A few years ago when I was living in upstate New York I joined Literacy Volunteers of America and began teaching basic reading, writing and arithmetic to a lady in her middle fifties whom I’ll call Jean - not her real name. She was a brilliant pupil, endlessly fascinated by learning. “Gee Katherine, the things you tell me are so inneresting," she’d exclaim, after I’d explained something like the concept of the plural - or the idea that you could make a drawing of the neighbourhood into a flat plan called a map.
In my diary I wrote:
Jean gave me a huge hug as soon as we met. She never went to school beyond kindergarten. She's pale, her grey hair strained back in a ponytail. Several of her lower teeth are missing so she lisps a little as she speaks. Her nails are bitten down and she smells of cigarette smoke - even her work smells of this. She wears a dainty set of earrings though, and always looks neat. Indeed her work is neat - she writes in pencil and hastily rubs out and corrects any letter she judges to be too far above the line.
I ask, “How come you never went to school, Jean?” She answers in her rather gruff voice, “Well, when I wuz seven I got polio ‘n they put me in a Home. I would’n’ want ta tell you ‘bout that, Katherine. They beat up on us, hit us over the head - we didn’ learn nuthin.”
She cleans somewhere. Lives with her friend Joe since his sister died. She obviously adores him. He’s older than her, a veteran in his seventies, who told her she needed to learn to do things by herself (because he’s dying of lung cancer). He fell down a while ago, slid across a floor, hit his head against a door.
“He got a big goose bump,” recalls Jean, “’n I said to him, ‘Well I can do that for you, I can hit you over the head with a frying pan.' He says, ‘Thanks Jeanie.’ 'N he asked the landlord, he says for him to put soft doors in. He always makes a joke of it. He says, ‘Well I don’t want to go round thinkin’ ‘bout dyin’ (she pulls her chin down) ‘with a face like a cow that hasn’t been milked.’”
Jean’s reading level was very basic, around that of a child of six. She could spell out words slowly, but might miss the point of a sentence because by the time she got to the end of it she’d forgotten how it began. Her understanding of anything she read was therefore poor, and I began buying her simple early reader books with pictures, especially if they had anything to do with American history, which she was eager to learn about. And pretty soon I also realised she loved dogs. The story of Balto, the sled dog who helped bring vital medical supplies to Nome, Alaska, was a big hit with her, therefore - and probably her favourite until I found another dog story: this time about Buddy, the first American ‘Seeing Eye’ dog.
Buddy, the First Seeing Eye Dog by Eva Moore and Don Bolognese
To see Jean take this little book to her heart was to see the power of story turned up high. C.S. Lewis once provocatively argued (in 'An Experiment in Criticism') that since all criticism is subjective, the only criterion for telling if a book was 'good' should be the way in which it is read. If even a single person would read and re-read a book, 'and notice and complain' if anything was changed, then we should assume that book has a richness of quality for them even if we can't ourselves detect it, and should hesitate to dismiss it.
On that level this short book was a masterpiece. For me it was a nice little story about a man and his dog. For Jean it was something deeply, deeply moving. She read it so often she could quote whole sentences by heart. The best bit was in the middle. Buddy’s blind owner is travelling to Europe on an ocean liner, and he’s lying in his cabin unaware of the fact that he’s dropped his wallet somewhere on the deck, when his dog Buddy comes up and nudges him, the wallet in his mouth. The owner rubs the dog’s head and praises him. “Buddy,” he says, “You’re worth more to me than all the money in the world.”
Jean would read this aloud and her eyes would brim with tears. Her voice would shake. “You’re worth more to me than any money in the world, Buddy.” Jean knew the value of money. She didn’t have much of it. But she knew love was worth so much more.
Took Jean to lunch the other day. We each had a gyro at the Ice Cream Works on Market Street - she’d never had one before but thought it delicious. (Typical Jean to be bold and try something new!) I asked how Joe was; he won’t have treatment for his cancer because he ‘doesn’t want to be a guinea pig’, and looks terribly thin and keeps falling. What a charmer he is, though so ill. He told me he used to work for the Mafia - he means this - said one of the guys who lived on the hill offered him several thousand dollars to kill ‘his old man’ but Joe refused… And now he’s a frail old man with a puckish sense of humour. He and Jean score off each other all the time. She thinks the world of him. At the moment she’s paying off $40 on a pewter clock shaped like a merry-go-round horse, which she’ll give to Joe as a late birthday present once she’s paid it all (at $5 a week). My hope is that he lives to receive it. “He’s worth it,” she says.
Well, Joe died, and luckily the town found somewhere for Jean to live, and I left America for England. It was a wrench to say goodbye. Here’s one of her letters to me, written in her careful curling pencil script which I know will have taken her ages to write:
Dear Katherine,
I am writing you this letter to you to say hi. How are you and your family are doing. I am doing good. I miss you and your family. Merry Christmas happy new years. ...I wish I can see you. I have been learning on spelling words and math and reading and writing. I have been working on crafts. I have been learning a lots of different things. I learn on my budget all my friends said to me how I come along way. They are glad I came along way. They told me to keep up and don’t give up. I told them I wont give up I will keep on going. I am going to keep on doing good for myself. I am going to make myself happy. …What happens to your first dog you had she was a sweet dog. I did like her so much. She was a sweet dog. I am learning on the computer I learn a lot on it.
turnover
… I got new curtains in my front room. They are blue goes with my furniture. I got to go for now.
