William Mayne's Low Tide interested me a lot when I first read it in the 1990s. It's set in New Zealand - which always tends to pique the interest of locals such as myself, and while I'm not sure that he does a great job of reproducing our manners and mores, the story itself is an arresting one. This is how Google Books describes it:
Set in New Zealand at the turn of the century, this exhilarating story of survival and adventure finds Charlie Snelling, his sister, and his Māori best friend swept up in a giant green tidal wave that carries them up high in the mountains to the old wild man called Koroua. What must they do to survive and find the way home?Spoiler alert: They do eventually make their way down to the shore, only to find their town completely deserted and filled with sand and silt. But there's something just a little bit ... off about it. It looks similar, but not exactly the same.
To make a long story short, it turns out that there are two virtually identical towns set on different inlets. The one they live in was built after the other one was abandoned for various safety reasons. The new town was constructed on precisely the same model as the old one, though, which explains that strange moment of déjà vu when they stumbled into the latter by mistake, and found all their friends gone and the buildings half-buried by the tsunami.
It's a typically tricksy and laconically narrated William Mayne story: quite demanding even for its intended audience of older children, but also satisfactory in that he doesn't talk down to his readers.
He looks harmless enough in the picture above, doesn't he? Almost like an old basset hound, with those two white sidelocks for ears. However:
In 2004, Mayne was charged with eleven counts of indecent assaults of "young girl fans" aged between eight and sixteen. At trial one victim gave evidence of events some forty years in the past. According to The Guardian, the prosecutor said Mayne had "treated young visitors as adults". He was described in the courtroom as "the greatest living writer of children's books in English". Mayne had pleaded guilty to the charges, but his solicitor said he had done so while under huge stress and would try to clear his name. On conviction, Mayne was imprisoned for two and a half years and was placed on the sex offenders register for life. According to The Guardian, "Mayne's books were largely deliberately removed from shelves from 2004 onwards", as a result of his conviction.It's rather like Low Tide: two towns, side by side on almost identical inlets, one full of bustle and life, the other completely deserted and left to the mercy of wind and weather. The first is his stellar reputation before the scandal; the second his status as a cancelled individual afterwards.- Wikipedia: William Mayne
Trying to reread William Mayne now forces you to shift from that lively village of swift empathetic insights and strange, sometimes supernatural, fun, to the other town: the one where you have to hang your head in shame and watch armfuls of books being plucked from the shelves before being sent off to the nearest landfill for composting.
As for Mayne himself, he was "found dead at his home in Thornton Rust, North Yorkshire, on the morning of 24 March 2010." There were, we're informed, no suspicious circumstances; in other words, no reason to suspect suicide or foul play.
I think that the first book I ever read by William Mayne was All the King's Men. It's a very odd book indeed, a collection of three longish short stories. The first, title story concerns the doings of a group of dwarfs who feel oppressed by the lack of respect they've been receiving at court as the "King's Men." They run away from the palace, but are soon daunted by bad weather and lack of food and shelter.
Unlike the hero of Edgar Allan Poe's grand guignol classic "Hop-Frog," Mayne's protagonists are quite pleased to be found and brought back to their comfortable berths - albeit with a token slap on the wrist for their presumption.
The mockery they have to deal with is certainly real, but they are nevertheless forced to accept it and make do at the end. The story gripped me at the time because of Mayne's obvious empathy with his characters and sympathy for their dilemma. Like Jack London's equally moving "Told in the Drooling Ward," it's never really left my mind since.
It convinced me, among other things, that Mayne was a man of strange understandings and considerable delicacy of mind: another reason that the news of his conviction for indecent assault hit us all so hard.
About a year ago I wrote a piece, "Must We Burn Alice Munro?", about this same dilemma of whether or not we can continue in good conscience to read authors who've been outed in such a way. Can I, for instance, keep on enjoying Neil Gaiman's work after all the allegations of sexual misconduct which have surfaced recently?
