'Of the Devil's party without knowing it'

Andrew Wall, dir. & writ.: The Fantasy Makers (2018)

The reason Milton wrote in fetters when he wrote of Angels & God, and at liberty when he wrote of Devils & Hell, is because he was a true Poet and of the Devil's party without knowing it.

- William Blake: The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1790)

Recently Bronwyn and I watched the documentary "The Fantasy Makers", hoping for some insights into the work of George MacDonald and his successors J. R. R. Tolkien and C. S. Lewis. I have to say that it was a somewhat disappointing experience. A succession of non-entities - obscure Academics and writers, none of whom I'd ever heard of - came on screen to proclaim the vital significance of the Christian faith to the works of these three authors, and the various ways in which that old-time religion had jump-started their imaginations.

One of the hairier contributors to The Fantasy Makers:
Rev Dr A Malcolm Guite of Girton College, Cambridge

Don't get me wrong. This is certainly a defensible proposition: indeed a pretty obvious one, given the tendency of MacDonald and Lewis in particular to incorporate a good deal of Christian allegory and even straightout preaching in their respective fantasy worlds. There's no doubt, either, about the significance of his Catholic faith to J. R. R. Tolkien.

The Fantasy Makers

Where I part company with this documentary is in its selective - and thus quite misleading - account of the growth of the modern Fantasy genre. It's strongly implied in context that reading MacDonald had a decisive effect on Tolkien - whereas it's really Lewis who was more influenced by him. It's true that The Hobbit is deeply indebted to MacDonald's The Princess and the Goblin, but William Morris's series of heroic romances were the real catalyst for Tolkien's own peculiar fusion of mythology and folktale.

William Morris: The House of the Wolfings (1889)

So why leave out Morris? There were, of course - there always are - limitations of space. You can't put in everyone. In this case, though, there was a simpler reason: he wasn't a Christian. He was, admittedly, brought up as one, but in later life he espoused atheism, along with a very militant form of Communism. He was as independent a thinker as he was a writer and artist.

William Morris: William Morris (1834-1896)

It puts me in mind of an account I once heard of a Children's TV programme which one of my school friends inadvertently found himself watching one idle afternoon. The kids were all sitting around in a circle while the house band, called (I think) the Certain Sounds, performed various uplifting numbers.

This led to a "discussion" (i.e. harangue) where the hosts of the show denounced the excesses of contemporary Rock music - this was, admittedly, the era of Ozzy Osbourne and Black Sabbath - and stressed how wholesome, by contrast, were the songs they'd just been listening to. Those confirmed degenerates the Rolling Stones came in for a bit of a tongue-lashing, too.

All of a sudden a youth leapt up from the floor and shouted "The Rolling Stones are great - and the Certain Sounds are sh ..." They cut to commercial before he could finish what he was saying - but I think the audience got the message. Ah me, the perils of live TV!

When the programme resumed the lone rebel had, of course, been removed - and no doubt taken backstage for indoctrination. But, as the poet Horace once observed: "you can drive out nature with a pitchfork, but still she'll come back" [naturam expelles furca, tamen usque recurret]. His work there was done.

Top 50 Christian Rock Bands (2015)

The more the speakers in The Fantasy Makers stressed how hip-hop-happening the Bible was, and how deeply it had influenced the whole course of storytelling through the ages, the more I could hear the voice of my sister-in-law trying to persuade the rest of us at one extended-family gathering that Christian Rock was cool, and it was we who were the fuddy-duddies in sticking to more conventional forms of Rock 'n' Roll.

The Bible is undoubtedly a great source of stories, and Tolkien and his friends were very religious, but the intense vehemence with which the assorted talking heads in the documentary asserted these simple truths was in itself enough to make one feel suspicious.

J. R. R. Tolkien: On Fairy-stories (2008)

It was, after all, Tolkien himself who stressed the vital need to make a distinction between the realm of Faerie and its two nearest neighbours, Heaven and Hell. In his classic 1939 essay "On Fairy-Stories", he quotes from the old Border Ballad of Thomas the Rhymer:

O see ye not yon narrow road
So thick beset wi' thorns and briers?
That is the path of Righteousness,
Though after it but few inquires.

And see ye not yon braid, braid road
That lies across the lily leven?
That is the path of Wickedness,
Though some call it the Road to Heaven.

And see ye not yon bonny road
That winds about yon fernie brae?
That is the road to fair Elfland,
Where thou and I this night maun gae.

Having first mistaken her for Mary Mother of God, Thomas is inveigled into accompanying the Fairy Queen down the third of these paths, and so:

Till seven long years were gone and done
True Thomas on earth was never seen.

He brings nothing back with him from this mysterious realm except the ability to make rhymes and music.

Mind you, it isn't all good - and there's certainly nothing safe about it. Thomas was lucky to get back home at all: centuries can easily go by in the blink of an eye for those who've been taken away to Faerie. And there is, of course, the little matter of the Devil's teind (or tithe) - a tax of souls enforced by Hell in exchange for allowing this realm to exist independently.

Henry Fuseli: The Faerie Queene (1788)

'Of the Devil's party without knowing it' - well, no, not quite. Tolkien, Lewis, and MacDonald were quite clear in their opposition to that gentleman, witness their respective portraits of him as Morgoth in the Silmarillion (along with his chief lieutenant Sauron in The Lord of the Rings); the Infernal Minister served by civil servant Screwtape in The Screwtape Letters; not to mention the gloomy landlord depicted in MacDonald's introduction to Valdemar Adolph Thisted's Letters from Hell.

