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We returned from one of our regular trips to the library recently - me with a bagful of poetry – and my daughter with White Crow, a young adult novel with a dark, portentous cover…
As soon as we were through the front door, my daughter disappeared to her room, clutching the book like a prize – and by tea time, she had already read half way through it. By the end of the day, she had finished it, and was wearing that enigmatic expression of a reader just emerged from a journey somewhere inward, challenging and rewarding…
She mentioned an elfin-like girl named Ferelith – and mysteries that had gripped so much, she had been unable to put the book down… But she didn’t want to spoil it for me if I decided to read it too… (I’ve been careful not to include any potential spoilers in the following review, for the same reason…)
In the library, I’d only taken in a general impression of the book’s cover and title. Now, looking at it again, I fully registered who the author was – and recognised Marcus Sedgwick’s name as one that often crops up on children’s book recommendations and shortlists for book awards, including the Carnegie Medal. I checked my bookshelves – and yes, I was right, I have one of his other novels, The Dark Horse, which I bought a while back and still haven’t got round to reading.
Intrigued, I borrowed White Crow from my daughter a few days later – and, like her, found it was one of those gobble-up books that won’t let you go. I’m not quite sure who or what did the devouring – whether I gobbled up the book, or whether it gobbled me. All I know is that I was edgily compelled to turn just one more page, to read just one more chapter – unable to let it go. The book has an uneasy hold on you – circling you first with intrigue, and then moving in ever closer, to enmesh you in a growing sense of troubling darkness.
And as the story progresses, we are moving into very dark and disturbing stuff indeed. At the climax of the novel, Sedgwick heightens the tension to such a degree, my fear for the protagonist became oppressive, almost physical. Mistrust, the sinister and the malign are pitched to an all pervasive sense of dread; an almost unbearable suspense.
Reading this book, I felt increasingly on shifting ground – metaphorically and, in terms of the characters’ location, quite literally. The story is set in the village of Winterfold, based on Dunwich in Suffolk:
‘Once upon a time there was a whole town here, not just a handful of houses. A town with twelve churches and thousands of people, dozens of streets, and a busy harbour.
And then the sea ate it.
Storm by storm, year by year, the cliffs collapsed into the advancing sea, taking the town with it, house by house and street by street…’
We see a landscape where the last remaining church in the village is half eaten away by cliff erosion, its eastern end gaping open to sea, moon and stars; where the graves and bones of the long dead are poised to fall into the sea – and where subterranean secrets of the past are about to be exposed in all their horror.
This is a novel of big themes and big questions. It’s about the inevitability of death and loss – and about human questioning beyond the boundaries of that inevitability. Opposites constantly fray each other’s edges – life and death, sea and land, love and hate, good and evil, trust and mistrust, choice and fate, hope and despair, heaven and hell – angels and devils.
Sixteen year old Rebecca arrives in Winterfold with her father, their relationship also fraying at the edges of love, mistrust and resentment. Her father is a police officer, under suspicion for some kind of dereliction of duty that may have led to the death of a young girl. In Winterfold, they are looking for a retreat from the hell of their situation in London.
Rebecca meets Ferelith, a local girl with an ethereal, other-worldly quality, who is:
‘…strange-looking; there’s something elfin about her. Everything ends in points; her nose, her eyes, her chin, her lips, her fingers, the spikes of her long tresses of black hair…… her teeth, not quite a vampire’s, but not far short.’
Ferelith is a highly intelligent young woman who, having gained her ‘A’ levels at the age of fourteen has taken herself out of school, bored with it limitations. What interest her are big questions. Is there a God? If there is a guiding force in the universe, is it benign? Is the universe just a big cosmic accident? Is there a purpose to life? What are the implications of all the possibilities? She becomes obsessed with the question of life after death, wrapping up her thoughts in stories that surround the old, ruined manor in Winterfold; stories of a man called Dr Barrieux who arrived in Winterfold in the eighteenth century, fresh from the French Revolution, amid rumours that he was conducting sinister experiments into the possibilities of life after death.