Clearly no simple, off-the-cuff answer to so loaded a question can be expected to apply to every situation. I was forced instead to conclude my piece with a series of further questions:
Did Dickens lose any readers over the revelation of his cruel, public rejection of his wife in order to pursue an affair with the young actress Nelly Ternan? Nelly, it seems, had little choice in the matter - neither did Mrs. Dickens. His saccharine morality showed its pinchbeck quality once and for all in his later life. And yet we continue to pore over the complexities of his last fictions, full of young heroines sacrificing themselves for self-pitying older men.In other words, while "there may be a few temporary blips in sales ... more readers are drawn to turbulent, demon-ridden souls such as Dostoyevsky and Dickens than they are to the sanity and order of better-balanced authors."
Maybe it shouldn't be so - but it is. Whatever (for instance) your opinion of J. K. Rowling's views on tne inviolability of gender roles, Harry Potter remains a fixture on our shelves and our streaming services.
The interesting thing about Gaiman, in particular, is that these details about his private life have given me a number of new insights into his work. He sounds like a pretty sick bastard to me - in particular, if the accusations about his conduct with a young New Zealand nanny are accurate: "Call me Master" indeed! But then so is Dream, the protagonist of his Sandman stories, both as he appears in the the late 80s / early 90s comics and in the more recent 2022-25 TV series.
Dream (or Morpheus, as I suppose we should call him) sends a woman who rejects him to hell for ten thousand years as revenge for her presumption. Another of his ex-lovers, the muse Calliope, is repeatedly raped by a young writer in order to help him gain inspiration. She remarks, when Dream eventually decides to save her from this fate, that he must have changed over the past century or so. The older version would have refused to help her on principle.
The more closely you look, the more obvious it is that Gaiman has been half-condemning, half-defending his own sexual peccadilloes throughout his whole career. The disguise, now, seems as paper-thin as Dickens' series of late novels defending the idea of young women becoming enamoured of older men.
Whether or not Gaiman manages to extricate himself from his present difficulties concerns only him and his publicist, I would say. But, if anything, his work has become more interesting now it's revealed to have been so profoundly personal all along. I find I can continue to read it - mainly because Gaiman the writer is superior to Gaiman the man. The ugly face of libertinism, its callous cruelty, is shown in his fiction - not, I think, because Gaiman is a lying hypocrite, but because the logic of the story and the reality of his characters forces him to do so.
There's an interesting attempt to summarise the case against Mayne in John Clute's Encyclopedia of SF:
Soon after [the success of his "pared to the bone and fantasticated" later work], Mayne's life and work were tragically darkened – a tragedy first and foremost for his victims – when he was charged with child abuse in 2004 and imprisoned for two and one half years. His oeuvre went out of print, his books were removed from libraries, which was expectable; but his name was also conspicuously cancelled from the influential 1001 Children's Books You Must Read Before You Grow Up (2009) edited by Julia Ecclestone, an erasure with grave implications. His death may eventually have the effect of allowing his books to live again.As usual with this most fascinatingly layered of reference works, there's a lot going on in this short paragraph. There's a (parenthetical) acknowledgment that Mayne's abuse was "a tragedy first and foremost for his victims," but the burden of the piece seems, nevertheless, to be on the cost to him and his oeuvre. That last sentence sounds far more heartfelt: "His death may eventually have the effect of allowing his books to live again."
There's also a sideswipe at Julia "Ecclestone" (a misprint for Eccleshare), and her decision to "cancel" Mayne so conspicuously "from the influential 1001 Children's Books You Must Read Before You Grow Up (2009)", which the authors of the entry describe as "an erasure with grave implications."
Interestingly enough, this same Julia Eccleshare wrote the Guardian obituary for Mayne roughly a year after the publication of 1001 Children's Books You Must Read Before You Grow Up. Like most such long and well-considered assessments, it shows signs of having been written long before the eruption of the scandal, then recast in a hurry with a eye to those details:
William Mayne, who has died aged 82, was one of the most highly regarded writers of the postwar "golden age" of children's literature. His output was huge – well over 100 titles, encompassing novels and latterly picture books, rich in a sense of place and feel for the magical, and beautifully written. He wrote several books a year in a career that spanned more than half a century and won him the Carnegie medal and the Guardian children's fiction prize.That first paragraph could have been written at any time; the next one, however, shows signs of having been hastily supplemented with new details to undermine any notion of a Mayne "comeback":
Although never widely popular and sometimes thought of as inaccessible for his young readers, his distinctive, allusive and spare writing had considerable influence and, despite being sometimes out of fashion, his books were often thought due for a comeback. That was never to happen. Instead, Mayne's books were largely deliberately removed from shelves from 2004 onwards following his conviction and prison sentence for indecent assault on children.