It is undeniable, though, that - as a reader - you feel a certain sense of excitement in Tolkien whenever he allows himself to revel in the imagery and atmosphere of the pre-Christian Teutonic heroic age. The story comes to life. In Lewis, too, when he allows his English children entry to a country where fauns and centaurs and the other nature spirits of Classical Paganism are permitted to roam freely.

Milton, according to Blake, "wrote in fetters when he wrote of Angels & God, and at liberty when he wrote of Devils & Hell" - Tolkien, too, could write freely enough of both Middle-earth and Mordor, but when it comes to Valinor and the Blessed Realms, it all just fades off into sunlight and singing.

Pauline Baynes: Father Christmas (1950)

Think, too, of how embarrassing is the sudden appearance of Father Christmas in Lewis's first Narnia book The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. It just seems so jarringly wrong to drag St. Nick into the midst of all these talking animals and powerful magicians. Not even the superbly imaginative Pauline Baynes can do much with this intrusion. But Lewis must have learned from the experience, because he never did anything quite so crass again.

Tolkien detested Lewis's Narnia books precisely because of their imbalance of tone and seriousness. Nymphs and Their Ways: The Love Life of a Faun, the title of one of the raunchier books on Mr. Tumnus's bookshelf, exemplified for Tolkien everything that was wrong about this mish-mash of pagan and contemporary themes.

Ludovico Ariosto: Orlando Furioso (1516-32)

If Ariosto rivalled it in invention (in fact he does not) he would still lack its heroic seriousness. No imaginary world has been projected which is at once so multifarious and so true to its own inner laws; none so seemingly objective, so disinfected from the taint of an author’s merely individual psychology; none so relevant to the actual human situation yet so free from allegory. And what fine shading there is in the variations of style to meet the almost endless diversity of scenes and characters – comic, homely, epic, monstrous, or diabolic!

- C. S. Lewis, Blurb for The Lord of the Rings (1954)

Lewis, by contrast, was careful to praise Tolkien's "heroic seriousness", but suggested that his inventiveness might find a parallel (if not a rival) in Ariosto's Orlando Furioso. Tolkien, characteristically, bristled at the comparison, but one suspects that it was not made idly.

Lewis felt, it would seem, that Tolkien was at risk of starting to believe his own ideas about 'sub-creation' - that he was, in effect, within a hair of setting himself up as the god of his own creation. And there is certainly little that's ostensibly Christian about Tolkien's world: its values seem far more firmly based on Old Norse stoicism and blind courage.

Whatever bargain these writers may have struck with their own consciences, it seems clear to me whenever I read them that both Lewis and Tolkien were more in love imaginatively with the Queen of Faerie than they could ever could be with the minutiae of their own religion. That was theology; this was fantasy.

I don't question (or doubt) the sincerity of their faith, just as I don't doubt that of Milton - or Blake, for that matter. I may not share it myself, but I did in my younger days, so have at least some understanding of the mind-set involved.

The creative instinct, however, is an unruly thing: once you start to discipline it and push it in the directions demanded by dogma, you end up with (at best) Hymns Ancient and Modern; at worst, Socialist Realism.

C. S. Lewis: The Cosmic Trilogy (1938-45)

The reason, I suspect, that none of the more distinguished commentators on Lewis, Tolkien, and their fellow Inklings - the ones you might actually have heard of - could be persuaded to appear in this rather tin-eared documentary, is that they could see at once that it was attempting to shrink them to the size of mere Christian propagandists.

And yes, on one level, that is what they were - C. S. Lewis, in particular. But you don't have to be a Christian to delight in Out of the Silent Planet or Perelandra, just as The Lord of the Rings cuts across creeds and cultures to engage with real human truths.

Both of them took the road to fair Elf-land, and both paid a certain price for doing so. George MacDonald is a more complex case - his guilt over such lapses from the party-line threatens time and again to overturn his fantasies in mid-course. But the greatness of his narrative gift keeps us reading At the Back of the North Wind and the 'Curdie' books despite any failures of taste or consistency within them.

The Marion E. Wade Center Museum (Wheaton College, Illinois)

There's a reason why this particular set of seven British authors have been granted their own research centre at a major American university, and it's not because of the orthodoxy of their belief systems:

1. George MacDonald (1824-1905)
2. G. K. Chesterton (1874-1936)
3. Charles Williams (1886-1945)
4. J. R. R. Tolkien (1892-1973)
5. Dorothy L. Sayers (1893-1957)
6. Owen Barfield (1898-1997)
7. C. S. Lewis (1898-1963)

Barfield was an Anthroposophist, Chesterton and Tolkien were Catholics, Lewis and Sayers were Anglicans, MacDonald was probably more of a Unitarian than anything else, and it's very hard to say just what precisely Charles Williams was: he certainly dabbled in magic and occultism more than any of the others.

Where they stand together is in the superreal vividness of their imaginations. Their respective versions of Christian faith may well have been a help in this, but all seven of them had to cast their nets wider than that to write anything worth reading. The details of their individual bargains with Faerie remain sealed up with their bones.

