a gallimaufry

Happy 2023!

A belated Happy New Year! I hope you all enjoyed the holidays and have started 2023 in the nicest ways possible.

For me, one of the highlights of Christmas this year was going to see the Royal Ballet’s production of The Nutcracker in London with my mother and daughter. It was everything you would want a ballet to be: beautiful music, expertly played by the orchestra; lovely sets and costumes, and, most important of all, exquisite dancing. Not that I am an expert, but I actually cried a bit while watching it, and more than once too. The audience was filled with little girls in sparkly velvet and net dresses and it was one wonderful, happy experience. It’s shown every year and I thoroughly recommend it.

After a frantically busy couple of months, I finally and tardily finished reading Brian Attebery’s absolutely brilliant new book, Fantasy: How it Works, which I reviewed for Shiny New Books. If you don’t have time to wade through my turgid prose, just go out and buy/borrow it. It explains why fantasy isn’t just childish escapism, and analyses lots of books to discuss how it works and what it does. All in a very readable, chatty style.

(And look at that gorgeous cover!)

For the rest of the holidays, I enjoyed lounging about reading both in the UK and here in Belgium. In fact, I have rearranged a corner of the sitting-room for maximal reading and lounging pleasure. It’s also easier for me to write there, for I have been writing (just not here).

I spent September to the endish of December following the Golden Egg Academy 12-week Write Your Successful Children’s Novel course. It was brilliant and if you are thinking of writing for children, I highly recommend it. There are no entry requirements, and week by week you learn how you actually put a book together, what to think about, what to develop and how to structure it. It is really practical, and handily it’s distance learning so you can do it at your own pace. Pretty much every week there is a Zoom or FaceBook meeting with the course leader, Imogen Cooper, who is just the nicest person as well as hugely experienced, and you can ask questions and get advice. At the end you can send in your first 2000 words plus a synopsis for one of the Golden Egg editors to evaluate. I have to say that the feedback was very helpful and perceptive.

After another busy few weeks at work I am keen to get back to work on my book. One of the elements I hadn’t been sure about was having a dual narrative, and the editor suggested that sticking to one viewpoint would be better. My book’s other massive weakness, caused by my tendency to plot as I go along rather than before I start, is that there is too much going on and not enough focus on the main theme. So it’s time to prune and plan (at least a bit) before getting back down to writing. The feedback has really enthused me to carry on. I hope to have a reasonable first draft ready by the end of the summer, so that I can re-apply for the 12-month course on developing your children’s novel.

Because of all this I have mainly been reading children’s novels, especially recently published ones. Here are some of them, in short!

The Poisoned Pie Mystery, by Nicki Thornton  

A boy to whom accidents just keep on happening, a talking cat who is also a master detective and a lot of cake… This is a brisk and chirpy novel for children of about 9+. The author does something quite daring with the parents, which I did not see coming.

The Hounds of the Mórrigan, by Pat O’Shea

An older work but a wonderful immersion into Irish mythology, as Pidge and Brigit journey through a magical landscape in search of a drop of the Mórrigan’s blood. Truly magical, the many joys of this book include the characterisation of the children, who act and speak like real children, and the creatures they encounter.

Children of Blood and Bone, Tomi Adeyemi

In a mythical sort-of version of Nigeria called Orïsha, the maji are people who used to have magical powers but lost them suddenly twelve years ago. Now they are oppressed and enslaved by the majority kosídan and their cruel king, but maybe there is a way for teenaged Zélie and her friends to restore magic and end the tyranny. This is the first YA novel I have ever read and my was it bloodthirsty! But the story is compelling and I loved the setting.

The Scandalous Sisterhood of Prickwillow Place, by Julie Berry

I don’t think this book is very well known outside the US? But it should be. An exciting opportunity is delivered to the students of St Etheldreda’s School for Young Ladies in nineteenth-century Ely, when their horrid headmistress and her brother both drop dead: poisoned. Rather than informing the authorities, the girls decide to continue as usual and enjoy their freedom, pretending that the two victims are still alive. Of course, this becomes increasingly farcical and meanwhile the murderer is still lurking about. A bouncy entertaining read and the American author gets pretty much everything British spot on and believe me that is high praise.

 

From Spare Oom to War Drobe: Travels in Narnia with my Nine-Year-Old Self, by Katherine Langrish

When I was nine years old I wrote a book called Tales of Narnia, and I still have it. In spiky blue ink, written in my best handwriting with only occasional crossings-out and spelling mistakes, it runs for eighty-six numbered pages and fills an old hard-covered notebook from front to back. [...] I covered the notebook with a paper wrapper which I painted dark blue, and stuck a poster-paint picture I’d made of Aslan on the front. He looks very stiff, very yellow and rather cross.

So begins this lovely ramble through C.S. Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia. It is really for people who, like Langrish, adored the books when they read them as a child but perhaps have not revisited them since. So a chapter is devoted to each book, including a detailed retelling each story and extensive quotes. As we explore, Langrish considers how Lewis’s personal beliefs, the historical situation (shortly after the Second World War and during the Cold War) and literary and folkloric works contributed to each book. Her knowledge is impressive but lightly worn, so that it’s like reading along with a good friend whose ideas you mostly but not completely agree with.