The rest of the obituary runs through his career more or less chronologically, from his early choir school stories, "based on his own experiences as a chorister at Canterbury Cathedral from 1937 until 1942, the only part of his education he valued," to the more fantastic and supernatural themes he explored from the mid-1960s onwards.
Numerous encomia are quoted along the way:
A Swarm in May was hailed as a "minor masterpiece ... one of the 20th-century's best children's books" by Frank Eyre in British Children's Books in the Twentieth Century (1971).
... Mayne also received great praise for Choristers' Cake. A review in the Times Literary Supplement highlighted the already clearly recognisable qualities of Mayne's writing while also pointing out the difficulties:Its virtuosity and verbal richness, as well as the undoubted oddness of many of its characters, put it beyond the range of the average reader. But for the child who can meet its demands it will be a deep and memorable experience. In insight, in gaiety, in exuberance of idea and language, it is in a class apart. Mr Mayne is certainly the most interesting, as the most unpredictable, figure in children's books today.
He's also described as "a master – the master in contemporary English writing for children – of setting". At length, though, the scandal must be faced again:
In 2004, Mayne was convicted of 11 charges of sexual abuse with young girls and was sentenced to two and a half years in prison and placed on the sex offenders' register for life. It was a death knell for his books, but it did not stop Mayne from writing and he was still doing so at the time of his death. Print on demand had recently helped Mayne, with reprints of some of his titles due to become available on Faber Finds.How different is the tone of that "It was a death knell for his books" from the SF Encyclopedia's "His death may eventually have the effect of allowing his books to live again" ...
Eccleshare's obituary concludes as follows:
The son of a doctor, Mayne was born in Hull and lived in the Yorkshire Dales for most of his life. He was famously reclusive. When asked if he would be interviewed for a children's books magazine, Mayne replied: "I am sure this sort of thing never works. I shall go nowhere to accomplish it and I'm sure others would find it unrewarding to come here. I have not sensed the lack of my not appearing in your neologies ... but if you find it necessary to molest my ancient solitary peace for the sake of your new, maddening piece, I am prepared to tolerate for a short time some person guaranteed not to be strident."While the obituary as a whole was presumably composed for The Guardian's file of pre-cooked celebrity obituaries sometime before 2004, the choice of this particular quotation for its last paragraph does sound a bit pointed: the term "molest", in particular, seems a strange one for Mayne to have chosen, and given that it was a series of young fans and visitors "guaranteed not to be strident" he was eventually convicted of abusing, the irony is probably intentional.
Clearly the omission of Mayne from Julia Eccleshare's 1001 Children's Books You Must Read Before You Grow Up wasn't accidental.
Which leaves us where, exactly? This is certainly not the piece I would like to write about William Mayne, teasing out the subtleties and constant spirit of experiment to be found in his fiction, old and new. As Julia Eccleshare puts it:
in general in Mayne's books, the characters are quiet and gentle. There are no heroics. If there is power, it usually lies within the land and its past; it can temporarily be used by humans passing through. This absence of heroes and the lack of major dramatic focus, combined with increasing obliqueness, caused Mayne to become less popular with children by the mid-1960s as his slower-paced stories failed to chime with the expectations of his readers. But, even before then, Mayne was always admired more by adults than children.Different children have different expectations. I, too, found Mayne's books and elliptical dialogue difficult to follow at times, but for me that was a refreshing change from the "chosen one" action-hero fantasies which were the norm even then.
Nor did Mayne seem to have a distinct ideological axe to grind:
A recurrent theme of Mayne's stories was how children could see and accept magic and magical explanations, while the adults around them create rational stories to explain the same outcome. There was no sentimentality around Mayne's sense of children's belief. Instead he simply posited that children are as at home with unreality as reality, while adults take a different view. Mayne somehow seemed able to take both views himself, perhaps because he described his writing by saying: "All I am doing is looking at things now and showing them to myself when young."He may have been - was, in fact - a flawed, childish man, but that is one of the reasons he was able to write so well from a child's perspective, without sentimentality, as Eccleshare admits above.