George MacDonald: Phantastes: A Faerie Romance (1858)

•

George MacDonald (1860)

George MacDonald
(1824-1905)

Fantasy:


1. Phantastes & Lilith. 1858 & 1895. Introduction by C. S. Lewis. Grand Rapids, Michigan: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1964.
2. At the Back of the North Wind / The Princess and the Goblin / The Princess and Curdie. 1870, 1871, 1882. London : Octopus Books, 1979.
3. The Princess and the Goblin. 1871. Illustrated by Arthur Hughes. A Puffin Book. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973.
4. The Princess and Curdie. 1882. Illustrated by Helen Stratton. A Puffin Book. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1980.
5. The Gifts of the Child Christ: Fairy Tales and Stories for the Childlike. 1882. Ed. Glenn Edward Sadler. 2 vols. Grand Rapids, Michigan: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1973.
6. The Light Princess and Other Tales: Being the Complete Fairy Tales. Illustrated by Arthur Hughes. Introduction by Roger Lancelyn Green. 1961. Kelpies. Edinburgh: Canongate, 1987.
7. The Complete Fairy Tales. Ed. U. C. Knoepflmacher. Penguin Classics. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1999.

Novels:


8. The Marquis of Lossie. 1877. London: Cassell & Co., 1927.

Non-fiction:


9. 'Preface' to Valdemar Adolph Thisted. Letters from Hell. 1866. Trans. Julie Sutter. 1884. London: Macmillan & Co., Ltd., 1911.
10. George MacDonald: An Anthology. Ed. C. S. Lewis. 1946. London: Geoffrey Bles: The Centenary Press, 1947.

Poetry:


11. MacDonald, George. The Poetical Works. 2 vols. London: Chatto & Windus, 1911.

Secondary:


12. Raeper, William. George MacDonald. 1987. Herts, England: A Lion Book, 1988.

•

George MacDonald: The Gifts of the Child Christ (1882)

Jane Langton's The Swing in the Summerhouse

Jane Langton: The Swing in the Summerhouse (1967)

We were always on the lookout for good fantasy novels when we were kids, and after reading all about C. S. Lewis's Narnia, Ursula Le Guin's Earthsea, and J. R. R. Tolkien's Middle-earth, we were rather at a loss. One day I overheard my brother and sister arguing over the merits of a book called The Swing in the Summerhouse.

Anne (I think) quite liked it, whereas Ken found it too doctrinaire. In any case, I resolved to give it a try, and since it turned out to be in the Murrays Bay Intermediate School library, I must have borrowed and read it sometime in the early 1970s.

I thought it very good: better, even, than Madeleine L'Engle's A Wrinkle in Time, which I encountered at roughly the same time. It was a little frustrating, though, as it made numerous references to an earlier book called The Diamond in the Window, which it turned out that my older siblings had read, but which was unfortunately not in the library (perhaps one of the teachers had lent it to them).

Jane Langton: The Diamond in the Window (1962)

I was pretty excited when I finally ran across a copy of The Diamond in the Window in the local bookshop in Palmerston North (where I was then teaching). The date on the inside cover tells me that it was on my birthday in 1991, so I must have bought it for myself as a present.

You know how it is with old children's books, though - unless you managed to read them at precisely the right moment, their charm can be lost on you. The Diamond in the Window was too obviously infused with Emerson and Thoreau and their Transcendentalist ideology (a bit like Lewis and Tolkien's Christianity), so I couldn't really surrender to it properly. Nor was I able to find a copy of The Swing in the Summerhouse to compare it with, despite searching in vain for many years.

Jane Langton: The Hall Family Chronicles (1962-2008)

1. The Diamond in the Window (1962)
2. The Swing in the Summerhouse (1967)
3. The Astonishing Stereoscope (1971)
4. The Fledgling (1980)
5. The Fragile Flag (1984)
6. The Time Bike (2000)
7. The Mysterious Circus (2005)
8. The Dragon Tree (2008)

The other day I gave in and decided to order the whole series online. It came as a bit of a surprise to find out that Jane Langton had lived until 2018, and even added three new volumes to her series of "Hall Family Chronicles" in the years since 1991!

But then, just the other day, I found a couple of the books in (respectively) The Hard-to-Find Bookshop and Green Dolphin Bookshop in Uptown Auckland, and so I'm glad to have been able to read the first two again, after (respectively) 30 and 50 years. That last seems unbelievable. Can it really have been fifty years since I first read The Swing in the Summerhouse?

In any case, here they all are, in chronological order:

1. The Diamond in the Window (1962)

   Jane Langton. The Diamond in the Window. Illustrations by Eric Blegvad. 1962. The Hall Family Chronicles, 1. A Harper Trophy Book. New York: Harper & Row, 1973.



Jane Langton: The Diamond in the Window (1962)



2. The Swing in the Summerhouse (1967)

   Jane Langton. The Swing in the Summerhouse. Illustrations by Eric Blegvad. 1967. The Hall Family Chronicles, 2. Harper Trophy. New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 1981.



Jane Langton: The Swing in the Summerhouse (1967)



3. The Astonishing Stereoscope (1971)

   Jane Langton. The Astonishing Stereoscope. Illustrations by Eric Blegvad. 1971. The Hall Family Chronicles, 3. HarperTrophy. New York: HarperCollins Publishers Inc., 2001.



Jane Langton: The Astonishing Stereoscope (1971)



4. The Fledgling (1980)

   Jane Langton. The Fledgling. Illustrations by Eric Blegvad. 1980. The Hall Family Chronicles, 4. New York: Scholastic Inc., 1990.