Langrish is even-handed, although she admits she likes some books more than others (and does anyone truly love The Last Battle?), she is alert to beautiful writing wherever she finds it. She considers the darker side of the books: racism? Yes, definitely. Misogyny? More mixed. There are strong girls in every book, and some great villainesses; but on the other side there is the Susan problem and, though I don’t think Langrish mentions it, no strong and likeable adult females. Do these problems mean that we shouldn’t read the books any more? Of course not!

And I had not realised it, until Langrish pointed it out, how thoroughly Lewis loathed schools. There are plenty of references to them in the books and they are always awful places.

I was impressed by Langrish’s tracing of motifs and plots to their source material. This includes Victorian and Edwardian children’s books and fantasy literature, Mediaeval and Renaissance poetry, fairy tales, Greek, Roman and Norse myths, the Arabian Nights, Christian theology and of course the Bible. Lewis’s uses of these gives different flavours to the books: for instance, there is a strong debt to E. Nesbit in much of The Magician’s Nephew, but more of a Mediaeval romance feeling to The Silver Chair. Langrish also argues persuasively for the influence of more recent history on some of the books. So Maugrim’s secret police surely draws on the Cheka and the Stasi, Nickabrick on the struggles of Irish revolutionaries, and the silver chair on the horrors of trench warfare.It is all very illuminating and gave me a new respect for Lewis’s skills as a children’s writer and as someone who understood children. (The only real remaining mystery: why did Edmund love Turkish Delight so much?) Langrish’s emphasis on her own responses to the books keeps it from ever threatening to become dry. Passages such as Aslan’s death and rebirth, or the creation of Narnia, still move and delight her; Caspian’s lengthy back story bores her.  A particular joy is how she contrasts her adult reactions with her child ones. At the end of The Silver Chair, grown-up liberal Langrish disapproves of the way Jill and Eustace deal with the bullies but nine-year-old Katherine loved it.

This is the kind of book to read on a rainy Sunday afternoon with the kind of tea and toasted muffins you would eat in a faun’s cave in Narnia. Although you will then spend your Sunday evening grubbing about in the attic looking for your battered Puffin paperbacks...

(All the illustrations on this page are by Pauline Baynes; this last one is the cover illustration for The Last Battle - rather different from the one on my Puffin edition!)

catching up

Oh dear! Where did the time go? I am almost embarrassed to come back here after so long. How are you all? Did you enjoy the summer?

I have mainly been having a lovely time. International travelling rules were relaxed just in time for me to pop over to the UK in August to see my family. I fell upon the charity bookshops of Ipswich with joy and managed a small but respectable haul (I am limited by what I can carry back on the Eurostar and my suitcase also held the Folio Society edition of The Lord of the Rings which is possibly the heaviest three-volume set ever published, my arms are now six inches longer).

Here is my swag, rounded out with a few books I filched from my mother’s box of books to go to Oxfam:

But! Not a single work by Storm Jameson! It seems my dreams of second-hand bookshops stuffed with her books are indeed dreams with no basis in reality. Bother.

I have mentioned before that I decided to rearrange the majority of my fiction, poetry and plays chronologically. Dear friends, do not do this. In theory it was a wonderful plan which would reveal very clearly the development of (mainly) English literature; in practice it is difficult to sustain because you have to keep checking publication dates every time you want to shelve a book (so you don’t bother and shove books in where there’s space and then everything becomes even more chaotic) – quite apart from what to do about books published many years after they were written, collected works, etc. I had known that it would take longer to find any book I wanted but I thought this would yield pleasant rambles through my books as I sought a particular volume. In fact it’s just annoying. But I am too lazy to re-organise everything again.

Anyway, an unexpected drawback of scattering slender volumes of modern verse among novels is that you can’t really see them any more. So, when we redecorated my daughter’s bedroom and a small bookcase became surplus to requirements, I stole it for them. It’s right beside the door to the kitchen and already I’m reading more poetry than I’ve done for years. Hurrah!

At the moment I am having a Brontë fest. I reread Jane Eyre – it’s so good! And then I read Glass Town: The Imaginary World of the Brontës by Isabel Greenberg, which was fun and led me back to Juliet Barker’s The Brontës. It was abandoned half-read a couple of years ago but I am now fully absorbed in it. It is too unwieldy for the bus, so I am also rereading Wuthering Heights and loving it all over again.

And now, although I ought to be preparing a four-hour English lesson on answering the telephone and takng a message (four hours! I know! my lucky, lucky students), I will leave you with a quick list of books I’ve read recently that I recommend to you!

