Other Worlds (2)

Earthsea, Narnia, Middle Earth – the three classic fantasy worlds I talked about last week – are distinctive places. Most children – most people you meet – will have a pretty clear picture of at least the last two. If you were dropped at random into one of these worlds, you would soon be able to guess which one it was.

There has been a great deal of fantasy written since these worlds were created, but not much that competes with them in iconic status and recognisability. Try thinking of names of other worlds, and “Discworld” is the one that springs most readily to my mind.  At the borders where fantasy and science fiction blur, there may be others – "Dune", maybe - but what in fact are modern writers doing with fantasy worlds? Is sub-creation, as Lewis called it, their primary concern?

First of all there are the fantasy worlds which offer a slightly different version of our own. One example is Joan Aiken’s wonderful alternative Georgian England – not Georgian at all, of course, because the Stuart kings are still in power, and instead of Bonnie Prince Charlie, we have ‘Bonnie Prince Georgie’ and a whole series of wonderfully bizarre Hanoverian plots to bump off the reigning monarch and put him on the throne. We know we are not going to get historical accuracy, so we play a happy game of follow-my-leader through the wildest places. Pink whales (“Night Birds on Nantucket”), a sinister overweight fairy queen in a South American Welsh colony (“The Stolen Lake”), a plot to roll St Paul’s Cathedral into the Thames in the midst of a royal coronation (“The Cuckoo Tree”), foiled by tent-pegging it down from the back of a galloping elephant… That one initial twist, parting her fantasy world from history, gave Aiken permission to let her imagination loose. And her imagination was powerful, joyous, puckish. Her books are always full of energy, but they can also be eerie, sad. It’s a long walk in the dark/on the blind side of the moon, a character sings in one of her short stories; and it’s a long day without water/when the river’s gone…

Diana Wynne Jones followed Aiken’s lead: many of her books are set in alternative universes that closely parallel our own except for one crucial difference: the existence of magic. She goes so far as to suggest that the absence of magic in this world is something of an aberration. Each world diverges from the next in its series because of a different outcome to some historical event – Napoleon winning the Battle of Waterloo, for example. ( I suspect that Susanna Clarke, of "Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell", read Joan Aiken as a child: her marvellously convincing magical Regency England does seem to owe something, in the best possible sense, to Aiken's lively tales.) And the ‘In-Between Place’ in  Diana Wynne Jones's "The Lives of Christopher Chant" owes something in concept, though not in presentation, to CS Lewis’s ‘Wood Between the Worlds’ in 'The Magician’s Nephew': a neutral space, a jumping-off ground between universes.

Fascinating, fun, and sometimes thought-provoking, these books are not high fantasy in the classical sense. They don't offer self-contained Secondary Worlds like Middle Earth, or Narnia. But they share a purpose with the next one I’m coming to: Terry Pratchett’s ‘Discworld’.

Discworld has grown enormously over the series. It began – in “The Colour of Magic” as a spoof, a comic take on popular sword-and-sorcery novels. With characters like the incompetent wizard Rincewind and the warrior Cohen the Barbarian, it was brilliant comedy, spot on the mark. But Pratchett was too good a writer to remain content with such an easy target. The books rapidly became more serious of purpose (though still extremely entertaining). Discworld fits all the criteria for an instantly recognisable, self-contained imaginary world. It is carried through space by four elephants standing on the back of a giant turtle. It has a consistent geography, with its central mountain range at the Hub, the Ramtops, the city of Ankh-Morpork, the cabbage fields of Sto Lat; its directions (hubwards and rimwards rather than north and south ). There is nowhere quite like it... except that nearly everything in it is a deliberate borrowing from our own Earth, viewed through a distorting fantasy lens that paradoxically allows us to see it rather more clearly. I don’t know of a more passionate advocate than Pratchett for racial and sexual equality. We might be reading about dwarves and trolls, but we’re not fooled. When Commander Vimes employs trolls, werewolves, dwarves, zombies and vampires in the City Watch, it’s not because they all live together in Ankh Morpork like one big happy family. Read "Feet of Clay", read "Equal Rites". Discworld, like the worlds of Aiken and Wynne Jones, sets Pratchett free to say exactly what he wants in a way quite different but not less seriously intended than so-called ‘realistic’ fiction.