Jane Langton: The Fledgling (1980)



5. The Fragile Flag (1984)

   Jane Langton. The Fragile Flag. Illustration by Peter Blegvad. 1984. The Hall Family Chronicles, 5. HarperTrophy. New York: HarperCollins Publishers Inc., 1989.



Jane Langton: The Fragile Flag (1984)



6. The Time Bike (2000)

   Jane Langton. The Time Bike. Illustrations by Eric Blegvad. 2000. The Hall Family Chronicles, 6. New York: Scholastic Inc., 2001.



Jane Langton: The Time Bike (2000)



7. The Mysterious Circus (2005)

   Jane Langton. The Mysterious Circus. Illustration by Peter Malone. The Hall Family Chronicles, 7. New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 2005.



Jane Langton: The Mysterious Circus (2005)



8. The Dragon Tree (2008)

   Jane Langton. The Dragon Tree. The Hall Family Chronicles, 8. New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 2008.



Jane Langton: The Dragon Tree (2008)

Mind you, some of the initial, non series-focussed cover illustrations for the individual volumes seem more spirited than the ones included above: this moonlit scene for The Fledgling, for instance:

Jane Langton: The Fledgling (1980)

Or this turbulent, energetic image of The Time Bike:

Jane Langton: The Time Bike (2000)

As for the books themselves, what's the verdict, after all these years? Was it really worth the wait?

I can certainly understand why it was The Fledgling which got signalled out from the rest of the series to be a Newbery Honor Book (runner-up to the Newbery Medal, awarded for each year's "most distinguished contribution to American literature for children" since 1922).

The Fledgling is more intimate and engaging than some of the others, and its characters are less easily divisible into goodies (Transcendentalists) and baddies (Materialists). All of them have their own magical charm, though, and I have to say that I only wish they'd all been available to me fifty years ago when I was truly desperate for such reading.

•


Jane Langton (1922-2018)

Boneland: Alan Garner

Alan Garner (1934- )

There's an early Alan Garner story called "Feel Free" included in Susan Dickinson's anthology The Restless Ghost and Other Encounters and Experiences (1970). I read it while I was at Intermediate School, but I've never seen it collected anywhere else.

I remember it surprised me quite a bit. It was too advanced and complex to be as satisfactory to me, then, as the other stories by the likes of Joan Aiken and Leon Garfield in the same collection. There was something very intriguing about it, though.

Susan Dickinson, ed. The Restless Ghost (1970)

The story begins with a boy, Brian, who is copying a design from an old plate in a small provincial museum:

The dish stood alone in its case, a typed label on the glass: "Attic Krater, 5th Century BC, Artist Unknown. The scene depicts Charon, ferryman of the dead, conveying a soul across the river Acheron in the Underworld."

He persuades the curator to let him take it out for a moment:

Anthony Maitland: "Feel Free" illustration (c.1970)

"Tosh, look!" Brian nearly dropped the dish. On the base was a clear thumb print fired hard as the rest of the clay.
"There he is," whispered Brian.
The change from the case to the outside air had put a mist on the surface of the dish, and Brian set his own fingers against the other hand.
"Two thousand year, Tosh. That's nothing. Who was he?
"No, he'll not have a headache."
Brian stared at his own print and the fossilled clay. "Tosh," he said, 'they're the same. That thumb print and mine. What do you make of it?

Tosh, the curator, is at first disposed to scoff. Eventually he admits: "Very close, I'll allow, but see at yon line across the other feller's thumb. That's a scar. You haven't got one."

Brian is unconvinced: "But a scar's something that happens ... It's nothing to do with what you're born like. If he hadn't gashed his thumb, they'd be the same."

Butlins: Clacton-on-Sea (1940)

Later Brian meets his girlfriend Sandra for their date at the open day at the local holiday camp:

Hello! Hello! Hello! Feel free, friends! This is the Lay-Say-Far Holiday Camp, a totally new concept in Family Camping, adding a new dimension to leisure, where folk come to stay, play, make hay, or relax in the laze-away days that you find only at the Lay-Say-Fair Holiday Camp.

"Where shall we go on now?" asks Brian, after they've wandered around for a bit, and gone on most of the rides:

"There's the Tunnel of Love, if you're feeling romantic," said Sandra.
"You never know till you try, do you?" said Brian.

The tunnel is predictably cheesy, but a little macabre as well:

Beyond the gate was a grotto of plaster stalactites and stalagmites, and the channel rushed among them to to a black tunnel.
"Queer green light there, isn't it?" said Sandra. "Ever so eerie."

The heel of Sandra's shoe gets caught as she tries to climb in the boat, and he is unable to free it in time for her to join him:

She was swinging away from him, a tiny figure lost among stalactites. He stood, looking, looking and slowly lifted his hand off the nail that had worked loose at the edge of the stern. He had not felt its sharpness, but now the gash throbbed across the ball of his thumb. The boat danced towards the tunnel.

Tunnel of Love

I guess what I like, still, so much about this story is the way in which it manages to introduce all the characteristic themes Alan Garner is known for in such a short compass of time.

There's the idea of artefacts carrying baggage with them from the past (like the patterned plates in The Owl Service, or - even more so - the stone axe in Red Shift). There's also the (implicit) comparison between a dignified, layered past of cottage industries and individual destinies and the mass-produced, plastic present.