• The Absolute Book, by Elizabeth Knox. (Whenever I clap eyes on the spine of this novel, in my head I hear a voice saying ‘The absolute BOOK!’ with exactly the emphasis of a Georgette Heyer heroine gasping ‘You absolute SWINE!’) This is a novel which is always changing, never quite what it seems – characters move through different worlds and we move through different genres. A mash-up of Ruth Rendell, The Shadow of the Wind and Graham Joyce’s Some Kind of Fairy Tale, streaked with darkness and splendidly evocative, it is an enjoyable read slightly let down, I felt, by the neat ending.
• The Trick is to Keep Breathing, by Janice Galloway. I’ve had this book for twenty-five years and finally its moment arrived and it was worth it. In it Joy Stone, a drama teacher, chronicles her struggle with grief and mental breakdown; this sounds grim but it is clever and witty and hopeful as well as sad. I want to read more of her work now.
• The Queen of Air and Darkness, by T.H. White. Darker and crueller than The Sword in the Stone, this is an excoriation of the chivalric code with which Arthur’s court has become associated. White depicts it as either violent or ridiculous and the novel lurches between these two extremes. I found it uncomfortable to read, I think that’s the point. Soon: The Ill-Made Knight.

Happy October, everyone!

 

The Sword in the Stone, by T.H. White

I’ve had a copy of The Once and Future King hanging around for several years now, and every time I see it I think, ‘I really want to read that!’ and then I don’t. And I feel a little guilty because when I finally picked it up it wasn’t really to read it in its own right, as it were. As I may have mentioned, the third and last Sylvia Townsend Warner reading week is coming up. Since STW was accomplished at so many forms of literature, I’ve always tried to include a variety in my reading for this; she wrote a biography of T.H. White which I thought would be nice to write about for this year.

Alas, second-hand copies including delivery to Belgium are now so expensive that I have changed my mind. The very least I could do to make it up to T.H. seemed to write a post about this, his most famous book in his Arthurian quartet.

The Sword in the Stone is about the boyhood of King Arthur; specifically, his education. The boy Wart has been fostered by Sir Ector and brought up alongside Sir Ector’s biological son, Kay, in the Castle of the Forest Sauvage. Lost in the forest one day, Wart stumbles across Merlin’s cottage and Merlin decides to become his tutor. Naturally the lessons Merlin teaches are not the tedious grammar ones to which Wart has been accustomed up until now. He is transformed into different animals and birds and in one of my favourite episodes he and Kay meet Robin Hood and rescue Friar Tuck and the Dog Boy from Morgan le Fay’s fortress, CastleChariot. Finally, on a trip to a jousting tournament in London, Wart draws out a sword from an anvil because Kay needs it. This sword is the magic one which proves he must be the next king of England.

(John Lawrence, illustration for the Folio Society edition of The Once and Future King, 2013)

I will quote the description of Morgan Le Fay’s castle here because I love it so much:

It was a castle made entirely out of food, except that on the highest tower of all, a carrion crow was sitting, with an arrow in its beak. [...] It rose from its lake of milk in a mystic light of its own – in a greasy, buttery glow. It was the fairy aspect of Castle Chariot, which the Oldest Ones [...] had thought would be tempting to the children [Wart and Kay]. It was to tempt them to eat. [...] They plodded over the filthy drawbridge – a butter one, with cow hairs still in it – sinking to their ankles. [..] In the end they came to the inner chamber, where Morgan le Fay herself lay stretched upon her bed of glorious lard.

People sometimes talk about ‘comfort books’, and this is a comfort book. A ‘bed of glorious lard’! It is a comforting book to read, because it is amusing, it is about childhood, it is grounded in a wonderful natural world and it allows wish-fulfilment. Like Narnia, the world of the Castle of the Forest Sauvage is a place we long to visit. It is a self-consciously ‘hyperreal’ version of the Middle Ages, with proper snowy winters and old oak trees and feasts and jousting, all the Middle Ages one could wish for. Society is ordered and dangers are successfully overcome. And it is funny. However, it was also a comforting book for White to write. According to Kevin Crossley Holland, in the foreword to my edition, White had a miserable childhood and for the rest of his life used education as a means of comforting himself. So in this novel Wart learns what it is like to live in an ant society and a goose society; when to fear a pike; what falcons discuss at night. And we learn how to shoot a bow and joust a knight on horseback and hunt a wild boar – but like Wart, we have fun while we learn.

White writes in a dry, amusing tone and there are great comic moments in this novel. He also has a lot of fun with the concept of historical fiction, throwing anachronisms around gleefully to underline the fantastical nature of the book. Look, he seems to be telling us, it’s just a story, let’s enjoy ourselves! And we do.

(Photograph of T.H. White, found here)

Piranesi, by Susanna Clarke

ENTRY FOR THE NINETEENTH DAY OF THE SIXTH MONTH IN THE YEAR THE ALBATROSS CAME TO THE SOUTH-WESTERN HALLS
[...] On the way, the House showed me many wonders.
In the Forty-Fifth Vestibule I saw a Staircase that had become one vast bed of mussels. One of the Statues that lined the Wall of the Staircase was all but engulfed in a blue-black carapace of mussels with only half a staring Face and one white, out-flung Arm left free. I made a sketch of it in my Journal.
In the Fifty-Second Western Hall I came upon a Wall ablaze with so much golden Light that the Statues appeared to be dissolving into it. From there I passed into a cool little Antechamber with few Windows, where it was cool and shadowy. I saw the Statue of a Woman holding out a wide, flat Dish so that a Bear Cub could drink from it.