And so we move on to wholly self-contained invented worlds. (I’m still excluding Elfland, which seems to me a different kettle of fish, and I’ll explain why some other time.) Some have been created for the sheer delight of experiencing something fantastical and other: but in the best fantasy that is never the be-all and end-all. They still have something to say. Katherine Roberts’ Echorium Sequence is a good example:  it reminds me of the Earthsea books. In the first volume, "Song Quest":

The day everything changed, Singer Graia took Rialle’s class down the Five Thousand Steps to the west beach. They followed her eagerly enough. A Mainlander ship had broken up on the reef in the recent storms, and the Final Years were being allowed out of the Echorium to search for pieces of the wreck.

Already the reader has picked up hints of reservations about the culture which treats a shipwreck as an excuse for a class outing. The task of the Singers on the Island of Echoes is to spread healing and harmony; they are the diplomats of their world, and are able to talk with the Half-Creatures, such as the Merlee who live in the sea and are trawled for by sailors who sell their eggs as delicacies. The boy, Kherron running away and picked up by fishermen, is told:

“You wait right over there with your bucket. When we draw them in, there’ll be lots of wailing and shrieking. Don’t you take no notice. Soon as we toss you one of the fish people, you get right in there with your knife. No need to wait for ‘em to die first. They ain’t got no feelings like we humans do. Got that?”

Kherron does – but soon:

Soon he was surrounded by flapping rainbow tails, coils of silver hair tangled in seaweed, gaping mouths and gills, reaching hands, wet pleading eyes – and those terrible, terrible songs.
“Help us,” they seemed to say.
He shook his head. “I can’t help you,” he whispered... [He] watched his hand fumble in a pool of green slime and closed on the dagger. He began to hum softly. Challa, shh, Challa makes you dream...
The creatures’ struggles grew less violent. One by one their arms and tails flopped to the deck, and their luminous eyes closed. Kherron opened their guts as swiftly as her could and scooped out handfuls of their unborn children. It helped if he didn’t look at their faces. That way he could pretend they were just fish.

This is strong stuff, and Roberts is clearly interested in the differences between a superficial adherence to peace and harmony – the soothing songs of the Singers, the diplomatic missions – and the blood and guts reality that it may not be possible even literally to keep your hands clean. Colourful adventures in imaginary places don’t have to be anodyne: even heroes and heroines may do some very bad things. But in YA fiction, the learning process is usually what counts, and hope is never forgotten.

John Dickinson’s fantasy trilogy – beginning with ‘The Cup of the World’ (2004) – is a more downbeat series. You could almost call it a teenage 'Game of Thrones' - plenty of Machiavellian politics, less sex and violence. It’s set in a claustrophobic medieval-style kingdom, in a world pictured as held in a vast cup and circled by a snake or cosmic serpent. All of the characters are flawed: civil war is rife, and the main characters are themselves descendants of invaders from over the sea. Long ago, their ancestor Wulfram led his sons against the indigenous hill-people, whose goddess Beyah still weeps for the death of her son. It’s an intricate story which no brief summary can do justice: but the narrative is dark and fatalistic, with a gloom bordering at times on pessimism. This trilogy is a great corrective to the notion that fantasy is all about crude oppositions of good and bad, white and black. The main characters’ best intentions can lead to disaster, and often their intentions are selfish anyway. The descriptions of the world are lovingly detailed and rich, the writing is beautiful, and these are books I greatly admire.

Last, and more recent, Patrick Ness’s trilogy “Chaos Walking” is set on another planet. The border between sci-fi and fantasy is fuzzy at best. Is this a fantasy trilogy? Why not? There is no reason other than convention why a fantasy world has to be medieval. The books ask: is there ever an excuse for violence? And there isn’t a clear answer: Todd, the adolescent main character, has a good heart and wants to do the right thing. But how do you know what the right thing is? Can you trust your own judgement? Are people what they seem? Can even first love – the most intense of experiences – sometimes be a selfish excuse for doing harm to others? Like Katherine Roberts’ Kherron, Todd learns that you can’t always keep your hands clean.