Like the smell of woodsmoke – which always takes me back to a narrow sun-striped Majorcan street lined with tall houses, silent in the afternoon heat, on a long-ago holiday when I was eight years old – certain books take me back to the particular place and time when I first read them.
“The Voyage of the Dawn Treader”, for example. Here I am, about nine years old, curled up in a big bristly armchair which prickles my bare legs, reading and reading. I’m alone in the house because my younger brother’s in hospital with peritonitis and my parents are visiting him. (He swallowed a small cocktail sausage at a children’s party, and amazingly the cocktail stick went down too. He’ll come out of hospital in a week or so with a three inch scar – this was before the days of keyhole surgery.) Unaware of the danger he’s in, I am mildly bemused by the fuss and bother I sense in the house. My parents have bought me the ‘Dawn Treader’ paperback, the last of the Narnia books I haven’t read – I came to them out of sequence – to keep me quiet and console me for being left alone while they go visiting the hospital. Anyway, their ruse is working. I’m away on those brilliant seas, looking down through clear water at the purple-and-ivory-skinned sea people, shivering with pleasurable terror at the nightmarish island where dreams come true (“Dreams, do you understand? Not daydreams: dreams!”), tiptoeing with Lucy along the sunlit empty corridors of the magician’s house.
We had a lot of books at home and I was allowed to read more or less whatever I liked. I loved Shakespeare, I loved “Jane Eyre” (Oh, poor Jane, locked in the Red Room by horrid Mrs Reed!) Now I’m ten years old, I’ve just finished “Oliver Twist”, and I’m cowering in bed with the lights out, terrified by Bill Sykes’ vision of dead Nancy’s eyes. I expect to see them, eyes floating in the darkness, coming in from the landing through my half-open door, hovering over my pillow.
“The Hobbit”. I’m in bed with a sore throat: my mother works on the principle that if you’re too sick to go to school, you’re too sick to come downstairs. But I don’t mind: I can sit in bed reading library books, sucking blackcurrant throat pastilles and waiting for my mother to bring me dinner on a tray. I’m not reading “The Hobbit” because I like it; I’m reading it because I’ve run out of Enid Blytons, and I’m a child who will read the labels on sauce bottles if there’s nothing better to hand. I’ve just got to the chapter called ‘Riddles in the Dark’, where Bilbo the hobbit meets Gollum. And my dinner arrives: a plate of mutton, greens, mashed potato and a dark lake of gravy. I picture Gollum, pale as mashed potato, splashing in his dark underground lake. I am put off both my food and the book, and I’ve never really got around to liking “The Hobbit” since.
“The Tale of Mr Tod”. This takes me back a lot further. I’m six years old, sitting on a hard-wearing blue hall carpet, leaning against a polished cedarwood chest which my father brought back from Burma before I was born. Sunlight slants across the hall. My two dolls, the one with curly fair hair, the one with long brown hair, and my panda bear are lined up on the floor beside me. I am teaching school, and reading aloud to them this most exciting story, full of natural violence and terror. The bones outside the fox’s den. The baby rabbits, alive in the oven. The tension as Peter and Benjamin dig their way under the floor. The tremendous fight between Mr Tod and Tommy Brock the tramp-like badger who has gone to sleep in Mr Tod’s own bed – with his boots on! The Heath Robinson device by which Mr Tod tries to scare Mr Brock by dropping a flatiron on him – and then thinks he has killed him stone dead. The pictures; above all, the pictures: rusty reds and bracken browns and fern greens! I don’t know if my dolls are impressed, but I am thrilled. I relish the strength and darkness of the story.
“Jill’s Gymkhana” by Ruby Ferguson. (Remember those Green Knight books? And there were age-banded Red Knight and Black Knight books too, I seem to recall.) I’m twelve years old, pony mad, but also - unfortunately - terrified of riding. I go once a fortnight to a riding stables near Gloucester, and am white and sick with fear beforehand. Afterwards though, I come back home, curl up on my bed and read blissfully about girls who own their own ponies, who arrange shows and gymkhanas, who win rosettes…
Many of my most vivid experiences of reading are from childhood. And for me, that's what reading's all about: rapture, terror, immersion in another world. I'd love to think my own stories may sometimes lend a child the same quality of experience.
The traditional Old Irish voyage tales known as immrama mostly tell of voyages towards the west, the traditional (European) direction for the Otherworld, where the sun sets into the sea. The immrama hark back to older pre-Christian Celtic voyage tales: but the briefest of readings will show that the stories of Bran or Maeldune are simple entertainment compared with the difficult and cryptic Welsh poem, ‘The Spoils of Annwfn’.
It's hard to disentangle cause and effect, belief and tradition. Why was it the practice of many an early Celtic monk to set sail for a remote island on which to live and meditate – like Saint Cuthbert on Inner Farne, who was observed by the community on Lindisfarne to pray all night standing in the sea? Was it only for the solitude and sense of being cut off from the world, or was there a half-hidden memory or tradition that the voyage itself was a holy act which would bring the traveller at last to set bodily foot upon the shore of another world? Alongside the fame of their monasteries, is there a second reason why Lindisfarne off the east coast of Britain, and Iona off the west, are both named ‘Holy Island’?
We’ll never know, any more than we’ll ever be able to answer the question I asked at the beginning of this series on Mystical Voyages, if prehistoric peoples who set out under sail or oar in the earliest times and colonised previously uninhabited lands all over the globe, may have done so partly out of a belief that they were voyaging to the land of spirits, gods, and their ancestors, the blessed dead.
‘... do you think,’ says Lucy in ‘The Voyage of the Dawn Treader’, ‘Aslan’s country would be that sort of country – I mean, the sort you could ever sail to?’