I have now read Piranesi and I am ready to tell you that it’s just as good as everyone says, albeit very different to Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell.

It is impossible to write very much about it without spoiling it, and one of the pleasures is that you really don’t know at first where it’s going. So I’ll just explain that it takes the form of a series of journal entries by Piranesi (not his real name) who inhabits a vast labyrinth of abandoned stone halls. Seas wash the lower ones and clouds float through the higher ones. Many of the halls contain statues, but apart from the birds and the fish Piranesi lives alone. He has explored many of the halls and noted down his observations of them, but he has not found their limits. On his travels, he has found the bones of thirteen different people, and he cares for them, bringing food, drink and lilies as offerings. Piranesi loves the House and appreciates its beauty. His observations are a tribute to it; they are also essential to his survival since he records the tides which sporadically sweep through and would drown him if they caught him.

(Piranesi, ‘Via Appia and Via Ardeatina’, etching from Le Antichita Romane, 1756; from here)

However, there is something unsettling about the world from the beginning. Piranesi does not seem to belong there. Among the marble and the fishes, he sniffs the smell of petrol, which is out of place in this car-less place. How does he know the smell of petrol? He finds crisp packets. He is visited twice a week by the Other, who gives him a pair of brightly coloured trainers. He has a sleeping bag, a torch, plastic bowls to catch rainwater. Despite his meticulous record-keeping, there are holes in his memory. His innocence is both charming and odd; is it the result of some trauma?

Do you trust the House? I ask Myself.
Yes, I answer Myself.
And if the House has made you forget, it has done so for good reason.
But I do not understand the reason.
It does not matter that you do not understand the reason. You are the Beloved Child of the House. Be comforted.

The Other is the one who has named Piranesi. He does not seem to feel the beauty or the kindness of the House. He believes that that it is the repository of some secret and powerful knowledge which he intends to find and exploit. He knows that to stay too long in this world is to pay a price. He perceives the House as a prison, which presumably is why he has chosen the name Piranesi.

(Piranesi, ‘The Pier with the Chains’, etching from Carceri d'Inventione, 1750/1761; from here)

The question that the reader has is not, What will happen to Piranesi? but, What is this place and what does it mean? This places Piranesi in a tradition of Absurdist and Surreal literature in which characters are trapped in places that do not seem to be our world and are forced to reflect on themselves. I am thinking of Silvina Ocampo’s The Topless Tower, Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, that sort of literature, though there are probably better-known examples which I just can’t remember. Unusually, Piranesi experiences the labyrinthine House as a benign, living entity. He feels a religious awe for it and his existence, his record-keeping, is a sort of worship. And without, I hope, giving too much away, it is a place that others long for even before they have seen it (this is explored in the interviews at the end of the novel). It is both a place of escape and a prison.

The novel abounds in literary allusions which give us further ways to understand the House. There is an epigraph from The Magician’s Nephew by C.S. Lewis, and at the heart of that novel is the Wood Between the Worlds which contains the entrances to many different universes. Something similar occurs in this novel. There is also an abandoned city (although Charn is dead, and the House is living) and a magician who likes to experiment upon people, both of which may be relevant to Piranesi.

Near the beginning of the novel, Piranesi encounters an albatross.

Still it continued, straight towards me, and the strangest thought came to me: perhaps the albatross and I were destined to merge and become another order of being entirely: an Angel! This thought both excited and frightened me, but still I remained, arms outstretched, mirroring the albatross’s  flight. [...] The moment that he reached me – the moment that I thought we would collide like Planets and become one! – I gave out a sort of gasping cry – Aahhhh! In the same instant, I felt some sort of pent-up tension go out of me, a tension I did not know I had until that moment. Vast, white wings passed over me.

Far from shooting it with a crossbow, as did the Ancient Mariner, he feels kinship with the bird, concern for its chick. And the arrival of the albatross heralds significant changes for Piranesi.

(Piranesi, detail from ‘The Triumphal Arch’, etching from Grotteschi, 1748; from here)

A final literary allusion is to ‘The Garden of Forking Paths’ by Jorge Luis Borges. In this story, two characters discuss the ancestor of one of them, who declared he would write a novel and create a garden labyrinth. When he died, his relatives found a jumble of papers which made no sense. Stephen Albert, the man who has translated these papers, explains that novel is the labyrinth. In most fiction, characters are presented with questions, they make a choice and the consequences of that choice follow. But in this novel, every possible choice is explored, every forking path, and the book just carries on expanding. This seems to me to bear a relationship to the nature of the House, which is endless and apparently living. Perhaps it is created by the collective imagination, constantly expanding, prison and freedom. It is, after all, an artifice constructed between the sea and the sky.

reading notes, 5th March 2021

(Dogwalking chez gallimaufry; French school, early nineteenth century, A Young Woman Standing Reading a Book in the Woods, her Dog beside her, oil on canvas; found here)

Writing about books takes me an insanely long time, and sometimes I don’t have an insanely long time to devote to it. Sometimes I read a book and I enjoy it but I don’t have anything to say about it. So I thought what I might do, fairly regularly, is write a short post about what I’ve been reading and what I’m looking forward to reading, no real analysis, no spoilers. And then I hope that in the comments, you’ll tell us what you’ve been reading and are looking forward to reading.