I enjoyed “Chaos Walking” immensely, but began to feel towards the end that I could have done with just a little less non-stop, breathless action, and a little more world-building. This is a trilogy which takes the moral choice to the level of a sixty-a-day habit. I loved the first book the best, maybe because there was more leisure to examine Todd and Viola’s (and Manchee’s) surroundings:

The main bunch of apple trees are a little ways into the swamp, down a few paths and over a fallen log that Manchee always needs help to get over… 

The leap over the log is where the dark of the swamp really starts and the first thing you see are the old Spackle buildings, leaning out towards you from shadow, looking like melting blobs of tan-coloured ice cream except hut-sized. No one knows or can remember what they were ever s’posed to be…

… I start walking all slow-like up to the biggest of the melty ice-cream scoops. I stay outta the way of anything that might be looking out the little bendy triangle doorway… and look inside.

What will we see?

The accusation that fantasy is escapism has always seemed strange to me. Far from being away with the fairies, what fantasy writers do is to take that little step sideways out of this dimension so that they can turn around and take a really good look at this one. At its best, fantasy offers perspective, the chance to run thought experiments, the chance to alter history and see what might have happened. A chance to look at serious issues with the heat off: Terry Pratchett can tell stories about dwarfs and golems and trolls and really he's talking all the time, quite clearly, about race relations. And nobody accuses him of writing allegory, or preaching, either.  And it's all fabulously entertaining.

Next week I want to ask: Why do we do it? And what are the pitfalls? When shouldn’t you be writing fantasy?

What’s it all for?

Magical Classics: 'The Stone Cage' by Nicholas Stuart Gray

Kate Forsyth writes about a much-loved childhood classic: 

I first read Nicholas Stuart Gray’s novel The Stone Cage when I was about eleven. It was an utter revelation to me. 

The Stone Cage is a retelling of the Rapunzel fairy tale, told from the point of view of the witch’s cat. It was the first fairy tale retelling I had ever read, and I remember being amazed that a writer could take an old, well-known story and turn it into something utterly new and surprising. 

I was also utterly enchanted by the story itself, and particularly by the characters of Tomlyn the cat, and Marshall, the witch’s raven. One was sleek, self-assured, coolly amused, and tantalised by the bewitching power of sorcery. The other was hunched and tattered and miserable, with a great heart.

What I remember most about The Stone Cage was the absolute assurance of the voice. It sounded exactly how I imagined a cat would speak:

‘My name is Tomlyn. I am very beautiful. Marshall says I am spiteful and wicked and a barbarian to boot. He’s jealous of my thick grey fur, my white chin and breast, and the snowy end of my tail. I suppose he can’t help being envious, the great rusty-black thing! He’s got a big, blunt beak, and stubby wings, and tiny little eyes... He’s old and stupid and a coward; with an endless flow of long words that he can’t possibly understand.’

I had always been fascinated by ‘Rapunzel’, and reading The Stone Cage made me want to write my own retelling of the tale. I even had a go at it, when I was in my mid-teens. And, yes, my story had a cat in it too. Many years later, I did write my own retelling of the tale, though my novel Bitter Greens is very, very different. 

Nicholas Stuart Gray was born on 23 October 1922, in Scotland. From a young age, he made up stories and plays to amuse his brothers and sisters, and to try and escape his unhappy childhood. He described his mother as ‘beautiful and terrifying’.‘She was a megalomaniac,’ he said in an interview in 1973. ‘We grew up terribly unsure of ourselves and doubtful of other people, always prepared to be cut down … We were always ugly, stupid, gullible, useless people in her eyes.’

Gray admitted that the character of the witch in his play The Wrong Side of the Moon (1966) is ‘almost a biography’ of his mother and I wonder if she influenced the character of the witch in The Stone Cage, who was utterly egocentric and had no feelings of remorse for any of her actions.  ‘The sad thing about people like (my mother) is they are completely alone,’ Gray said in the same interview. 

Gray left home at the age of fifteen, finding work as an actor and stage manager. His first play was produced before he was twenty years old, and he turned to writing for children in 1949 after seeing a hundred or more children queuing up for the cinema and wondering why there was no comparable entertainment for them in the theatre. He wrote the play Beauty and the Beast as a result, and it was shown at the Mercury Theatre in London in 1950. 

Gray wanted, he said, ‘to give the children a sense of magic. Nobody attends to this enough. They give them too much realism. They can see it all on the box, they can see frightful things there. But they’re not being given a world to escape to … the world of the imagination. Children must have an escape line somewhere.’

His first novel, Over the Hills to Fabylon, was published in 1954. It is about a city that can fly away across the mountains any time the king feels his home is in danger. 