There's something uncomfortably prescient in the passage where Brian and Sandra sit together in the Willow Pattern Garden:

"No. Look, said Brian, and leant backwards to gather a handful of earth from a rockery flower bed. "Soil isn't muck, it's ... well, I'll be ... Sandra? This here soil's plastic."
Smooth, clean granules rolled between his fingers.
"The whole blooming lot's plastic - grass, flowers, and all!"
"Now that's what I call sensible. It helps to keep the costs down," said Sandra. "And it doesn't kill bees."

As it turns out, there are no bees to kill. "They were each mounted on a quivering hair spring, the buzzer plugged in to a time switch."

In someone else's hands, this could be quite a heavy-handed story. But Garner leaves an air of mystery about almost every aspect of it. Does the fact that Brian has now acquired a scar to match the one left on the ancient plate mean that he is going to join its owner as his own boat moves towards the dark mouth of the tunnel? There's certainly something a bit ominous about the fact that the pattern of the plate shows Charon the ferryman carrying souls to the land of the dead.

And then there's the title, "Feel Free." The point appears to be that while Brian may feel free, his actions are somehow predetermined by an inexorable, inescapable past. For all the wondrous patina on the artefacts in the old museum, they can exert an uncomfortable, even (possibly) an unhealthy influence on the present.

Brian and the other character's use of a few provincial turns of phrase also seemed pretty innovative to me when I read it first. Garner's characters move downwards in social level as his work progresses. Colin and Susan in his first two books talk standard English to the other characters' Cheshire dialect. The children in Elidor are closer to the working classes, but they still use something resembling received pronunciation.

Class becomes an issue for the first time in The Owl Service, but even there it's a more standard Middle-Class English / Working-Class Welsh contrast. After that, though, Garner's characters mostly speak in dialect, though there are always a few toffs around in the stories - reflecting their author's own divided identity, I guess.

The story, like the old Greek plate at its centre, is a small masterpiece: better than one has any right to expect in such a context. The museum, its curator, Brian himself, are sketched deftly, in a few strokes. Only the fun fair descends to caricature (Sandra, too, I fear: a typically unimaginative female who could have walked straight out of any story from the Angry Young Man era).

The focus really isn't on Sandra, though, it's on Brian: Brian whose sense of rightness and perfection in design has made him blind to the charms of the present, and predisposed him to flirtations with the dark past:

"Have you ever hidden anything to chance it being found again years and years later - perhaps long after you're dead?
"No," said Sandra.
"I have," said Brian. "I was a great one for filling screw-top bottles with junk and then burying them. I put notes inside, and pieces out of the newspaper. You're talking to someone you'll never meet, never know: but if they find the bottle they'll know you. There's bits of you in the bottle, waiting all this time, see, in the dark and as soon as the bottle's opened - time's nothing - and - and -"
"Eh up," said Sandra, "people are looking. You do get some ideas, Brian Walton!

It's not hard to see the analogies here between Brian and his creator: Brian Walton / Alan Garner. Writers, too, bury things in the dark, hide them inside the containers they make: "You're talking to someone you'll never meet, never know: but if they find the bottle they'll know you."

Terracotta Perfume Flask: Charon (c.340 BC)

•


Susan Dickinson, ed.: The Restless Ghost: Acknowledgements

That may be a lot of significance to lay on one short, uncollected story - dating from 1968, if we can trust the acknowledgments section above - but if anything is apparent in Garner's work in general, it's that he expects each page, each line, each word even to do a great deal of work. It's no accident that his books tend to be short. The weight of significance each one of then bears is disproportionate to the number of pages: in that he has far more in common with a poet than a more conventional prose writer.

His publications to date fall into several discrete groups. Before continuing any of these trains of thought, I think I'd better outline just what we're talking about. First of all, both chronologically and in popularity, there are those books which - despite their increasing subtlety and complexity - still have to be thought of as primarily for children:

Alan Garner: The Weirdstone of Brisingamen (1960)



1. The Weirdstone of Brisingamen: A Tale of Alderley. 1960. London: William Collins Sons & Co. Ltd., 1990.




Alan Garner: The Moon of Gomrath (1963)



2. The Moon of Gomrath. 1963. An Armada Lion. London: Collins, 1974.




Alan Garner: Elidor (1967)



3. Elidor. Illustrated by Charles Keeping. 1965. London: William Collins Sons & Co. Ltd., 1971.




Alan Garner: The Owl Service (1967)



4. The Owl Service. 1967. An Armada Lion. London: Collins, 1974.




Alan Garner: Red Shift (1973)



5. Red Shift. 1973. London: Collins, 1973.




Alan Garner: The Stone Book Quartet (1976-78)



6. The Stone Book. The Stone Book Quartet. 1. 1976. Illustrated by Michael Foreman. Fontana Lions. London: Collins, 1979.


7. Tom Fobble’s Day. The Stone Book Quartet, 2. 1977. Illustrated by Michael Foreman. Fontana Lions. London: Collins, 1979.


8. Granny Reardun. The Stone Book Quartet, 3. 1977. Illustrated by Michael Foreman. Fontana Lions. London: Collins, 1979.


9. The Aimer Gate. The Stone Book Quartet, 4. 1978. Illustrated by Michael Foreman. Fontana Lions. London: Collins, 1979.