An exploration of the philosophy of William James (philosopher and psychologist brother of the novelist Henry James) also runs through the fabric of the novel; Ferelith is very interested in choice and how it determines the future – and bound up in her obsession with questions about the afterlife, is William James’s analogy of the white crow. As Ferelith explains it in the novel:
‘You might say that although you have not seen every crow in the whole world, every crow you have ever seen is black. Therefore the chances are very great that all crows are black. In fact, you have decided that all crows are black. Now of course, if someone could show you a white crow, everything would be overturned in a moment.
But all crows are black.
And in the same way, you conclude that no one lives after death. There is no ‘other side’. There is no white crow.
But, supposing I said I had seen a white crow? Just one. A single white crow.
What then?’
There is a leaden weight of sadness and suffering behind both girls’ histories, and a longing to love underlies their troubled paths. In their developing friendship, there is a moving, tentative reaching out through the ravages of damage, whilst manipulation and detachment , threat, cruelty, power-play and vulnerability become a shifting counter current in that connection between them.
The summer in which the story takes place is unrelentingly hot, dry and parched – but, like everything in the book, the unease between states is held on a knife edge and Winterfold, living up to its name, retains ‘a cold embrace, and like the snows of winter, it does not let you go easily.’
The language is tight, edgy; it makes you jittery and unsure. There are three narrators – an omnipotent narrator, telling the story in third person present tense, an eighteenth century priest telling his story in diary form – and Ferelith, narrating in first person past tense. Like the unstable landscape, the unsettling dance between the narratives adds to the shifting feel of the book – and the reasons for the differing tenses become startlingly exposed by the end of the novel. The very structure of the book fulfils the interplay of its explorations.
All the time, as I raced through the book, I was aware that Marcus Sedgwick was layering the narrative with meaning and significance, with clues and pointers; food for endlessly questioning thought. For instance, each of the chapters narrated by Ferelith is headed by a song title, which I’m sure on further investigation, will throw up some deeper significance. So far, in hindsight, I’ve realised how one is a major clue.
It is a book that deserves a second – slower and closer – reading. Its structure is layered with fraught possibilities, working on many levels simultaneously. The symbolic and apparent, the psychological and physical, the natural and supernatural draw the reader to their tipping points, challenging interpretation. Taking us on subterranean journeys of the human mind, Sedgwick offers up an unsettling exploration of the unanswerable, and leaves our perceptions teetering on that ever present knife edge of doubt and insight.
This is territory suitable for older children and adults. Dark, disturbing and leading into gruesome and horrifying recesses of humanity, it is a troubling read, but one that nags at the edges of the mind and sets a deep questioning to eat away at assumptions and veiled possibilities, exposing them to the light of scrutiny, just as the sea in the book relentlessly uncovers what’s hidden, and the storms force us to look and see.
On the evening of 4th October 2010, Bath was bathed in golden light. Enticing vistas – distant trees, columns, roofs – glowed like reachable other worlds. We followed the dusk into the park, searching for conkers under ancient horse chestnuts, whilst birdsong mingled with the Sunday bells of the Abbey…
…We were on our way back from an hour long sojourn in Mirror World, still a little unsure as to which layer of reality we were actually moving through. For my daughter and me, Cornelia Funke’s presentation of her latest book, Reckless at the Bath Children’s Literature Festival, had served up more than a small dose of enchantment…
An hour before, under the Christmas tree dazzle of the Guildhall’s beautiful chandeliers, all eyes had turned to the ballroom doors, as Cornelia entered – like a high priestess of fairytale – resplendent in a the most amazing dress I’ve ever had the privilege to share a room with.
I wish I could describe Cornelia’s Reckless tour dress in a way that would give you a truly accurate picture of how dazzling it was. Even these photos on her fan website don’t do it justice. Cornelia introduced it to us (immediately, I find myself referring to it as a living thing…) as a ‘crazy’ dress, ‘made by witches,’ every detail of it hand made to create a work of fairy tale art. Designed by Oscar winning costume designer, Jenny Beavan, it was a dress straight out of an Arthur Rackham illustration. Made from luminous layers of fabric in shades of moss and woody green, it was like an organic thing grown from ancient oaks in hidden groves, festooned with cobwebs.
An upright semi circle of green and gold feathers adorned the collar and, as Cornelia moved, the feathers and fabric glittered with random pulses of multi-coloured sparkle – making the prosaic electric spotlights of our, familiar, world reflect back at us like tiny points of magic made visible. It was as if the world from the other side of the mirror was glimpsing back at us from the shine of our own world. And this, as Cornelia explained to us, is very much what Reckless is about.