Well, who knew? There was only one way to find out.
This Irish in particular, stationed as they are on the western verge of Northern Europe, were in a particularly good position to ask themselves the question, ‘What might be out there?’ One of the earliest parts of the British Isles to become Christian, Ireland was sending out missionaries to England and the continent by the 6th century AD: which is also the era of Saint Brendan.
Brendan, whose voyages are recorded in many manuscripts, sets off into the Atlantic Ocean in search of Paradise, the Land of the Blessed, after dreaming of ‘a beautiful island with angels serving upon it’. Later, hearing the account of a fellow monk, Mernoke, who claimed to have sailed to the Earthly Paradise, Brendan puts out in a curragh – a hide boat – with twelve companions in search of this country. He spends years wandering the Atlantic between island and island: the island of the ‘Comely Hound’ (a dog which leads them to a hall with a table spread with food); the Island of Sheep, ‘every sheep the size of an ox’; ‘The Paradise of Birds’, on which the angels who fell with Lucifer, but whose fault was small, live in the form of small birds all rejoicing and singing the matins and the verses of the psalms…
And I particularly like the amiable sea monster, ‘Jasconye the Fish’, whom the monks mistake for an island and who – after a startled first occasion when he swims off, bearing the fire the monks have lighted upon him still on his back – allows Brendan and his companions to celebrate Easter upon his back as an annual occurrence. Brendan seems to know all about this beast, explaining to his companions that Jasconye is for ever vainly trying to swallow his own tail. Is this an echo of the Northern Midgard Serpent, or simply a bit of early medieval natural science? Here he is anyway, on a map of 1621, obligingly stretched out between the east coast of Africa and 'the Fortunate Isles', with 'St Brendan's Isle' to the north.
There’s a clear sea like Maeldune’s, full of fishes which come to hear Mass:
So clear that they could see to the bottom, and it was all covered with a great heap of fishes. …And the fishes awoke and started up and came all around the ship in a heap, that they could hardly see the water for fishes. But when the mass was ended each one of them turned himself and swam away, and they saw them no more.
It’s lovely, I think, that all nature is included in this Celtic Christianity.
Like Maeldune and his friends, Brendan and his companions also venture close to what seems suspiciously like an erupting volcano:
There came a south wind that drove them on… and at the end of eight days they saw far away in the north a dark country full of stench and of smoke; and as the ship drew near it they heard great blowing and blasting of bellows, and a noise of blows and a noise like thunder, the way they were all afeared and blessed themselves. …And with that there came demons thick about them on every side, with tongs and with fiery hammers, and followed after them till it seemed all the sea to be one fire… and they saw a hill all on fire and like as if walled in with fire, and clouds upon it…
This has to be Iceland, surely? To Brendan of course, it’s the borders of hell, and therefore hardly surprising that their next encounter is with poor Judas Iscariot, marooned on a rock.
In the end, after forty days more sailing, and showers of hail, and fog, Brendan and his companions do reach the Land of Promise, the Blessed Land. Oddly enough, although they should be sailing west, the land they see is to the east. (Perhaps this is because east is the direction of Jerusalem: the Earthly Paradise is always located to the east in later medieval maps.) It is:
...clear and lightsome, and the trees full of fruit on every bough… and the air neither hot nor cold but always one way, and the delight that they found there could never be told. Then they came to a river that they could not cross but they could see beyond it the country that had no bounds to its beauty. Then there came to them a young man… and took [Brendan] by the hand and said to him…
‘Here is the country you have been in search of, but it is our Lord’s will you should go back again and make no delay… And this river you see here is the mering,’ he said, ‘that divides the worlds, for no man may come to the other side of it while he is in life; [and when he dies] it is then there will be leave to see this country towards the world’s end.’
Praising God and laden with fruit of the country, and precious, stones, Brendan returns to Ireland and dies, his whole mind set on the heaven he has already seen.
The Irish hero Bran’s Mystical Voyage begins when, after being lulled to sleep by the magical music of a silver branch with white apple-blossoms, he meets a woman who invites him to seek the wonders of the Emain Ablach or ‘Isle of Women’, where there is peace and plenty and no one is ever sick or dies. Bran sets out after her with twenty-seven companions and three curraghs – nine men in each boat. After sailing for two days he is encouraged by meeting Mannanan Mac Lir, god of the sea, driving his golden chariot over the sea, who tells Bran he should reach the Isle of Women by sunset. First however they come across an island on which everyone is laughing, and when Bran sends one of his men to investigate, he begins laughing too, and will not return to the boats. (Is this reminiscent of the Odyssey's Land of the Lotus Eaters?) They are forced to leave him there, and sail away.
Arriving at the Isle of Women, Bran’s boat is drawn into port by a ball of magical thread which the queen tosses to him. Each of the men is paired with a beautiful woman, Bran sharing the bed of the queen, and they remain there happily, unaware of how much time is passing in the real world, until Nechtan son of Collbran becomes homesick and Bran decides to return home. The queen warns against it, and especially against setting foot on land, but Bran insists – but when they sight Ireland, so many years have passed that Bran’s name is only an ancient legend, and when Nechtan leaps out of the curragh, he crumbles to dust. (Just the same fate befalls one of Oisin's companions in the legend of Oisin and the fairy woman Niamh.) At the sight, Bran and his companions sail away, never to be seen in Ireland again.