These six books (I think one can describe the Stone Book Quartet as a single work, despite its quite separate sections) range from the madcap magical adventurousness of The Weirdstone of Brisingamen to the terrifying intensities of The Owl Service with no diminution of quality at any point. Garner is one of those rare writers who is content only with masterpieces, and who constantly racks up the pressure with each new work.

Alongside this very original sequence of imaginative works, though, there is a very different set of publications. I don't have all of these folktale anthologies and retellings, but this is most of them. They are quite exceptionally good of their kind, I would say, and I speak as one who has read more than his fair share of such books. The figure of the trickster appears to appeal particularly to Garner, and he writes of him brilliantly and (at times) quite disconcertingly:

Alan Garner: A Book of Goblins (1969)

1. Garner, Alan, ed. A Book of Goblins. Illustrated by Krystyna Turska. 1969. Puffin Books. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972.


2. Garner, Alan, ed. The Guizer: A Book of Fools. 1975. Fontana Lions. London: Collins, 1980.


3. Alan Garner's Book of British Fairy Tales. Illustrated by Derek Collard. 1984. London: Collins, 1988.


4. Garner, Alan, ed. A Bag of Moonshine. 1986. Lions. London: HarperCollins, 1992.


5. Collected Folk Tales. London: HarperCollins Children's Books, 2011.

Alan Garner: Collected Folk Tales (2011)

Which brings us to his novels for grown-ups. Or at least I suppose that's who they're for. They require such careful, attentive reading, that I guess they're for anyone prepared to invest in them fully.

The first, in particular, is another masterpiece. And while one can recognise many elements of the earlier Garner of the 'Weirdstone' books: the obsession with Alderley Edge, for instance, Strandloper is really sui generis as a novel. It is, among other things, the work of someone determined to reinvent himself wholly for each new project - a pretty terrifying prospect for other, more workaday writers.

Alan Garner: Strandloper (1996)



1. Strandloper. 1996. London: The Harvill Press, 1997.




Alan Garner: Thursbitch (2003)



2. Thursbitch. 2003. London: Vintage, 2004.




Alan Garner: Boneland (2012)



3. Boneland. Fourth Estate. London: HarperCollins Publishers, 2012.

The last of these is the oddest and - to my mind - probably the least successful. It attempts to close off the 'Weirdstone' trilogy, fifty years after it was begun. And yet it's hard to see exactly who it was written for. Certainly not for the children who enjoyed those adventurous encounters with magicians and dwarves.

Neither is it really for admirers of his previous two novels, though it shares many features with them: allusiveness in place of direct utterance, absence of affect where one would most expect it, and intricate pattern-making of an almost Celtic, Book of Kells-like, nature.

Which brings us to the last set of books. His recent memoir and his book of essays:

Alan Garner: The Voice that Thunders (1997)

Non-fiction:


1. The Voice That Thunders: Essays and Lectures. London: The Harvill Press, 1997.


2. Where Shall We Run To? A Memoir. London: Fourth Estate, 2018.

Alan Garner: Where Shall We Run To? A Memoir (2018)

The picture these two books paint of their author is not an entirely positive one. The memoir concerns only his early childhood, before he went off to Grammar School, and contains little more compromising than the revelation that his 'scientific' curiosity about the effects of dock-leaves on nettle stings inspired him to push one of his friends, Harold, into a field of them at one point:

I'd not heard a boy scream before. It went on. It didn't stop. It wasn't Harold. I ran. I ran all the way home, up the stairs, fell on my bed, and yelled and yelled, still hearing the scream in my head, and cried and cried; but I hadn't got any dock-leaves.
The next day, Harold called me a daft beggar and a mucky pup.

The book is constructed in a curiously spiral manner. It concludes with a few late anecdotes (one about Harold), but the narrative proper ends with the author sitting the eleven-plus examination in Manchester. We've already heard the results of this at the end of chapter two, shortly after the nettling incident, however:

A letter came for me in the post some time after, and my mother was waiting for me at the end of School Lane when lessons were over. She told me I'd won a scholarship.
That evening, the gang were playing round the sand patch. It was Ticky-on-Wood. Harold's mother came out of the house. Her face was different. 'Well, Alan,' she said, 'you won't want to speak to us any more.'
I didn't understand. I felt something go and not come back.

In a sense, it's clear that everything Alan Garner has written since - all the novels, the essays, even the retellings of folktales - has been one long attempt to understand this moment when something went and did not come back.

•

Why Tim Powers?

Tim Powers (1952- )

You know how it is when you have a long list of worthy books to read, and you find yourself instead obsessively following up every title by some hitherto neglected writer? True, I've been reading Tim Powers on and off for years, but this summer I found myself going through his entire oeuvre again in a rather more systematic way, book by book, rant by rant ...

Here's a list of my own collection of Powers books. It isn't quite complete, as there are a few missing novellas and limited editions - short story collections, mainly - but I have all fourteen of his novels, from The Skies Discrowned (1976) to Medusa's Web (2015).

