman writes about a poignant tale of love and sacrifice:

My copy of The Works of Oscar Wilde (Collins 1948, 1960 edition) has my name and “Newnham” written on the flyleaf so I must have had it at university. But we never studied Wilde on my Eng. Lit. course and I know I fell in love with him while still at school so I think I think I had it then and must have put my stamp on it when I left home.

It would have been typical of me to pack my Oscar Wilde when heading off for the adventure of university because it had by then become a bit of a comfort blanket, the one book I would have saved in a fire. The plays, including Salome, for which Aubrey Beardsley did those splendid illustrations, The Picture of Dorian Grey, the fabulous Portrait of Mr W. H. and above all the Fairy Tales, were my absolute ideal of what writing should be.

Everyone knows The Happy Prince and The Selfish Giant, many have heard of The Canterville Ghost and Lord Savile’s Crime but I have never seen anything written about The Nightingale and the Rose.

It’s a short story – no more than four and a half pages in my Complete Works – and takes the form of a parable:

A Student is madly in love with the daughter of a professor, who has agreed to dance with him at the Prince’s Ball if he brings her a red rose. But all the roses in the Student’s garden are white or yellow; the only red rose is frostbitten and will bear no flowers that summer.. The Nightingale overhears the Student’s plaint.

“Here at last is a true lover,” said the Nightingale. “Night after night have I sung of him, though I knew him not: night after night have I told his story to the stars and now I see him. His hair is dark as the hyacinth-blossom, and his lips are as red as the rose of his desire; but passion has made his face like pale ivory, and sorrow has set her seal upon his brow.”

The bird decides to help him and, after seeking easier ways, chooses the bitter path of sacrifice.  The red rose tree tells her that she must construct a blossom out of her music by moonlight, through singing with her breast against a thorn. The thorn will pierce her heart and her life’s blood flow into the rose-tree and produce one perfect flower.

“Death is a great price to pay for a red rose,” cried the Nightingale, “and Life is very dear to all .....Yet Love is better than Life, and what is the heart of a bird compared to the heart of a man?”

The Student can’t understand the Nightingale’s passionate song in which she tells him he will have his rose; he makes notes on her music – “ she is like most artists; she is all style without any sincerity. She would not sacrifice herself for others.”

But of course that’s just what she does, singing all night of love with the thorn against her breast. A pure white rose springs from the frozen tree and the Nightingale sings on in her agony until the thorn pierces her heart and the perfect flower is stained crimson.

At noon (realistic detail) the Student looks out of his window and sees the red rose, thanking his good luck, while the Nightingale’s body lies cold in the long grass, the thorn still in her heart. He plucks the rose, runs to the Professor’s house and proffers it to the beautiful daughter, claiming his dance.

But the girl frowned. “O am afraid it will not go with my dress,” she answered; “and, besides, the Chamberlain’s nephew has sent me some real jewels, and everybody knows that jewels cost far more than flowers.”

 The Student throws the rejected rose into the street, where it falls into the gutter and it run over by a cartwheel.

“What a silly thing Love is!” is the Student’s conclusion and he resolves to study Philosophy and Metaphysics instead, taking down a dusty book.

Why did this tragic story mean so much to a teenage girl? The unrequited love theme (both Student and Nightingale) was bound to appeal and now that I look back on it, the failure to recognise or appreciate the sacrifice made is the same as in my other favourite Fairy Tale: Hans Andersen’s The Little Mermaid.

The Student is just as unknowing and ungrateful as the Prince. But at least the mermaid gets to live on in the foam of the sea while the small brown bird with the glorious voice rots unseen in the long grass. It broke my heart and it breaks it all over again to read it for this blog post.

Maybe I thought that was what love would be like? That it always involved pain and the willing giving up of the self for the beloved? After all this time, who knows? The writing style is over-flowery in places; Oscar loved his pomegranates and rubies throughout his life. And there is no place here for the dry humour of there being no cucumbers available in the market, “not even for ready money.”

But as a teenager who had already experienced the pangs of many “crushes,” I preferred the sensuous and tragic to the warm and funny.

And now I think it was prophetic, part of Oscar’s own self-destructive streak that brought about his downfall. (He didn’t have to prosecute the Marquess of Queensberry (see below) and his friends begged him not to, knowing the risk of Oscar’s – at that time illegal – homosexual practices being exposed).

Oscar’s years picking hemp in jail were the sacrifice he made for Bosie, who, although he lived with his older lover in France in the latter part of 1897, later repudiated him and married an heiress. Maybe Constance, Oscar’s wife, too would have seen herself in the role of Nightingale with Oscar as Student and Bosie as the Professor’s daughter.

I’m glad to say it wasn’t prophetic of my own later life: no trampled roses there. But it still speaks to me with an incredible poignancy and I wouldn’t swap it for any more robust story with a happy ending.


Oscar Fingall O’Flahertie Wills Wilde was born in Dublin in 1856. His father was a surgeon and his mother, “Speranza,” a hostess both Society and Political. After studying at Trinity College, Dublin, Oscar won a scholarship to Magdalen, Oxford, where he took Firsts in Mods and Humanities and won the Newdigate Prize for his poem, Ravenna.

Although an avowed Aesthete at Oxford, he was of powerful build with hands like hams. So when some Hearties decided to dunk him in the Cherwell as a punishment for effeminacy, they came off rather worse. In 1884 he married Constance Lloyd, who bore him two sons. In 1888, he published The Happy Prince and Other Tales. The last decade of the 19th century was enormously productive for him: his only novel, The Picture of Dorian Grey (1890); Lady Windermere’s Fan (1892); An Ideal Husband and The Importance of Being Earnest (1895).

1895 also saw his imprisonment with hard labour for two years for the crime of gross indecency, resulting from his unwise decision to prosecute the Marquess of Queensberry for libel, the Marquess being the father of Oscar’s lover Lord Alfred Douglas (“Bosie”). In prison Oscar wrote the Ballad of Reading Gaol (1898) and De Profundis, published posthumously. Oscar Wilde died, a broken man, in 1900.

Mary Hoffman is the author of numerous books including the best-selling picturebook Amazing Grace (1991) , and the well known ‘Stravaganza’ series for young adults, beginning with ‘City of Masks’, Bloomsbury 2002, which are set partly in our modern world and partly in an alternate universe’s 16th century Italy.  She has also written YA historical fiction like the highly acclaimed ‘Troubadour’.  Her website is http://www.maryhoffman.co.uk/, her personal blog is The Book Maven and she is the founder of the collective blog The History Girls

 

Picture credits:
'The Nightingale and the Rose', copyright PJ Lynch, is shown here by kind permission of the artist. More of his lovely work can be seen at pjlynchgallery.blogspot.co.uk
'Single red rose' by Kate Greenaway, at Wikimedia Commons