I have just finished...

Once Upon a River by Diane Setterfield. I found it in the library and for some reason I borrowed it. ‘For some reason’ because I read her first novel, The Thirteenth Tale, and began by enjoying it but found the ending unsatisfying – annoying, even. And then I read her second novel, Bellman & Black, and did not like it at all. Still, there was something about the way she writes... So I’m very glad that I persevered because I really did enjoy Once Upon a River and it was exactly the right book at the right time.

One midwinter night a man bursts into The Swan at Radcot, on the Thames, carrying a dead child in his arms, and collapses. Miraculously, the child returns to life. But who is she? Is she Amelia Vaughan, who was abducted two years ago and never seen again? Her parents believe so. Is she Alice Armstrong, whose desperate mother has drowned herself? Her father claims her. Could she be Ann, Lily White’s little sister, even though Lily is now a woman in her forties? And how can a dead child revive? It’s a novel about the stories people tell themselves, as entertainment or exploitation or as a means of surviving, where they come from and how they can change. It brings a nineteenth-century community to life, it’s funny and sad but ultimately a cheering book, and it features a sapient pig.

I am looking forward to...

Piranesi, by Susanna Clarke. For reasons too boring to list here, I had ordered a copy of this before it was published but was only able to get my hands on it (thanks to my kind mother) yesterday. Entirely by coincidence, I had been having a tiny Susanna Clarke fest. My daughter had received the DVD of Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell for her birthday (yes it was from me, pretending to be the hens; I knew she’d enjoy it and I am of course softening her up for when she’s old enough to read the novel). We watched that, and I’d been rereading stories from The Ladies of Grace Adieu. Piranesi lives in a wonderful house quite alone, except for Tuesdays and Fridays when he’s visited by his only friend, the Other. But then messages start appearing, chalked onto the pavements: there is someone else in the house. A friend or, as the Other tells Piranesi, a foe?

What have you just finished? And what are you looking forward to reading next?

Flyaway, by Kathleen Jennings

Kathleen Jennings is an Australian illustrator with an interesting blog. I can’t remember where I first saw her work, but I do remember seeing a warm recommendation of Flyaway, her first novel, from Terri Windling. Without bothering to find out anything about it, I spent my Christmas book token on a copy and settled down to read it by the stove, one icy evening.

Our narrator is Bettina Scott, aged nineteen, living with her mother Nerida in the prettiest and tidiest house in Runagate, a small Australian town in a district ‘somewhere between the Coral Sea and the Indian Ocean but on the way to nowhere’. Despite Nerida’s careful homemaking and tender pruning of Bettina into a model of 1950s girlhood decades too late, all is not quite perfect in the Scott household since Bettina’s ‘mocking father and unloving brothers’ vanished three years previously. Bettina is busy ‘scrubbing out a little more, too, of that old childish self – the restless temper, the loose-limbed insolence’, almost but not entirely successfully. Sometimes a lie escapes. Sometimes she has a nip of the cooking brandy.

Beyond the lattice of roads, paddocks and houses, the land around Runagate has ‘a fragile beauty’ which gets ‘into your bones, into your veins’. It is a land of ‘hills and scrub’, ‘purple shadows’ and tough trees: ‘Bottle and box, paper and iron, thorned and blossomed under the unutterable light [...] Trees like lanterns, like candles, ghosts and bones’. It is a haunted landscape: ‘Memory seeped and frayed there’. It is beautiful but dangerous. People vanish into the landscape, just disappear. Bettina’s family are not the only ones.

Two strangers are seen in town and someone paints the word ‘monsters’ on the Scotts’ fence. Believing that the strangers are her brothers, returned, Bettina and two of her former schoolfriends, Gary and Trish, follows them, a small quest with a Tupperware box of sandwiches. (Trish’s mother vanished too, years ago. And so did Gary’s uncle.)

It’s a short book, complex, thorny and tangled as the lantern bush that engulfs the village school at Woodwild. I read in a state of constant fear, yet enjoying the rich and evocative prose. Bettina’s repressed and partial narrative is interwoven with stories about other disappearances and explain them in terms of magic and monstrosity, borrowing motifs from folk lore and fairy tale. The further into the bush the three companions go, the more threatening the landscape becomes. The stories are chilling: a shape-shifting megarrity which will take your place at the dinner table, a wolfish Pied Piper, a bone horse. What do these stories mean? What kernel do they transform? Fantasy and reality become so deeply entwined there is no separating them any more (perhaps just a bit too confusing, ultimately?).