The hero Maeldune also discovers these same two islands which Bran found, but his is a longer voyage and a happier homecoming. Setting out to avenge the killing of his father Ailill, his journey is extended because he fails to follow the advice of a druid to take only seventeen men with him. His three foster brothers swim after the ship, and Maeldune picks them up – but one by one loses them as they visit or pass thirty or so marvellous islands and a variety of other wonders. At last Maeldune receives the advice of a hermit that he will only be able to return home safely once he has forgiven his father’s murderer. Maeldune does so and makes a safe landfall.
Along the way Maeldune and his companions see such wonders as the Isle of Ants ‘every one of them the size of a foal’; an Island of Birds; an island where demon riders run a giant horse race; an island of a miraculous apple tree whose fruit satisfy the whole crew for ‘forty nights’; an island where a mysterious beast turns itself around and around inside its skin (and hurls stones at the voyagers); an island of fiery pigs, an island of a little cat; a ‘four-fenced’ island divided into quarters for kings, queens, fighting men and young girls respectively; an island where giant smiths strike away on anvils and hurl a huge lump of red-hot iron after the boat (surely a volcanic eruption?) so that ‘the whole of the sea boiled up’.
The Very Clear Sea
They went on after that till they came to a sea that was like glass, and so clear it was that the gravel and the sand of the sea could be seen through it, and they saw no beasts or monsters at all among the rocks, but only the clean gravel and the grey sand. And through a great part of the day they were going over that sea, and it is very grand it was and beautiful.
Surely this influenced C.S. Lewis’s ‘Silver Sea’! ('How beautifully clear the water is' said Lucy to herself as she leaned over the port side early in the afternoon...'I must be seeing the bottom of the sea; fathoms and fathoms down.' Although Lewis soon fills his clear sea with the Sea People and their castle, as shown in this lovely illustration by Pauline Baynes.)
Maeldune soon comes across another marvel: one of my favourites:
The Silver-Meshed Net
They went on then till they found a great silver pillar; four sides it had, and the width of each of the sides was two strokes of an oar; and there was not one sod of earth about it, but only the endless ocean; and they could not see what way it was below, and they could not see what way the top of it was because of its height. There was a silver net from the top of it that spread out a long way on every side, and the curragh went under sail through a mesh of that net.
Diuran, one of Maeldune’s companions, strikes the net with his spear to obtain a piece:
“Do not destroy the net,” said Maeldune, “for we are looking at the work of great men.” “It is for the praise of God’s name I am doing it,” said Diuran, “The way my story will be better believed; and it is to the altar of Ardmacha I will give this mesh of the net if I get back to Ireland.” Two ounces and a half now was the weight when it was measured after in Ardmacha. They heard then a voice from the top of the pillar very loud and clear, but they did not know in what strange language it was speaking or what word it said.
I love the way these voyage tales don’t try to explain anything: they simply delight in the marvellous inventions (of the poet, or of God) and convey a sense of great wonder at the things men find when they set out upon the illimitable sea.
All quotatations are from Lady Gregory's translations of the voyages in her 'Book of Saints and Wonders'
Picture credits: illustration from 'The Voyage of the Dawn Treader' by Pauline Baynes Bran meets Manannan Mac Llyr : 'The Voyage of Bran': Tapestry by Terry the Weaver/Terry Dunn, 1996
This will be the first of two posts about other worlds in children’s and YA fiction – about fantasy worlds; the sort of magical countries many children invent for themselves as refuges and playgrounds for the imagination. In this post I want to discuss the three classic fantasy worlds I entered as a child: in the next, I’d like to take a wander around some of the more recent ones. (There's no way I can fit them all into one piece.)
And I’m not talking about Elfland - which is a place no one invented, a place which in spite of its various glamours is always itself and always the same. I’m talking about complete, self-contained worlds like Middle Earth which seem – in their own terms – solidly real.
Of course the first such world to come my way was Narnia, a place which shares one characteristic with Elfland, in that it’s possible to get there from here. I certainly wasn’t the only child to half-believe Narnia might really exist. I don’t think I peered into wardrobes (though we had several that might have modelled for the one in the picture), but at the age of nine or ten my best friend and I longed terribly to get into Narnia ourselves – to wander through the woods talking to dryads, to sail those magical seas...
...when they returned aft to the cabin and supper, and saw the whole western sky lit up with an immense crimson sunset, and thought of unknown lands on the Eastern rim of the world, Lucy felt that she was almost too happy to speak.
Lewis believed such longing was a common human experience; for him it suggested the existence of God, and I think he believed at least one of the purposes of art was to create a yearning for something above and beyond this world. Whether he was right or not, I do know that he was enough of an artist to create a powerful yearning in many of his own readers. I longed for Narnia at least as much as I longed for a pony of my own; and both desires, at the age of ten, could compare in strength of feeling and emotional highs and lows, with being in love.
Having gobbled up the last of the Narnia books, I began writing my own. (It was the next best thing to getting there.) “Tales of Narnia”, I called it, and filled an old hardbacked exercise book with stories and pictures based on hints Lewis had left in the Seven Chronicles: “The Story of King Gale”, “Queen Camillo”, “The Seven Brothers of Shuddering Wood”, “The Lapsed Bear of Stormness”. (You can see more of it here.) And I copied out Pauline Baynes’ map of Narnia in loving detail. There it all was, as if looking down from an eagle’s eyrie: the indented east coast with Glasswater Creek and Cair Paravel; Archenland to the south; Dancing Lawn and Aslan’s Howe and Lantern Waste in the centre of the map; Harfang and Ettinsmoor to the north. Looked at in realistic terms, I suppose the map is really pretty sparse, but it didn’t matter. Narnia isn’t the sort of fantasy world in which one worries about economics, transport, coinage, or supply and demand. In fact, as soon as any of the characters start thinking in those terms themselves (Miraz, for example, or the governor of the LoneIslands) they get into trouble. (“We call it ‘going bad’ in Narnia,” as Caspian magnificently remarks.) Narnia self-corrects in that respect: it will allow the existence of a Witch Queen who rules over a century of winter, but it will not permit the existence of taxation and compulsory schooling. This can hardly be because Lewis disapproved of taxation and compulsory schooling. It’s because Narnia is a child’s world, and no ideal world for children is going to include anything so dull.