1. Powers of Two: The Skies Discrowned & An Epitaph in Rust. 1976, 1986, 1989. Framingham, MA: The NESFA Press, 2004.
2. The Drawing of the Dark. 1979. London: Granada, 1981.
3. The Anubis Gates. 1983. London: Triad Grafton Books, 1986.
4. Dinner at Deviant's Palace. 1985. London: Grafton Books, 1987.
5. On Stranger Tides. 1987. New York: Ace Books, 1988.
6. The Stress of Her Regard. 1989. London: HarperCollins, 1991.
7. Last Call. Fault Lines, 1. 1993. New York: Avon Books, 1996.
8. Expiration Date. Fault Lines, 2. London: HarperCollins, 1995.
9. Earthquake Weather. Fault Lines, 3. 1997. London: Orbit, 1998.
10. Declare. 2001. New York: HarperTorch, 2002.
11. Strange Itineraries: Short Stories. San Francisco: Tachyon Publications, 2005.
12. Three Days to Never. 2006. William Morrow. New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 2013.
13. Hide Me Among the Graves. 2012. Corvus. London: Atlantic Books Ltd., 2013.
14. Medusa's Web. 2015. Corvus. London: Atlantic Books Ltd., 2016.

So who on earth is Tim Powers, some of you must be saying by now? His work falls into the SF / Fantasy genre, certainly, but it's hard to be more precise than that - I've heard him described as a Steampunk writer, but I'm not sure that that label quite fits, either. He is, really, unique and sui generis.

Which is not to say that he's much of a prose stylist. One has to put up with some pretty clumsy phrasing at times, some clunky paragraphs - not to mention odd lapses of historical verisimilitude (and some truly dreadful attempts to translate bits of dialogue into foreign languages).

Guess what? It doesn't matter. Even though many admirers of Byron and Shelley would shudder to read what he's made of them in The Stress of Her Regard (for instance), or of Coleridge in The Anubis Gates, there's a mad exuberance about both books which keeps one reading on, and which ends up constructing a pretty plausible series of alternate universes largely controlled by magic and the hermetic sciences.

I once read an interview [Brad Katz, Brow Magazine (21/2/96)] with Powers where he said that he'd been much influenced by Fellini in his early writing. He liked the way that there's almost always something going on behind the main action in a Fellini film: a couple of extras trying to carry a church bell, a bunch of kids getting into a fight. He's been trying ever since, it seems, to get that effect in his fiction - a sense of teeming life going on behind his protagonists' mad preoccupations: to revive the dead Fisher King of Northern California, to stop a bunch of alien spiders from taking over the universe, to exterminate the rogue genies who've infested Noah's Ark ...

Tim Powers: Powers of Two (1976 / 2004)

This rather handsome hardback collects Powers' first two books, The Skies Discrowned and An Epitaph in Rust (both 1976). He writes in his entertaining 2003 introduction to this reprint:

the publication of these two books ... had effectively deflected me from wanting to be a college literature professor; I didn't go back to graduate school. ... if it weren't for K. W. Jeter and Roger Elwood, and the heady experience of seeing those first two books in print, It'd today be teaching "Twain to Modern," and "Analysis of Literary Forms," and maybe - with a wistful air, I like to think! - "Creative Writing."

Bravo, Tim! I like that "wistful air." As one who himself teaches Creative Writing (and various survey courses not a million miles from the ones described), I know what he's talking about. I remember once confessing to John Dolan how much I'd prefer to be a Sci-Fi pulp writer than any kind of "intellectual" or "experimental" writer. He stared back at me. "Of course!" he said. "If we only had the talent!"

Who wouldn't prefer to be Gene Wolfe than Virginia Woolf, or - in this case - a kind of maverick hybrid of pulp fiction, period pastiche and perverse historicism like Tim Powers rather than a staid old English lecturer? Never mind, we give what we can - the rest is the madness of art ...

The books themselves are promising but a little embryonic: with quite a lot of Jack Vance mixed into their basic substratum of Philip K. Dick.

Tim Powers: The Drawing of the Dark (1979)

This book gives us the first glimpse of Powers' protean, Fellini-esque self. Loaded with detail (much of it referred to glancingly, in passing), it takes us through pre-Enlightenment Europe to Vienna in 1485 during its siege by the Turks. Merlin and Arthur are the principal protagonists, though in their latter-day avatars Brian Duffy and "Aurelianus": the stakes are no less than the soul of Europe itself.

It's a break-neck, rollicking yarn, and very entertaining to read, but not - in retrospect, at least - quite there yet. The essential parts of the Powers recipe are present, but the brew is still a little chunky and dark.

Tim Powers: The Anubis Gates (1983)

Not so this book, which still has a claim to be considered Powers' masterpiece - the central exhibit of his early manner, at least. I was once stranded in Frankfurt airport by a snowstorm for a couple of days. I couldn't leave the hotel, and I only had one book: this one. I read it twice through in that time and it never palled. I could, in fact, pull it out and start reading it again right now. It's bloody good.

The story introduces Power's favourite Romantic faux-poet, William Ashbless, to the reader for the first time, and is endlessly, tirelessly inventive in its details. It ain't Shakespeare. Nor is it Dickens or any other high culture piece of fine writing. It has a punk soul, but it's also a kind of apotheosis of that page-turning trashiness that makes those of us brought up on them adore pulp paperbacks so much. What else can I say? Read it.

Tim Powers: Dinner at Deviant's Palace (1985)

This is a little out on a limb in Power's oeuvre. It reads, at times, more like his friend Phil Dick (Dr Bloodmoney, or Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said) than Powers himself. But that's not to say it isn't good. As post-apocalyptic narratives go, this one is excellent. It's the kind of book his first two novels were aspiring to be (he admits in his introduction to them that he was already writing a book with this title before rattling them out in a hurry: two paperbacks in the same year). Nevertheless, I think he was right to complete it and get it out of his system. It is, in effect, a kind of alternate Powers: a slightly more predictable but every bit as accomplished writer.