Far too creepy to read on your own at night, you will enjoy this in daylight if you like the work of Kelly Link, Zoe Gilbert or Angela Carter. But really, it is unlike anything I have ever read: an eerie song to the power of land and story.

(Kathleen Jennings, Into the Woods, silhouette; from her portfolio here)

Women’s Weird: Strange Stories by Women, 1890–1940, edited by Melissa Edmundson

(Steps, by Simon Marsden)

I started to write this at the beginning of the half-term holiday, for Hallowe’en and to participate in Witch Week. It was a sullen, grey day, we’d had to cancel the little party for my daughter due to tighter Covid restrictions and even the prospect of an extra week’s half-term holiday was failing to lift my spirits. So I did not get far with it, but now that the sun is shining and the positive rate of new infections is at last falling, everything seems a lot better and I seem to be regaining the urge to write.

Here, belatedly, are my thoughts on Women’s Weird, a most enjoyable collection, and on ‘ghost stories’ in general. It is Friday 13th, so a not inauspicious day for something uncanny.

The book is exactly as the title describes it and includes work by American and British authors from the tail end of the Victorian period until 1940. Although many of them are well known (if surprising: I had no idea that D.K. Broster wrote ghost stories, although why shouldn’t she?) – and include These include E. Nesbit (of course!), Charlotte Perkins Gilman and Edith Wharton – only a couple of the stories appear in other, similar anthologies (of which I seem to have rather more than I thought, perhaps they have been spawning while I wasn’t looking), so there is plenty of new material here for long-standing fans of creepiness.

Crucially, these aren’t just effective ghost stories. Edmundson has been looking specifically for ‘Weird’ stories, and she discusses what Weird is in her (excellent) introduction to the collection. As a very bald summary of her definition, Weird stories engage with the supernatural but are ‘something more than the traditional ghost story’, eliciting ‘a profound sense of dread [H.P. Lovecraft’s words]’ as well as ‘a stirring, a touching of nerves not usually sensitive, an awakening to more than fear – but to something like awareness or conviction or even memory [Mary Butts’ words]’, ‘an alternative path for the exploration of the numinous [Jeff and Ann VanderMeer’s words]’. The stories seek to unsettle through disturbing manifestations of the supernatural, shaking our complacent view of reality. This collection, Edmundson explains, reflects the fact that ‘During the late Victorian period and into the early twentieth century, women’s supernatural fiction became much darker as newer, more ominous presences emerged [...] This collection surveys some of these experimental forms to show how these authors moved beyond the traditional ghost story and into areas of Weird fiction and dark fantasy.’

For me, a spooky story provides two experiences: the story while you’re reading it, and the story when you’ve finished it. Obviously all literary forms do this, but it seems to me especially significant in this genre. While you’re reading it, you should feel chilled, horrified, unsettled. This is difficult for a writer to achieve. Readers are cynical and they know the tropes. Don’t disturb the ancient grave or hiding place; don’t ignore the old tales. Evil deeds have consequences. Don’t be a sweet young wife or (in this collection anyway) a dog. (In fact, it may be wisest to focus on a sense of inevitability about the story than to attempt a shocking twist.) But the end of a ghost or Weird story often forces you to reinterpret what has gone before: perhaps it offers an explanation, perhaps a catharsis. A good story does both elements satisfyingly well; an exceptional story explores something else at the same time and means that you can reread the story even if you ‘know the ending’ and still find new and interesting aspects.

So, the first story in the collection, ‘The Weird of the Walfords’, contains few surprises for the seasoned reader of haunted tales. The young heir to the Walfords hates the ancestral family bed in which so many of his forefathers have died; when he inherits Walford Grange he takes an axe and chops it to pieces. Of course, bad things ensue. But what is young Humphrey really trying to destroy along with the bed? What does it represent to him – death, the stifling responsibilities of an aristocrat to the buildings and things he is supposed to keep in trust for the next generation? And in a weird and horrible way, does he get what he wants in the end?

(Ecclescraig House, by Simon Marsden)

I like best stories that don’t explain away too much. For me, ‘Let Loose’ – a truly spine-tingling account of an architect (and his dog!) who descends into a bone-stacked crypt to copy a wall-painting – is most effective when you don’t quite know what’s happening. The explanation was a bit weak, frankly, in comparison with the power of the haunting and left me with too many questions which I won’t pose here because I don’t want to spoil it for you. In creating an atmosphere of dread and winding up the tension, it is supremely skilful. It is also significant because it invents a structure of ghost story (according to Wikipedia: 1. characterful setting; 2. gentleman scholar; 3. antiquarian object whose disturbance awakens a supernatural being) which was later to be associated with M.R. James. Let it now be associated with Mary Cholmondely!

‘The Twelve Apostles’ by Eleanor Scott follows in this Cholmondely tradition and is also an excellent example of its kind. Even though you know what’s coming, and are muttering to yourself, ‘No no no don’t do it’, it’s still shocking.