People talk a lot nowadays about the Narnia stories as religious allegories. They really aren’t. There is Christian symbolism in the books, but that is not at all the same thing. And it went clean over my head as a child. Indeed, talking to some teenage Muslim girls lately, I got surprised looks when I mentioned the Christianity in the Narnia stories. They hadn’t noticed it either; I had to explain why, how Aslan is a parallel to Christ. I think Lewis, who only came to Christianity through stories, actually minded more about the story than the allegory. It’s perfectly possible for a child to read “The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe” under the impression that Aslan is no more and no less than the literal account makes him: a wonderful, golden-maned, heroic Animal. I know, because that’s the way I read it, and that is why I loved him – the Platonic Form of the Lion, if you like, though I couldn’t have put it in those terms. “The Last Battle”, in which the Christian parallels become more explicit, is far less popular with children, because everything goes wrong, and Narnia ceases to be, and Aslan turns into Someone Else: “And as He spoke, He no longer seemed to them like a lion...” What? What? I didn’t want the new heaven and the new earth and the new, improved Narnia, thank you very much. I wanted the old one, and Aslan the Lion, and things to go on as they always had.
After Narnia, then where? Luckily for us all, there was Middle Earth waiting to be explored. Aged about nine, I’d paid a brief visit via “The Hobbit” and hadn’t liked the place at all. I was sensitive to tone, and detected a certain flippancy and condescension in Tolkien’s writing. Those elves at Rivendell, singing silly songs in the trees: “Oh tra-la-la-lally, come back to the valley,” indeed! And the grumbling, cowardly, squabbling dwarves weren’t at all the sort of people I liked to be fictionally associated with. (Needless to say, this was a personal reaction, no more. One of my daughters adored “The Hobbit”, and reading it aloud to her as an adult, I found it more tolerable than I’d remembered…)
I might never have picked up “The Lord of the Rings” if it hadn’t been recommended to me by my maths teacher Miss Parker who found me drawing dragons in the back of my exercise book. I admired her (she was young, with short curly hair and a cheerful smile), so dutifully sought out “The Fellowship of the Ring” in the school library, and was swept away forever. Gone was the semi-detached air of facetious patronage I’d disliked in “The Hobbit”: here was a self-consistent written world that took itself entirely seriously.
There was no way of getting there from here, no view from the outside. If Middle Earth is connected with ours at all, it’s far away in the depths of time. It’s a bigger, more grown-up place than Narnia, and an advantage of the quest theme is that we get to travel through it, solving one of the big problems with fantasy and sci-fi worlds: Worlds are huge places, and one spot cannot be representative of all. The length of the book ensures the sense of scale, too: travelling on foot, or at best by boat or on horseback, it takes the characters a realistically long time to get anywhere. The detail of the journey is part of the pleasure: fantasies in which deserts, ice-caps, jungles and seas flash by at bewildering speed give me motion sickness.
Instead Tolkien loiters and lingers through the woods of the Shire:
...after a time the trees began to close in again... then deep folds in the ground were discovered unexpectedly, like the ruts of great giant-wheels or wide moats and sunken roads long disused and choked with brambles. These lay usually right across their line of march, and could only be crossed by scrambling down and out again, which was troublesome and difficult with the ponies. Each time they climbed down they found the hollow filled with thick bushes and matted undergrowth...
This richness of visual, almost tactile detail is what makes the world of “The Lord of The Rings” so particularly actual and real. You feel you could dig a hole in the ground. And note how Tolkien uses description to make us feel uneasy: those “sunken roads long disused”, who made them? When, and for what purpose? Though we never find out, I’m willing to bet that Tolkien knew, and it is such small touches that build up the sense of Middle Earth as a place with a deep and often unsettling past.
Is it odd that the things which make a fantasy seem most real are the things borrowed from our own world? Narnia often seems like a glorified Britain: those sunny woodlands with their ranks of blossoming cherries, those bright coves with their sea-splashed rocks, those dour rocky highlands patched with snow. Middle Earth is a sort of ur-Europe, with its mountain ranges and plains and forests, all in the temperate zone. (For some thoughts about Mordor, see my post here.) We hear vaguely of hot southern lands in both fantasies, and neither Lewis nor Tolkien treats the south fairly. Calormen is an ‘Arabian Nights’ fantasyland, and Lewis avowedly hated the Arabian Nights. (It’s probably unwise to try writing about something you hate, and no amount of special pleading can quite let him off the hook. If you doubt this, imagine trying to explain to someone from Turkey or Iran, why this place whose entire idiom and setting is clearly based on an imaginary Baghdad, also includes the worship of Tash and a character like the Tisroc?) Tolkien’s dark-skinned southerners (“swarthy men in red” with “black plaits of hair” and “brown hands”) from Far Harad are in league with Sauron. In either case, the south is viewed as a place of delusion and error, of false opinions and false gods. Though I noticed this as a child, I did not recognise it as prejudice. Children accept things in books at face value. This is why it is important to think about what they are being offered. I certainly noticed – again without any sense of being taught a lesson – that the people in the next fantasy world I visited were all dark-skinned – except for the outlandish and savage Kargs.