Not really, then, quite, Tim Powers, though it did (like its predecessor) win the Philip K. Dick Memorial award.

Tim Powers: On Stranger Tides (1987)

This one had a recent vogue when it was used as the basis for the fourth film in the Pirates of the Caribbean series. Students of the book could not have been blamed for not noticing, though: the resemblances are few and far between (coming down mostly to the presence of Blackbeard in both stories). It's a fine yarn (far better than the film, alas), with another of Powers' plucky and resourceful - but not omnipotent - protagonists, and a guest appearance from Ponce de Leon and his Fountain of Youth.

There are one or two interesting aspects to the historical research in the book, though. At one point (p. 140 in my paperback edition) there's a reference to the "murder of James 1st a century ago." This seems a little odd, since King James was not, in fact, murdered (he died of dysentery after a stroke), and introduces the possibility that this is supposed to be set in an alternate history analogous to Joan Aiken's in her Wolves of Willoughby Chase series. If so, he doesn't really follow up on the idea. Perhaps it's a fossil from some earlier, longer state of the book?

Of course, one could argue that it's actually a reference to the historical murder of King James the 1st of Scotland rather than James the 1st of England, but since that took place in 1437, it's a bit hard to see it as only a century before the present of the book (c. 1718). I bequeath this concundrum to more profound Powers scholars than myself.

Tim Powers: The Stress of Her Regard (1989)

Now this one is something special. So dense is the narrative, centering on Byron and Shelley's haunted summer (during which his wife's great novel Frankenstein was conceived), that one can hardly follow it at times. Nor is Powers' prose style quite up to the task he has set himself at times, but it remains a kind of masterpiece: a genuinely frightening and thought-provoking novel with enough inventiveness to power ten conventional plots. What isn't in there? I'd rather reread The Anubis Gates anyday than venture into this one again, but I have to admit that it scared the shit out of me, and persuaded me that readers really could take a lot of disruption in their fictional fare without giving in (hence, I suppose, some of the more intractable elements in my own first novel, Nights with Giordano Bruno).

Tim Powers: Last Call (1993)

This is the first in a trilogy and (I would say) by far the most attractive in the series. It takes on the folklore of Las Vegas in a really big way, and almost succeeds in creating an American occult mythology to rival those of old Europe. It was the first of his books to win the World Fantasy Award, and it certainly deserves it.

Tim Powers: Expiration Date (1995)

There's something monstrous about the picture of LA, full of hungry, talkative ghosts, portrayed in this novel. It reads more like the transcript of a nightmare than an amusing piece of derring-do. Re-reading it this summer, though, I found that there is some benefit in reading the whole of his "Fault Lines" trilogy in order. What seemed merely bewildering and repetitive the first time seems far more planned and deliberate in retrospect.

Tim Powers: Earthquake Weather (1997)

The poet John Masefield called one of his own adventure novels One Damned Thing After Another (or ODTAA). there's something of that in the endless (and mostly futile) attempts to bring Scott Crane (the Fisher King of the Western states) back to life in this culmination to Powers' trilogy. He does succeed in knitting all the loose ends together, but at a certain cost to the narrative pleasure principle.

Tim Powers: Declare (2001)

This one I didn't like at all when I first read it. It seemed almost perversely incomprehensible, and trying to link together too disparate a mass of material. On rereading it, though, I wonder what I was thinking about. I see it now as a brilliant fusion of spy fiction and Dan Brown-ish antiquarianism. I suppose reading more about Kim Philby in the meantime has helped me see the inventiveness and intelligence of Powers's portrait of the modern era's greatest double agent. Winner (again) of the World Fantasy Award, I'd now recommend it highly, but that earlier adverse reaction does remind me that certain aspects of it may be an acquired taste.

Tim Powers: Three Days to Never (2006)

This is a good, solid piece of Powers-iana. The characters are attractive and well-drawn, the action compelling. To someone not used to his style, it might be quite difficult to follow in parts, but to a Powers fan, this is pretty mainstream stuff. After all, there was a time when even Haruki Murakami seemed incomprehensible to most readers. In a way, I hope such universal acceptance never happens to Powers. Part of his edge comes from that sense of inhabiting a private universe with only occasional connections with everyone else's ...

Tim Powers: Hide Me Among the Graves (2012)

Wonderful. This sequel to The Stress of Her Regard (with many of the same monsters) allows Powers to go to town on the Pre-Raphaelites. Great stuff throughout, and very visual in its appeal.

Tim Powers: Medusa'a Web (2015)

Which brings us to Power's latest work, set (again) in LA - this time in Hollywood - and with a slight overtone of Shirley Jackson (both The Haunting of Hill House and We Have Always Lived in the Castle - fans of either of those would find much to attract them here, I feel). There's something a little Dr. Who-like, too, in some of the action.

To be honest, I don't quite know what to think about this one yet. I like it, but it didn't grip me to the same extent as Three Days to Never. What is certain is that it shows no diminution in Powers' skills after almost forty years of scribbling - and 14 major novels. Thank God he didn't become an English Professor instead sticking to what he does best: benefiting poor suffering humanity as a spinner of wondrous tales.

Tim Powers: Strange Itineraries (2005)