(Melrose Abbey, by Simon Marsden)

‘The Shadow’, by E. Nesbit, is as different as can be from ‘Let Loose’. There is no ghost, only a shadow haunting a modern house and three people in it: a young married couple and their friend Miss Eastwich who visits them after the (never-named) husband asks her to come and cheer up his sweet young wife Mabel, who is poorly. The husband fears it is some curse; he must have a guilty conscience but he claims he does not, and we never find out – though perhaps it is connected somehow with Miss Eastwich...

Specifically feminist concerns feature in many stories, such as ‘The Giant Wistaria’ and ‘Kerfol’, while Margery Lawrence subverts a symbol of ordinary domesticity and the feminine rôles of wife, nurse and cook in the delightfully sinister ‘The Haunted Saucepan’. ‘The Book’, by Margaret Irwin, describes the collapse of a middle-class family in a truly nasty case of evil influence.

My favourite of all, however, was the last one: ‘With and Without Buttons’, by Mary Butts. Two bored sisters are irritated by their neighbour and decide to cook up a ghost to frighten him. Is what follows their own creation, gone horribly out of control, or something else that was just waiting for an opportunity? It is one of a pair of stories – the other being D.K. Broster’s ‘Couching at the Door’ – which turns articles of women’s clothing into something life-threatening (to men).

Hallowe’en and Witch Week may have ended but this time of year is perfect for stories like this – and a second volume, Women’s Weird 2, was published just a few weeks ago. And remember: Covid 19 restrictions are depressing, but at least you’re not being menaced by powers beyond the grave.

(The photographs in this post are all by Simon Marsden, whose beautiful book The Haunted Realm captured my imagination as a teenager. His pictures derive their eerie, Weird atmosphere from his use of infrared film)

Hexwood, by Diana Wynne Jones

Some thousand years ago in February I wrote about The Starless Sea by Erin Morgenstern and postulated that it might have been influenced by video games. (This was, I admit, quite a reach since I don’t play video games, but knowing very little about something has rarely prevented me from pontificating.) Anyway, in the comments we wondered about a subgenre of fiction influenced by video games. Chris mentioned Codex by Lev Grossman but I don’t think we came up with any others.

Now, perhaps here is a third novel to add to that subgenre: Diana Wynne Jones’s Hexwood, from 1993, which uses elements of gaming as its plot in a far more fundamental way than I think Morgenstern did.

First of all, what is Hexwood? To teenaged Ann, lying in bed with a virus, it is the housing estate on which she lives – with Hexwood Farm, a derelict old place behind crumbling walls. People enter it but never seem to leave. To Hume, it is a woodland filled with strange creatures, a castle, a white van. To the Reigners, it is an old library and archive on Earth, a remote and backward outpost in their intergalactic empire.

But in all these guises Hexwood houses the Bannus, an ancient computer whose function is to make decisions by creating an ever-expanding theta-field and:

live action scenarios of any set of facts and people you care to feed into it. [It] acts little plays for you, until you find the right one and tell it to stop.

What does that mean? It means that it generates an alternative reality into which it pulls people and circumstances. In this alternative reality the people play out different scenarios, on and on, until an outcome is reached and someone stops the machine. And each of these scenarios is itself a sort of alternate reality, since the people playing them have no memory of the previous versions.

At the beginning of the book, a young man called Harrison Scudamore has succeeded in getting himself employed by Rayner Hexwood, the manifestation of the Reigner Corporation on Earth, and has switched on the Bannus. More and more people are being sucked into it to play out its scenarios. Can anyone stop it – and how? 

This device of the playing out of versions of a similar story is very like that of many video games, in which you have a character and a set of circumstances and at each stage a variety of possible decisions which shape the way that the game moves. And one (or possibly more!) set of decisions will lead you to a successful outcome and the winning of the game.

In many of her novels, Diana Wynne Jones uses alternate worlds and realities (The Homeward Bounders, Fire and Hemlock, the Chrestomanci series, to name but a few), so the conceit of the computer game is obviously attractive to her. The Bannus layers different realities over each other, but what is ‘real’ and what is ‘game’ is further complicated by the lies and misdirections of some characters and the confusion of others over who they ‘really’ are – since they inhabit more than one identity. Furthermore, time is not linear but skips back and forth. The Fisher King has apparently been in his castle for years at the beginning of the novel, but in fact only arrives there halfway through. (This makes much more sense in the book.)

Hexwood I think goes further, in asking questions about free will and control, which again come from the device of the video game. When someone plays a video game, they know they are playing and they know what their goal is, even if they only have control over their own character. In Hexwood you are in the game, but you don’t know it, you think you are in the ‘real’ world and acting from your own free will. The Bannus is the one who is playing, and without your consent or even knowledge, since your memory is wiped each time.

Wynne Jones make the parallel with political systems clear. If the Bannus, compelling people to play a game they do not understand and removing parts of their memories to do so, has a sinister aspect, how much more does the Reigner Corporation, which seeks to control and (mis)shape people to suit their own ends, treating them as having no more value than some pixels on a screen? The training of children to become Servants – official assassins to the Reigners – is truly chilling. Yet the power of the Corporation, like that of the Bannus, seems so great as to be unstoppable.