Mirror world, she explained, is the fairytale world – a world that ‘wants to grow up’ and which uses our world, the world we perceive to be real, to do so – capturing people and technology from this world in order to progress. It is the land which protrudes through to our world in the faces of stone gargoyles and the grisly tales of folklore – a world populated by a shape shifter fox woman, a Dark Fairy, children stolen from our world and turned into stone, a sleeping beauty crumbling into the passing of time, her skin turning to ‘parchment’ like the dried rose petals falling from the thorns surrounding her castle.
Cornelia explained that the book is the result of a three-way collaboration between herself, Lionel Wigram (producer of Harry Potter and Sherlock Holmes films) and her cousin Oliver Latsch. Lionel came up with the initial idea of the fairytale world that wants to grow up; together he and Cornelia wove from that a whole world of ideas and narrative turns and surprises; she did the writing – and her cousin Oliver translated her drafts, and numerous rewrites, from German into English.
In answer to one child’s question from the audience expressing surprise that, with such excellent spoken English, Cornelia doesn’t write in/ translate her work into English herself, Cornelia explained that she has to write in her native tongue because it is in German that she feels most able and free to play with language and grammar, to ‘break the rules’ to create the effects she is chasing. She told us that a native English speaker is better able to translate these effects into ways that sound natural to an English speaking ear. She told us too, with real relish, of her ‘passion for words’ and that she could happily play with one sentence, altering, polishing, chasing that exact desired effect for eight hours or more, and love every minute of it. Whereas, with her original role as book illustrator, before she took up writing as a career, drawing didn’t engender the same love of time spent perfecting.
During the event, Cornelia was in conversation with Damian Kelleher. He began the journey into the world of Reckless by asking Cornelia to read us the opening of the novel. This is a threshold moment – both within the book; and within the room. Cornelia reads, unfolding the moment when Jacob Reckless discovers, and passes through, the mirror. The pin-drop silence of the audience, the many absorbed minds concentrated on her words, suspends the whole room on a threshold – a hovering between this world and the world of the book; each one of us drawn in to our own personal reflection of the narrative.
Afterwards, Cornelia told us how, when she reads aloud, she loves the thought of so many interpretations of her book existing in the room simultaneously. Once a book is made into a film, this tends to reduce to one shared version, and that is a loss. She prefers the thought of her books remaining books, rather than being turned into films. She also talked about the importance of attaching fiction to reality for depth and meaning; of the importance of research and real detail to inspire, anchor and enrich the story and its world.
She spoke too about how important it is, as a writer, not isolate yourself too much in this very solitary profession – but to remain in the flow of everyday life – because life and its very ebb and flow is what fiction is all about – and what it needs to feed from for any sense of Truth.
She told us about her ‘writing house’ in the garden of her home in Los Angeles. How she plasters the walls with pictures of things relevant to her current work, in order to immerse herself in the atmosphere those things conjure up. Hence, during writing Reckless, she covered her writing house walls with pictures of the nineteenth century; Romantic landscape paintings, the art of the pre-Raphaelites, pictures of nineteenth century industry and machinery, architecture etc.
She also talked about women’s roles in the nineteenth century, how her perceptions of those roles had been challenged by finding out more about individual women of the period who defied the passive ideal served up by those times. She linked this to the Victorian versions of fairytales – how girls in these versions are generally timid and passive; not at all like the feisty, independent characters to be found in the much scarier, pagan world of older versions – and in her fairytale world in Reckless.
Cornelia talked about modern and old worlds meeting and overlapping through her characters, Jake and Will (their names being part of the book’s general nod towards the Brothers Grimm) – brothers from the ‘younger’ ultra modern society of America, placed in the old world of Europe. She talked about how, as a frequent traveller herself, she is acutely aware of the existence and overlapping of different realities – the contrasts of place and shifts of thought as she might move from the snow, forests and lakes of Europe, to the heat of her garden in L.A. where hummingbirds feed outside the window of her writing house.