The island of Gont, a single mountain that lifts its peak a mile above the storm-racked North-eastSea, is a land famous for wizards.
So begins Ursula K LeGuin’s “A Wizard of Earthsea”, the third in the triumvirate of imaginary worlds I discovered as a child. The Earthsea books aren’t a polemic. They are not satire: white readers are not supposed to see themselves in the Kargs, like the Yahoos in Gulliver’s Travels. LeGuin simply upends convention and supposes that for once, the ‘savages’ have white skin and blue eyes. Here is a strength of fantasy, the chance to see and do things differently: how often is it taken advantage of? I think writers often discover their own fantasy lands a bit at a time. LeGuin began the Earthsea books by asking questions about wizards: must they always be old, like Gandalf and Merlin, with long white beards? Why are they never young? Gradually these questions led to others. Why are wizards always male, anyway? What is it about wisdom, that we always picture it in this male form? Where do women come into it all? When, eventually, Ged relinquishes his wizard’s power, he grows in wisdom and humanity.
Once again there was a map, this time of islands like jigsaw pieces scattered across the sea. The Archipelago, with Havnor in the middle, the East Reach and the KargadLands; the West Reach, Pendor, and the Dragon’s Run. Perhaps even more than in Middle Earth, there was a sense of space: you could take a boat like Lookfar, and sail and sail until you sailed right out of the Archipelago into the Open Sea, and find the colonies of the Raftmen who never come to land; and beyond that, what?
And beyond that, what? Because in many ways, the boundary of Earthsea isn’t a physical one at all. We don’t know whether there are other islands beyond the rim of the horizon, or where the dragons come from. The true limit of Earthsea is the wall of tumble-down stones that separates us from the land of the dead. Here is Ged, trying to save a dying child:
Summoning his power all at once and with no thought for himself, he sent his spirit out after the child’s spirit, to bring it back home. He called the child’s name, “Ioeth!” ...Then he saw the little boy running fast and far ahead of him down a dark slope, the side of some vast hill. There was no sound. The stars above the hill were no stars his eyes had ever seen. Yet he knew the constellations by name: the Sheaf, the Door, the One Who Turns, the Tree. They were those stars that do not set, that are not paled by the coming of any day. He had followed the dying child too far.
C.S. Lewis wrote of: “That unnameable something, desire for which pierces us like a rapier at the smell of a bonfire, the sound of wild ducks flying overhead, the title of The Well at the World’s End, the opening lines of “Kubla Khan”, the morning cobwebs in late summer...”
Is it longing? Or is it more simply a pang of mingled delight and pain: sic transit gloria mundi? You can cram all things into a book. There’s a fairytale (which A.S. Byatt retold in “Possession”) about someone who goes underground and discovers a miniaturised enchanted castle under a glass dome. Fantasy worlds are a bit like that: little bottled universes that we can hold up to the light and use to examine huge questions about life and death and loss and the beauties and cruelties of the world.
I once read, I think in an essay by C.S. Lewis – that to have weird or unusual protagonists in a fantasy world was gilding the lily. Simply too much icing on a very fancy cake. And then he cited Alice as a good example of an ordinary child to whom strange things happen. I’m not sure he was right.
Of course it’s true that many heroes and heroines in classic 20th century fantasy are ‘ordinary’ – hobbits, for example; and Lewis’s own Pevensie children, and Alan Garner’s Colin and Susan in ‘TheWeirdstone of Brisingamen’ and ‘The Moon of Gomrath’. There’s a pleasure in seeing an ordinary person rise to the occasion, as when Bilbo Baggins turns out to be a very good burglar indeed, or when Frodo self-sacrificingly takes on the burden of the Ring. Tolkien must have seen many instances of ‘ordinary’ heroism in the trenches of World War I.
And I’d agree that one does need to able to identify with characters in fantasy. For me, one of the difficulties of Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast trilogy is that apart from Titus and Fuschia there are too few characters for whom one can feel any empathy. Although I love the setting and the descriptions of the immense castle and its strange ritual life, I become emotionally exhausted by Peake’s cast of grotesques. Peake had, it’s fair to say, a line on the darker side of life. And not coincidentally for this post, he illustrated the two Alice books. Just look at his picture of Alice emerging out of the mirror into Looking-GlassLand, and compare it with Tenniel’s.
Tenniel’s Alice is barely halfway through the mirror. She looks not at us, but around and down at the room with an expression of calm interest. She is a little excited, perhaps, but not alarmed. We don’t feel there in the room waiting for her: instead, we are looking through the window of the picture. We can glimpse part of the room. The grinning clock is strange but not threatening. The room itself appears to be well lit. In Tenniel’s drawing, Alice is firmly planted on the mantelshelf. She has a chance to look around, and will jump down when she chooses.
Peake’s Alice appears through the misty glass like an apparition. She looks straight into our eyes, as if we are the first thing she sees. Her face is very white, and so are her hands, outspread as if pressing through the glass, but also gesturing an ambiguous mixture of alarm and conjuration. She is coming out of darkness, and there are no reflections to suggest what the looking glass room may contain – except us, for we are already there, waiting for her. (We may not be friendly). With one leg waving over the drop, she is about to fall off the mantelshelf into the room – for her position is precarious.