Other important works include The Seventh Swan, which tells what happened to the boy left with one swan wing instead of an arm; Down in the Cellar, an eerie story of  a family of children who find a gateway to another world in their basement;  Grimbold's Other World, about a black cat that teaches a boy about the world of the night; The Apple Stone, which tells of the adventures of a family of children who find a magic stone, and, of course, The Stone Cage, published 50 years ago this year.

Gray’s story line follows the basic plot of the well-known Grimm fairy tale, which had been translated into English in 1882 by Lucy Crane. Her translation was based upon the 1857 edition of the Grimm’s Kinder-und-Hausmärchen, in which the character of Rapunzel is at its most passive and childlike. There is no mention of any sex, or pregnancy, or birth of twins in that tale, and Rapunzel betrays herself to the witch (rather stupidly), by complaining how much heavier she is to pull up than the prince.

Within the narrow confines of that tale, Gray created a story that celebrates the redemptive power of love. Tomlyn the cat and Marshall the raven – natural enemies and rivals for the witch’s rare expressions of affection – are united in their desire to save Rapunzel. They protect her from the witch, an old, ugly and malicious woman who craves power. 

The story begins when the witch tricks a woodcutter into giving up his newborn daughter. He asks her what she intends to do with the baby. ‘Mother Gothel answered the man’s question in a small and faraway voice: “I will teach her my craft. Teach her to be the greatest and wickedest witch in all the world.”’

However, her plans are thwarted when Tomlyn and Marshall lay a spell on the little girl so that she was unable to work magic.  Rapunzel grows to maturity, frustrating and angering the witch in her inability to remember even the simplest of spells.

Then the two conspirators bring a young man to the witch’s garden in the hope he would rescue Rapunzel, but unwittingly she betrays him and he is cast down from the tower and blinded. Again, the cat and the raven work to bring Rapunzel and the prince together again, even though Rapunzel has been banished to the dark side of the moon.

In the final confrontation, the raven tells the witch he no longer fears her. Rapunzel agrees, ‘very clearly and gently:

‘I’m not afraid of Mother Gothel, either.’

‘The witch gave a shrill cry … “You must fear me! You must! Sorcery can only thrive on fear.’

Rapunzel’s courage – and the bravery of her animal friends – together overcome the witch, who is transformed by the raven’s magic into a bare and lifeless-looking tree. There she must stay, ‘dead and dried, till a heart may grow inside.’

Rapunzel and her prince return to the human world, but the raven and the cat stay with the witch on the dark side of the moon, to look after her until she returns to being human.  In the final scene, Tomlyn the cat pours a few drops of water on the tree’s roots, and a small, green leaf uncurls from a bare twig. In this way, Nicholas Stuart Grey shows how the animals’ faithfulness and compassion to the witch, despite her wickedness, hold out the hope of her redemption.

Gray’s dramatic training shows in the swift, graceful pace, and the quick, vivid character sketches – not a word is ever wasted. The dialogue is brilliantly done, being clever, witty and poignant in turns. Tomlyn the witch’s cat steals every scene. He speaks and acts and thinks just like a cat should, and I was not at all surprised to discover that Gray is most probably the only person ever to write a biography of his own cats (The Boys,1968).  I also have a deep affection for Marshall the raven, and sympathise with his yearning to read, and his longing to love and be loved.

Haunting, whimsical, funny and heart-breaking, The Stone Cage is one of the most beautiful and profound books ever written for children. At its heart, The Stone Cage tells us that love, compassion and courage will win out over hatred, cruelty and cowardice, and that is a lesson that cannot be taught often enough. 

All quotes from The Pied Pipers: Interviews with the Influential Creators of Children’s Literature, 1973

Kate Forsyth's adult fantasy 'Bitter Greens', based on the fairytale 'Rapunzel', is published in the UK by Allison & Busby. Kate is the bestselling author of more than twenty books, ranging from picture books to poetry to novels for both children and adults. She has won numerous awards and been published in fourteen countries around the world. She lives by the sea in Sydney with her husband, three children, a rambunctious Rhodesian Ridgeback, a bad-tempered black cat, and many thousands of books. Her new novel, 'The Wild Girl', about the love affair between  Wilhelm Grimm and Dortchen Wild, is to be published in the UK in 2013, and you can visit her website at www.kateforsyth.com.au