At the end of the event, Cornelia again read to us from the novel – this time from the scene where Sleeping Beauty still sleeps in a version of the tale where the Prince never turns up, and Will Reckless’s skin is slowly turning to jade. Again, the magic of the many mind-pictures at work within the room seemed to layer the moment with many realities and fictions; separate worlds of imagination, experience and vision all woven together and spellbound by the power of the edged, spare, tightly written prose of the novel. At one point, Damian Kelleher remarked on the tightness of the prose – and Cornelia said, in response, that very spare writing had been her aim, as she felt the fairytale nature of the story demanded that effect. She also spoke of the pleasure of this style, as a change from the very ‘Baroque’ nature of the language of the Ink World novels.
I made no notes whilst at the event, so this account is entirely from memory, and so may be full of blips and trips for which I apologise – and I’ve left out some details, simply for the sake of aiming for brevity (which I still don’t seem to have achieved!) For certain, this version will be a product of my own individual perception and interpretation. Another person’s version would offer an alternative reality; the other side of the mirror. What stays with me though, is a sense of ‘this world’ and ‘other-world’, hung on the balance of the language – the precision of words creating a suspension in a place of deep-seated familiarity; the familiarity of both the ‘real’ and the fairytale – a vital, formative mixture that enriches our lives as we, like Mirror World, continue to grow up.
And what stays with me also is that amazing dress – and I’m sure it will be a memory that will stay with my daughter too. Thank you, Cornelia for creating this living memory bound up with the world of books and story; the fictional made real – the book stepping into the room.
‘At dawn one still October day in the long ago of the world, across the hill of Alderley, a farmer from Mobberley was riding to Macclesfield fair.’
The lilt of those opening lines to Alan Garner’s The Weirdstone of Brisingamen acts like a lure, making me – on this chill November day in the here and now – want to follow that farmer and return to Alderley Edge. I’ve journeyed there before in the pages of Alan Garner’s mind-shifting novel Thursbitch – but, as yet, have not read The Weirdstone…
A copy is waiting on my bookshelves, promising magic; a treat to come. But I also feel regret that I didn’t discover it during my childhood; that time of wide open doors when its magic would have overlapped my world completely, and become my dreaming reality.
I have, however, been able to open up that experience to my daughter, and to happily watch her overtake me in her eagerness to follow Colin and Susan on their adventures. I first discovered Alan Garner in my twenties when, intrigued, I stumbled upon The Owl Service in the tiny village library just a magpie’s hop across the road from the house we were renting at the time.
We lived, back then, in a landscape of river and reed beds, where the wheezing beat of mute swan wings passed overhead – and a wood, just a field’s width away across the railway, bristled with the drama of tawny owls.
That wood, a fragment of ancient forest, was a gateway to a vivid, vital, timeless world. On darkening summer evenings, we would follow the needle gleam of glow worms along the paths – and in the margins of the day, when sunshine and time met in a suspended hush, we sometimes caught glimpses of fox cubs or common lizards basking in their own worlds.
On the other side of the village stretched a mosaic of wetland, where geese patterned the sky, the occasional kingfisher sparked blue fire on snow in winter, and on warm nights, Daubenton’s bats dashed under the river bridge, snapping up prey.
Like all landscapes tend to do, it settled into my mind, even when unseen and unnoticed, as a presence – a kind of cloak around the day. It was present in this way when, with dog nestled under one arm, I curled up in our back room, close to the window which faced the tawny owl wood, and opened the pages of The Owl Service for the first time…
What spilled from that slim volume was something ungraspable, like a jolting light that would not be contained; a jagged, edgy, searing, elemental…something… binding words to place in a way that was like a spell of losing and finding, a half glimpsing – an instinctual knowing.
My daughter read The Owl Service this year, enthralled, gripping it with white knuckled fingers. One evening, she glanced up at me and said, in awed tones, “I love this book… It really makes you think.” Her eyes shone with the relish of the challenge. I could almost hear those mental doors opening to even wider horizons of possibility, and I could see in her eyes a dawning realisation of what boundaries literature can stretch, what edgy places it can let in (or out!)
When reading Garner’s books, it’s as if that presence of the landscape – that cloak of the day – stops being outside our window, or benignly present in our minds, and suddenly enters our house, startles us, scratches at the ceiling and walls like those legend-living owls in The Owl Service, and permeates our living room, removes all veneer. Whilst we read, we move out of the ‘long ago of the world,’ still bound to the here and now, but with all the vital connections between the ancient and the present haunting our deepest awareness.