Even the 1951 Disney cartoon recognised the tough element in Alice’s character, and the latent terror in Wonderland. They made her into a prim little cutie, but she still managed to stand up to the frightening Queen of Hearts and the Mad Hatter.
So how ordinary is Alice, after all – is she really just an innocent and rather pedestrian Every-little-girl in a mad, mad world? Or does she have her own brand of illogical weirdness with which to combat the weirdness she finds? I think she does, and I think modern readers often miss it. We look at the blonde hair, the hairband, the blue dress and the white pinafore, and forget her speculative, inventive mind, her impatience – and passages like this:
And once she had really frightened her old nurse by shouting suddenly in her ear, “Nurse! Do let’s pretend that I’m a hungry hyaena, and you’re a bone!”
Compare that with George MacDonald’s heroine in ‘The Princess and The Goblin’. Can you imagine Princess Irene doing anything so bizarre? Irene is truthful and brave, but always a little lady – the Victorian gentleman’s ideal child. The adventures that happen to Irene are not of her own creation. But it’s Alice’s weird imaginings about what might be happening on the other side of the glass – that take her into Looking Glass Land at all. Alice is both a credibly strong-minded little girl – capable of losing her temper, of defending herself in the White Rabbit’s house by kicking Bill the lizard up the chimney – and a surreal philosopher, as some children are. She is the maker of her own imaginary worlds and when they get too chaotic, she ends them – amid considerable violence.
“Who cares for you?” said Alice, (she had grown to her full size by this time) “You’re nothing but a pack of cards!”
At this the whole pack rose up into the air and came flying down upon her: she gave a little scream, half of fright and half of anger, and tried to beat them off…
(Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland)
“I can’t stand this any longer!” she cried as she jumped up and seized the tablecloth with both hands: one good pull, and plates, dishes, guests and candles came crashing down together in a heap on the floor.
“And as for you,” she went on, turning fiercely upon the Red Queen… “I’ll shake you into a kitten, that I will!”
(Alice’s Adventures Through the Looking Glass)
Tenniel’s illustrations catch the vivid threat and drama of the situation. In Peake's, lit by three tall sinister candles, it looks as if Alice and the two Queens are being sucked into a black hole.
Some books with dream endings can feel like a cheat. ‘And she woke up, and it was only a dream’ seems to negate all that has happened. But in the case of Alice, the dream settings are absolutely necessary. She has not strayed into a pre-existing Narnia like Lucy Pevensie. She is the Alpha and Omega of her own fantasylands. She is, like dreaming Brahma, the creator and destroyer of worlds: and when she awakens from her dreams, it is utterly logical that Wonderland and Looking Glass Land will cease to be.
My younger daughter tells me she looks for two things in a book: a mischievous, iconoclastic hero or heroine – and descriptions of wonderful food.
She eats like a bird, so I can only assume this is wish-fulfilment.
Anyway, tonight I happen to be cooking that old British favourite, sausages with bubble-and-squeak. (Recipe attached, see foot of post!) It’s cold weather food. And following on from my blogs about books to read in snowy weather, I thought it might be warming to remind ourselves of comfort food in books.
I was pretty sure that bubble and squeak makes an appearance in “The Wind In The Willows”, and so it does. The jailer’s daughter, pitying poor Toad, in jail, brings him: “bubble and squeak, between two plates.” This alone is not enough to rouse Toad from his misery, however, and she has recourse to:
“…a tray, with a cup of hot tea steaming on it; and a plate piled up with very hot buttered toast, cut thick, very brown on both sides, with the butter running through the holes in it in great golden drops, like honey from the honeycomb. The smell of that buttered toast simply talked to Toad…”
As well it might. Anyone rushing off for a piece of toast, yet? Stay a while…
I read John Masefield’s “The Box of Delights” to both my daughters when they were small. There’s a point when the hero, Kay, despairs of ever managing to get through to the warm-hearted but slow Inspector (who breeds Belgian hares) that his friends are in danger, and that the villain (and wizard) Abner Brown is masquerading as the principal of a nearby religious college. The Inspector attempts to reassure him:
‘You get that good guardian of yours to see you take a strong posset every night. But you young folks in this generation, you don’t know what a posset is. Well, a posset,’ said the Inspector, ‘is a jorum of hot milk; and in that hot milk, Master Kay, you put a hegg, and you put a spoonful of treacle, and you put a grating of nutmeg, and you stir ‘em well up and then you take ‘em down hot. And a posset like that, taken overnight, will make a new man of you, Master Kay, while now you’re all worn down with learning.’
Both daughters immediately insisted that I make it. I did: and it’s delicious: and they had it often over the years of their ‘school learning’… Try it yourselves! For treacle, I’ve always used what in England is termed ‘Golden Syrup’; not molasses.
What about other books? My husband insists that the bear steaks with apples that the children eat in ‘Prince Caspian’ sounds pretty good to him:
“Each apple was wrapped up in bear’s meat … and spiked on a sharp stick and then roasted. And the juice of the apple worked all through the meat, like apple sauce with roast pork…”
I’m not quite convinced. To me, C.S. Lewis actually manages to make the earth, which the trees eat at the banquet in the same book, sound much more delicious:
“They began with a rich brown loam that looked almost exactly like chocolate…When the rich loam had taken the edge off their hunger, the trees turned to earth of the kind you see in Somerset, which is almost pink. They said it was lighter and sweeter. At the cheese stage they had a chalky soil and then went on to delicate confections of the finest gravels powdered with choice silver sand.”
I was with him through most of that, but he lost me at the gravels.