Of course, there is a lot of fun too. Wynne Jones also throws in dragons, a robot, Arthurian legend, a magician and problematic middle managers, all handled with her customary verve and humour. It is complex and even the outline I have given is not accurate because what happens right up until the end of the novel is that your perception of what is happening – and even what the Bannus is – is constantly shifting (due to the lies and misdirections I mentioned before). It’s also a timely reminder that the checks and balances built in to any system of government are both deeply important and deeply vulnerable so we should fight for them while we still have them, ahem British government (yes I know it is a cheap political point sorry).

What do you think? Have you read Hexwood? Can you think of any other novels which use video games in some way?

The end of the holidays (warning! a long post!)

(Boats at Pin Mill, Suffolk)

With the beginning of September, Belgian teachers and students return to school like swallows to the south. Last week I squeezed into the tiny study, nearly breaking my neck on assorted heaps of books, to start preparing for the new school year. Quite how it will pan out, of course I do not know, although early signs indicate that a great deal more cleaning than usual will be involved.

So here I am at the computer again after a lovely summer. Despite lurking Covid-19, the horror of the explosion in Beirut and the absolutely disgusting re-emergence of immigrant hatred expressed by British politicians and public, I have enjoyed myself. I have even been travelling! And what is peculiar is that I have travelled more than usual (well, I did in July; since I came home I’ve barely left the house...).

First, we visited some friends in France, in the mountains near Chamonix. It was astonishingly beautiful! My daughter, who has never been in mountains before, went slightly crazy – it was a mighty contrast to the flat Flemish countryside.

Then, we took advantage of what turned out to be a relatively brief period of time when one could travel to the UK without quarantining, and visited my family for the first time since the world turned topsy-turvy. This was a strange but also happy experience.

(This is the house in Essex designed by Grayson Perry, which we peered at through the hedge.)

Back here in Belgium I have started going for a run a few times a week in a feeble effort to become fitter – and I do mean feeble: dog walkers overtake me as I wheeze along. Surely at some point I will (a) improve and stop looking such a wally and (b) actually start to enjoy the experience, aren’t there supposed to be endorphins involved somewhere?

I am also – roll of drums – taking driving lessons. After I passed my theory test a hundred years ago my husband said he would teach me to drive. Readers, this will surprise you, but our lessons were not a success. So now I am taking lessons from a proper instructor, who specialises in teaching weedy people who are scared of everything and don’t really want to learn to drive anyway. (That is me.) So far no one has died, although my heart did almost give out when we had to drive on the motorway last week. So. Much. Terror. And my instructor shouting, ‘You must drive faster Helen!’ when I swear my molars were flying out the back of my head there was so much g-force.

Naturally I have been reading... and here are a few books I read.

I am working my way verrrry slowly, for it is BIG, through Fiona McCarthy’s biography of William Morris. Morris attended the boys’ public school Marlborough College not long after it had been founded. It turns out that there was a massive riot there in 1851, ‘the Rebellion’, in revenge for disciplinary measures taken against boys for bullying peasants and dancing by moonlight; the boys went berserk and threw fireworks at the masters, trashed the school and marched on the local town. For weeks on end! They even burnt the headmaster’s manuscript copy of his translation of Sophocles! School life has become considerably duller since the mid-nineteenth century, perhaps for the best.

I am also working my way, less slowly, through She Merchants, Buccaneers and Gentlewomen: British Women in India by Katie Hickman. This is a fascinating book and if the beginning of term doesn’t kill me dead I plan to write about it here.

Some months ago I read an article by Samantha Shannon recommending Under a Pendulum Sun, a novel by Jeanette Ng. With such a splendid title I was reaching for my purse even before I saw that it is about Victorian missionaries in Fairyland, with strong Brontë overtones. The Revd Laon Helstone has travelled to Arcadia, land of the Fae, to convert the inhabitants to Christianity. When his letters to his sister Cathy cease, she goes in search of him but no sooner arrives in Arcadia than is pent up in the creepy house of Gethsemane. Cathy’s problem is as much ‘reading’ the land and its people as it is finding Laon and surviving her encounter with Queen Mab and her fairy court. Ng’s Arcadia is properly weird and her Brontë references add depth (her version of Jane Eyre’s first encounter with Rochester is particularly cleverly done). Either I or the book ran out of steam a bit at the end – me, probably – but I do recommend this anyway.

Back in the day Ruth Rendall was pitched as P.D. James’s rival to queen of crime writers. But for me, Rendall has always been superior: James is good at place but Rendall’s characters are acutely (dispassionately!) observed and even her monsters have a credible psychological depth to a degree that James never achieves. The House of Stairs is one of her Barbara Vine novels, and is narrated by Lizzie who, by chance, encounters Bell, a woman she had known in the 1960s who has just been released from prison. Feeling compelled to write down the experiences that led to that long-ago murder, Lizzie allows herself to be drawn back into Bell’s life due to a sense of complicity in what happened and with possibly yet further terrible consequences. You may consider it as a warning against reading too much Henry James...

So how was your summer?