Those things are internal and external – and eternal. And, in The Owl Service they are, in part, the playing out of the eternal pattern of the journey from childhood to adulthood. A literal edginess of edges between experience, possibility, past and future; doorways between worlds. And that is what he speaks to, this craftsman of words that are bound to the ancient continuity of the land and to our heritage; he speaks to those deeper elements that are both within and without us. Not clear, but instinctive, both disturbing and vital; words that return us to ourselves, and connect us to the land and its (and our) stories.
It is fifty years since The Weirdstone of Brisingamen was first published, its golden anniversary falling, with an appropriate sense of magical portent, on 10/10/10. A special hardback gift edition (which I’ve only seen online so far, but am already feeling its lure!) has been published by Harper Collins to mark the book’s five decades of passage through so many young (and not so young!) lives, and a website linked to the anniversary celebrations explores its timeless, ever renewing appeal.
Legends, folklore, myths and stories draw us to the fireside. The mystery of landscape - and the words which express the bonds we feel with it - fit well the space provided by a pool of winter candlelight. There, the mystery flickers for us to examine it, whilst remaining as huge as the endless shadows that surround the flame.
As the winter solstice approaches, it’ll soon be time, I think, for me to link up with the long ago, set aside some winter hours before the year wears out – and follow that farmer to Alderley Edge…
As we left Topping & Co (see previous post), we noticed the display in the window of Philip Pullman’s latest novel, The Good Man Jesus, and the Scoundrel Christ. You could almost feel the disturbance in the air around those black and white volumes; the anticipation of the stir which, no doubt, would soon follow their appearance.
Which is exactly what the world needs writers for.
Since that first glimpse of the book in Topping’s window, the newspapers and television have indeed been buzzing about it. So much so, I can hardly keep up with it all; but others’ reactions, and the many interviews with Philip Pullman, have definitely piqued my interest. Philip Pullman’s description of the novel as being a story about stories also draws me to it. I agree with him that stories are absolutely central to who we are. Human beings need them. The magic and the weave of storytelling; the process and the power of stories in the cooking pot of the mind – it all fascinates me. I’ve also very much enjoyed all I’ve read by Pullman – especially His Dark Materials, which when I read it several years ago, was so vivid and vitally alive for me – it was like a lived experience.
It wasn’t until we got home from Topping’s, and I checked out the shop’s website later in the evening, that I learnt that Philip Pullman was due to talk about his new book at a Topping & Co. event in Bath that very night…
It felt like a rather spooky crossing of paths – especially as I’d just finished reading The Tiger in the Well, the third in Philip Pullman’s Sally Lockhart series – and am due to begin the fourth, The Tin Princess very soon. These gripping tales combine rip-roaring adventure with a life-affirming, humane rootedness that both inspires and captivates. These are books full of characters to really love. Who, for instance, wouldn’t want a friend like Jim Taylor?
Which brings me to another crossing of paths, of sorts, when just a couple of days after our trip to Bath, we welcomed Matt Smith as the new, eleventh incarnation of the Doctor…
Matt Smith was already a favourite in our household, due to his sparky portrayal of Jim in the TV adaptation of the Sally Lockhart Mysteries. Now, he looks set to be someone who it will be a real privilege to journey with in Time and Space. Matt Smith was born to be the Doctor. He oozes eccentricity and heart.
We dearly love David Tennant’s Doctor, he is such an amazing, intuitive actor, with huge emotional intelligence, and Christopher Eccleston was superb in the role. The Russell T. Davies era will always be treasured in this family – and now it looks as though the magic is not only set to be safe in the hands of Steven Moffat, Matt Smith and the new Doctor Who team – but will continue to flourish and fly.
I love Steven Moffat’s storybook – or ‘fairy tale’ approach, as he called it, in an interview in The Guardian recently. I love the spooky quirkiness of the worlds he has created in past episodes he’s written. And I’m intrigued by the deeply interesting relationship he has set up between the Doctor and his new assistant Amelia Pond (even her name is ‘fairy tale’). I love that wonkiness of time, and of weight of influence, that exists between them at the cusp of their adventures together; like scales where one dish overflows with years of make-believe, baked-into-the-soul childhood obsessions – and the other balances a few hours of ‘still cooking,’ kindness to a valiantly coping child; whilst all the time there is a meeting of potential – and an intuitive bond at work between them .