Here’s the recipe for Bubble and Squeak:
450g/1lb potatoes, peeled and diced
salt and pepper
70g/1 ½ oz butter
250g/8oz cabbage, shredded
3-4 tbsp oil
1 onion, diced
Cook the potatoes in salted water till done, then mash with 2oz of the butter. Season with salt and pepper.
Melt the remaining butter in a large saucepan with 2 tablespoons of water and add the shredded cabbage. Cook gently for 10 minutes until tender. Drain, and mix the cabbage and mashed potato together. Season to taste ( I like to add a grating of nutmeg).
Heat half the oil in a frying pan. Add the onion and cook, stirring, till softened. Add the potato and cabbage mix, pressing down with a wooden spoon to make a flat, even cake. Cook over medium heat for 15 mins till golden brown on the underside, and place on a large plate. Add the remaining oil and cook again on the other side till golden brown. Cut into wedges (or scoops) and serve.
Happy eating! Any more delicious book food you can remember?
I know this may be unexciting news for anyone much north of Oxford, but although it's been freezing here since Christmas, these stray flakes are the first for me. So I'm inspired to recommend my favourite wintery children's books to curl up with - if you can - ideally on a deep window seat with the dusk falling and a real fire flickering in the room, watching the world outside turn white.
My first is John Masefield's 'The Box of Delights', given me as a present when I was seven, and re-read constantly ever since. It's a wonderful, exuberent mixture. Young Kay Harker, coming home for the Christmas holidays to his rambling old house of 'Seekings' encounters a mysterious Punch and Judy man who tells him, 'the Wolves are running'. From then on it's a mixture of magic, ancient history and modern villains as the wizard Abner Brown, in charge of a band of international jewel thieves, serially kidnaps the Dean, Bishop and entire chapter of Tatchester Cathedral in an attempt to capture the marvellous Box of Delights. Snow, firelight, winged taxis, Arthurian camps and utter magic!
My second comfort read would be Alan Garner's 'The Weirdstone of Brisingamen' - especially the part where the children, Gowther and the dwarves are fleeing through the Cheshire landscape pursued by the terrifying mara, while their supernatural enemies call up the unnatural Fimbulwinter. There's a brilliant description of the discomforts of clambering through rhodedendrons: and the final stand on Shuttlingslow is terrific.
My third - all these are books I adored as a child and still love - is 'The Silver Chair' by C.S. Lewis. My favourite of the Narnia stories, and perhaps the least problematic, it too has wonderful descriptions of a cold and miserable journey over snowy moors, and then the children and Puddleglum arrive at the deceptive comfort and security of the giant's castle at Harfang. I always wanted to try a giant bath large enough to swim in, and to get dry by 'rolling around' on giant towels in front of a fire large enough to burn a young oak tree.
On the same lines, I'd recommend the attempted journey over Caradhras in The Fellowship of the Ring'. Nothing like reading about avalanches to make you feel cosy, curled up in a warm armchair: and you can follow the Fellowship on into the dark halls of Moria...
Coming more up to date, Garth Nix's 'Sabriel' is great for - again - atmospheric and arduous journeys through the dangerous death-haunted snows of the Old Kingdom: and if you haven't read his account of the nine other-worldly river gates leading into Death, do go and find it. Nix writes amazingly well and his monsters are unusual and convincing.
B.B.'s 'Brendon Chase' is a charming book about three boys living wild in the woods, and the writer was a naturalist and can transport you outdoors into the snow or the summer with the utmost ease.
Finally, 'Jane Eyre' is another comfort book - Jane's privations at Lowood Academy, the Gothic darkness at Thornwood Hall, the meeting with Mr Rochester and his black dog on the icy road, her flight across the moors - what are you waiting for?
Each time I’m asked this, I probably come up with a different answer, and sometimes I’m tempted to be a little sharp – to answer, “Why not?” or “Children are human too, you know!” Actually, I write for children because that’s the way stories come to me.
C.S. Lewis claimed to write for children ‘because a children’s story was the best art form for something he had to say’. Lewis probably believed it when he wrote it; but I think he was kidding himself. To me the statement sounds not only a little pretentious, but suspiciously like something he came up with after he’d written his books.
I don’t honestly believe anyone chooses a genre because they decide in advance that it’s the best art form for something they wish to say. (Unless they’re in advertising.) Rather, you get grabbed by an idea. Often, for me, a picture of something happening. Lewis himself said that ‘The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe’ started with a picture in his head of a faun with an umbrella walking through a snowy forest.
Well, if you’re being haunted (and I mean haunted: possessed) by an umbrella-carrying faun in a snowy wood, what are you going to do with it? You’re probably going to write a children’s story, because it’s going to take superhuman ingenuity to work it into a novel for adults. It’s not even very likely to become part of an adult fantasy. The comically domestic detail about the umbrella says that. Fauns in adult fantasy are going to be sexier. They’re going to riot through those woods in a wild, dangerous Dionysiac revel: and they’re not going to want umbrellas.
No: the material imposes the form. Fauns with umbrellas will insist on you writing a children’s fantasy for them. Other things may then find their way into that story; your moral outlook, world picture, concerns, loves and hates. No author is free of these, and one can only hope to find sympathetic readers who understand or at least make allowances. But throw away that umbrella, and you’ve thrown away the book.
Or to put it another way, writing is like this: you let down your shimmering little hook into the deep pool where stories come from, and something bites. You pull it up (if you're lucky). But look what happens! The fish talks! It opens its whiskery, blubbery mouth and speaks to you! And to me it says:
