Claire Dean’s fairy stories
are for adults, not because anything in them is inappropriate for children, simply because most children would find them difficult to understand. Much is left
hanging in the air, hinted yet unsaid. I was already familiar with a few of the stories
which have previously appeared in various new fairy tale journals, and the
words I’d have used to describe them would have been ‘beautiful', 'airy',
'delicate’. Now, ‘delicate’ is a word that isn’t always welcome: it can signal
‘slight’; surely ‘delicate’ rules out ‘powerful’? Well, Hans Christian Andersen
could write beautiful, airy, delicate fairy tales which have the emotional kick
of a mule. At her best so can Dean, and this collection showcases a very talented
writer whose work is getting better and better. The illustrations by Laura Rae perfectly complement the text.
‘You have to catch their coats
while they’re young’ is the mantra of a faded and nameless north-country
village where most of the locals are married to or descended from swan
maidens. In ‘Feather Girls’ a man makes
an habitual visit to the local pub to share a couple of pints and a packet of
crisps with the swan-maid whom, unlike the other village men, he has refused to
trap. In Dean’s elegant, sharp writing the ‘feather girl’ comes to life, ‘tall and slight in her downy white under
dress, and she compulsively twiddled her fingers, as though when she had them
she couldn’t bear not to be using them’. And ‘she plucked at the crisps … as
though her fingers became her beak and her long thin arm took the place of her
graceful neck’. It’s a story about love, loneliness and the price of freedom:
it’s also perhaps a story about the way custom turns the strangest things into
the quotidian. But I was left asking
myself why the feather girl would join the man at all? How far should gratitude for not being enslaved
take you? Is she sorry for him? Are
there no feather men in the lake?
People in Dean’s stories tend to be
nameless: often only the subsidiary characters have names. In traditional fairy
tales it’s usual for the main character to be ‘the boy’, ‘the maiden’, ‘the
king's daughter’, and so universal rather than particular. Dean takes this
further towards anonymity by referring to her characters with simple pronouns:
‘he’, ‘she’. It usually works I think, but occasionally the anonymity can get
a little characterless. The opening story, ‘Raven’, is based on another animal
transformation tale, ‘The Raven’ from the Brothers Grimm. An exhausted mother
wishes her restless child would change into a raven and fly away. In the traditional fairy tale this is the
beginning of magical adventures out in the forest. Dean shows the interaction
of raven-child and mother within doors, within the domestic setting. The
bird-baby is active, full of energy, curiosity, boldness; the mother is
passive: she copes better with the raven than she did with the child, but is
emotionally numb:
I watched her
watch the flock of ravens as they flew out of sight over the terraced roofs,
chasing wind-torn scrags of cloud. I was still holding my arms as though to
cradle her and support her head.
It’s very dreamlike. ‘I watched
her’; ‘I was still holding my arms as though to cradle her’ – such physical
stiffness and inability to react seem at odds with the vigorous, lively
descriptions of the first-person narration. The mother seems to feel neither
surprise nor responsibility for her daughter’s transformation, though maybe
that too is the point: the baby has always felt alien to her.
In ‘Growing Cities,’ a little girl
visits the greenhouse where her Granddad grows cities from seed. A woman who
works in the seaside ‘Museum of Shadows and Reflections’ takes an unexpected
revenge when she is overlooked for a position. In the lovely
‘Chorlton-under-Water’ a resident clings on to life in her own home even after it’s been submerged in the new
reservoir, and ‘A Book Tale’ is a charming, topsy-turvy, inside-out story
reminiscent of traditional fairy tales in which girls travel east of the sun,
west of the moon to rescue their lovers, or fall down wells into fairy
kingdoms. These are all delightful, and there are many more.
I did occasionally wish Dean had
drawn with bolder strokes: when she does, the effect is electrifying. The best stories in the collection are also
the most recent. ‘The Sand Ship’ is a splendidly weird tale about the power of
imagination, narrated by a bossy, rather unpleasant little boy as he plays with
his sister on a toy ship in a playground. It’s tough and funny and I loved the
sudden, surreal ending. In ‘The Stone
Sea’, the growing, miniature stone seafront (complete with stone funfair) in Rivalyn’s living room seems to parallel
the gradual petrification and loss of her memory. Finally, ‘Glass,
Bricks, Dust’ is outstanding: a softly sinister tale of a boy playing alone on
a mound of rubble by a demolition site: ‘At the top of the mound he was
king.’ On summer evenings he stays out
late, making play cities from bits of broken glass, ‘balancing roofs on them,
building towers’. As dusk is falling,
He heard nine
chimes of the town hall clock. For a moment, the lamppost looked like a tall
thin man wearing a large black hat. When the man turned towards him, he looked
like a lamppost… face to face
with the boy with his feet still planted in the pavement.
Dark and utterly assured, this
story has the strength and coherence of Neil Gaiman’s ‘Coraline’ and is a
terrific achievement. ‘The Museum of Shadows and Reflections’ is a
collection of beautiful, disturbing stories which will bear reading and
rereading. I unreservedly recommend it and look forward to whatever this author does next.
THE MUSEUM OF SHADOWS AND REFLECTIONS by Claire Dean, illustrated by Laura Rae, is published by Unsettling Wonder and available from Amazon (click here)
Read more about it, and other publications, at Unsettling Wonder's website (click here)
THE MUSEUM OF SHADOWS AND REFLECTIONS by Claire Dean, illustrated by Laura Rae, is published by Unsettling Wonder and available from Amazon (click here)
Read more about it, and other publications, at Unsettling Wonder's website (click here)