In Steven Moffat’s fairy tale approach, I think we may well have the television equivalent of the magic library hidden in rocking horse attics. Talking of which, I see from the new series trailers, that the Doctor and Amy will be riding real horses in a future episode. Horses in adventure is always good. It was horses in books that spirited me away on many of my earliest adventures into the magic of stories…
Can’t wait to be carried away in the newly refurbished Tardis later tonight, when episode two, and its journey into the eleventh Doctor’s story, begins…
Maundy Thursday in the beautiful city of Bath was a day of shifting spring sunshine and a pouncing April Fool wind. Swathes of daffodils shivered in Victoria Park, lesser celandines were opening their petals beneath stately trees…
Lesser Celandine, Ranunculus ficaria
…and we, via Royal Crescent, The Circus (and no doubt the route of many a Jane Austen stroll) were on our way to The Paragon – and our first ever visit to Topping & Co. booksellers
As we approached the pale blue shop front, we caught tantalising first glimpses through its windows – warm light, lingering readers, towering walls of books, beautiful wood floors – and then the door was closing behind us, and it was like entering a gentle fold of time, back to the bookshops of my childhood…
All around us, floor to ceiling, there was a vast selection of titles; row upon row of backlist volumes as well as current bestsellers, a discerning variety and breadth of choice wherever you looked. The natural history section was a rare treat in itself – packed full of carefully chosen titles spanning years of the best nature writing, not just the latest releases or TV tie-ins. Here was an ideal roll call of writers – a lovely selection of titles by Richard Mabey, Roger Deakin, Robert Macfarlane, and all the others you would wish to see represented there. It was wonderful to see the New Nature Writing issue of Granta tucked between them, completing the picture.
For a long while, I browsed in the children’s section and marvelled at the beautiful display of hardback gift books. It was a feast of magic for the eyes. Spines of sumptuous red, green, blue or inky black – gold blocked and cloth-bound volumes, all primed to begin their journeys through the lives of generations of readers to come. Heirlooms waiting for a home…
My eye was particularly drawn to a gorgeous cloth-bound volume, containing Susan Cooper’s complete The Dark is Rising sequence; a gem of an edition which I’ve not seen anywhere else – and, until now, never knew existed. It was so heart warming to see this fitting tribute to how special these books are – a gem for a gem, made to be treasured.
There’s something about storybooks like these, especially when gathered together in such numbers – that speaks of magic libraries in mysterious, Green Knowe houses; volumes waiting to be read in rocking horse attics, or in secret gardens – or on Gyptian ships bound for Svalbard…
My daughter’s eyes were shining as she drank it all in. Everywhere we looked our gaze fell on abundant treasures. Bookshops like Topping’s feel such an organic part of the journey of reading. They intensify the whole sensory and tactile experience, so that even before ‘Once Upon a Time,’ the discovery and anticipation begin.
The only way we’re going to keep these special places, and the experience they offer, is to spend money in them – so, as my daughter had some saved up Christmas money, she was able to make her selection from the ‘magic library.’
She chose this beautiful Everyman’s Library Children’s Classic edition of a well loved favourite, Anna Sewell’s Black Beauty:
Her old second hand paperback copy has all but fallen apart after many a bumpy rucksack journey to school – so this will be her treasure-copy, living long on her shelves for repeated readings (I can almost see those imaginary great-grandkids turning these pages in years to come!)
On its first journey home as heirloom-in-waiting, Black Beauty was joined by Cornelia Funke’s Inkspell (my daughter’s other choice from Topping’s shelves) – plus quite a hoard of other books which, earlier in the day, we’d bought with our stash of chain-store gift tokens left over from Christmas:
I’m looking forward to reading the Sarah Waters and Kate Atkinson (I loved the gripping storytelling and Woman in White, gothic feel of Fingersmith. And Kate Atkinson is a firm favourite, always providing a sparkling festival of fiction delights) but I’m sure I’ll be borrowing some of my daughter’s choices too!
We’ll definitely be back to Topping’s whenever we get the chance. In fact, I can feel the pull to return there already. Our Rocking Horse Attic is just an imaginary one – but that gorgeous edition of Susan Cooper’s The Dark is Rising series definitely belongs there, I think…
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