That trait of being able to take two views at once is crucial to understanding and appreciating his books. They're not action-packed - the land is more of an actor than the characters most of the time, as Eccleshare reminds us.
Like her, I doubt that there'll ever be a full-fledged Mayne revival. He never really was a bestseller, and his books were "always admired more by adults than children." I gather, though, that he's already finding his way back to a quiet vogue as a concocter of subtle and psychologically acute supernatural stories.
If the Weird Tales community can forgive H. P. Lovecraft and Robert E. Howard their multiple personal and stylistic transgressions, I can't foresee William Mayne having too much trouble.
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Novels:
- Follow the Footprints (1953)
- Follow the Footprints. Illustrated by Shirley Hughes. 1953. Oxford Children’s Library. London: Oxford University Press, 1958.
- The World Upside Down (1954)
- The World Upside Down. Illustrated by Shirley Hughes. London: Geoffrey Cumberlege / Oxford University Press, 1954.
- Choir School Series (1955-1963)
- A Swarm in May (1955)
- A Swarm in May. Illustrated by C. Walter Hodges. 1955. Oxford Children’s Library. London: Oxford University Press, 1962.
- Choristers' Cake (1956)
- Chorister’s Cake. Illustrated by C. Walter Hodges. 1956. London: Oxford University Press, 1960.
- Cathedral Wednesday (1960)
- Cathedral Wednesday. 1960. Leicester: Brockhampton Press, 1972.
- Words and Music (1963)
- A Swarm in May (1955)
- The Member for the Marsh (1956)
- The Member for the Marsh. Illustrated by Lynton Lamb. 1956. London: The Children’s Book Club, 1956.
- The Blue Boat (1957)
- A Grass Rope (1957)
- Underground Alley (1958)
- [as 'Dynely James'] The Gobbling Billy (1959)
- [with Dick Caesar] The Gobbling Billy. 1959. Knight Books. Leicester: Brockhampton, 1969.
- The Rolling Season (1960)
- The Changeling (1961)
- The Glass Ball. Illustrated by Janet Duchesne (1961)
- The Twelve Dancers (1962)
- The Twelve Dancers. Illustrated by Lynton Lamb. 1962. Puffin Books. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1964.
- Sand (1962)
- Sand. Illustrated by Margery Gill. 1964. Puffin Books. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1967.
- Plot Night (1963)
- The Changeling (1963)
- A Parcel of Trees (1963)
- A Parcel of Trees. Illustrated by Margery Gill. Puffin Books. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1963.
- Underground Alley (1963)
- Whistling Rufus (1964)
- No More School (1965)
- No More School. Illustrated by Peter Warner. 1965. Puffin Books. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972.
- Pig in the Middle (1965)
- Earthfasts Series (1966-2000)
- Earthfasts (1966)
- Earthfasts. 1966. Puffin Books. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1969.
- Cradlefasts (1995)
- Candlefasts (2000)
- Candlefasts. London: Hodder Children’s Books, 2000.
- Earthfasts (1966)
- The Battlefield (1967)
- The Battlefield. Illustrated by Mary Russon. 1967. Puffin Books. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1971.
- The Old Zion (1967)
- Over the Hills and Far Away [aka 'The Hill Road']. Illustrated by Krystyna Turska (1968)
- The House on Fairmount (1968)
- The Hill Road (1969)
- Ravensgill (1970)
- Ravensgill. London: Hamish Hamilton, 1970.
- A Game of Dark (1971)
- A Game of Dark. 1971. Puffin Books. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1974.
- Royal Harry (1971)
- The Incline (1972)
- [as 'Martin Cobalt'] The Swallows [aka 'The Pool of Swallows'] (1972)
- Skiffy Series (1972-1982)
- Skiffy (1972)
- Skiffy. Illustrated by Nicholas Fisk. 1972. Puffin Books. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1980.
- Skiffy and the Twin Planets (1982)
- Skiffy (1972)
- The Jersey Shore (1973)
- A Year and a Day. Illustrated by Krystyna Turska (1976)
- It (1977)
- It. 1977. Puffin Books. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1980.
- Max's Dream. Illustrated by Laszlo Acs (1977)
- While the Bells Ring. Illustrated by Janet Rawlins (1979)
- The Patchwork Cat. Illustrated by Nicola Bayley (1981)
- Winter Quarters (1982)
- Winter Quarters. Illustrated by Margery Gill. 1982. Puffin Books. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1984.
- Salt River Times. Illustrated by Elizabeth Honey (1982)
- Salt River Times. Illustrated by Elizabeth Honey. 1980. Puffin Books. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1982.
- The Mouldy. Illustrated by Nicola Bayley (1983)
- Hob Series (1984-1997)
- The Blue Book of Hob Stories. Illustrated by Patrick Benson (1984)
- The Green Book of Hob Stories. Illustrated by Patrick Benson (1984)
- The Red Book of Hob Stories. Illustrated by Patrick Benson (1984)
- The Yellow Book of Hob Stories. Illustrated by Patrick Benson (1984)
- The Book of Hob Stories. [Omnibus]. Illustrated by Patrick Benson (1991)
- Hob and the Goblins. Illustrated by Norman Messenger (1993)
- Hob and the Peddler. Illustrated by Norman Messenger (1997)
- Drift (1985)
- Gideon Ahoy! (1987)
- Gideon Ahoy! Illustrated by Chris Molan. 1987. Plus Fiction. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1989.
- Kelpie (1987)
- Kelpie. London: Jonathan Cape, 1987.
- Tiger’s Railway (1987)
- Tiger’s Railway. Illustrated by Juan Wijngaard. London: Walker Books, 1987.
- Antar and the Eagles (1989)
- Antar and the Eagles. London: Walker Books, 1989.
- The Farm that Ran out of Names (1990)
- The Farm that Ran out of Names. 1990. A Red Fox Book. London: Random Century Children’s Books, 1991.
- The Men of the House. Illustrated by Michaela Stewart (1990)
- Low Tide (1992)
- Low Tide. 1992. A Red Fox Book. London: Random Century Children’s Books, 1993.
- Oh Grandmama. Illustrated by Maureen Bradley (1993)
- Cuddy (1994)
- Bells on her Toes. Illustrated by Maureen Bradley (1994)
- Fairy Tales of London Town Series (1995-1996)
- The Fairy Tales of London Town: Upon Paul's Steeple. Illustrated by Peter Melnyczuk (1995)
- The Fairy Tales of London Town: See-Saw Sacradown. Illustrated by Peter Melnyczuk (1996)
- Lady Muck. Illustrated by Jonathan Heale (1997)
- Midnight Fair (1997)
- Captain Ming and the Mermaid (1999)
- Imogen and the Ark (1999)
- The Worm in the Well (2002)
- The Worm in the Well. Hodder Silver Series. London: Hodder Children’s Books, 2002.
- The Animal Garden (2003)
- Emily Goes To Market. Illustrated by Sophy Williams (2004)
- Jubilee's Pups (2004)
- Every Dog (2009)
- All the King's Men (1982)
- All the King's Men
- Boy to Island
- Stony Ray
- All the King’s Men. London: Jonathan Cape, 1982.
- A Small Pudding for Wee Gowry; and Other Stories of Underground Creatures. Illustrated by Martin Cottam (1983)
- The Blemyah Stories. Illustrated by Juan Wijngaard (1987)
- The Second Hand Horse (1990)
- The Second Hand Horse and Other Stories. 1990. Mammoth. London: Mandarin Books, 1992.
- The Fox Gate and Other Stories. Illustrated by William Geldart (1996)
- Book of Kings (1964)
- [with Eleanor Farjeon] The Hamish Hamilton Book of Kings. Illustrated by Victor Ambrus. London: Hamish Hamilton Children's Books Ltd., 1964.
- Book of Queens (1965)
- [with Eleanor Farjeon] The Hamish Hamilton Book of Queens. Illustrated by Victor Ambrus. London: Hamish Hamilton Children's Books Ltd., 1965.
- Book of Heroes (1967)
- A Book of Heroes. Illustrated by Krystyna Turska. 1967. Puffin Books, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973.
- Book of Giants (1968)
- A Book of Giants. Illustrated by Raymond Briggs. 1968. Puffin Books, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972.
Short Stories:
Edited:
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