Tim Powers (2): My Brother's Keeper

Tim Powers: My Brother's Keeper (2023)

It's roughly ten years since I wrote a post about American fantasy novelist Tim Powers. I did make a further brief mention of him in a piece on psychogeography a few years ago, but nothing much since. Am I my brother's keeper, after all?

Tim Powers: Alternate Routes. Vickery & Castine #1 (2018)

He's not been idle in that time: that's putting it mildly. Anyone would think he was doing it for a living! He's published a trilogy of books (with, apparently, a fourth yet to come) about a couple of Mulder and Scully-like investigators - Vickery and Castine - and their explorations of the Los Angeles motorway system and other haunted sites around the city.

Tim Powers: Forced Perspectives. Vickery & Castine #2 (2020)

"The Ghosts of the Freeway are rising," as the cover of the first of them proclaims.

Tim Powers: Stolen Skies. Vickery & Castine #3 (2022)

He's also put out a substantial collection of his short stories and novellas to date: Down and Out in Purgatory. As you can see from the listings at the bottom of this post, it's not complete, but still a pretty comprehensive selection of his work in these forms over the years.

Tim Powers: Down and Out in Purgatory (2017)

The main event in these years, however, would have to be his new novel about the Brontës, My Brother's Keeper.

Tim Powers: My Brother's Keeper (2023)

•

Tim Powers: The Stress of Her Regard (1989)

Set - more or less - in the same magical universe as his earlier books The Stress of Her Regard and Hide Me Among the Graves, My Brother's Keeper continues the conceit of an underlying occult explanation for the odd behaviour of various constellations of closely related Romantic poets and artists: the Shelley circle in The Stress of Her Regard, the Pre-Raphaelites in Hide Me Among the Graves, and now the three visionary sisters of Haworth Parsonage ...

Tim Powers: Hide Me Among the Graves (2012)

Perhaps Charlotte, Emily, Anne and their hapless brother Branwell are not quite so well known among fantasy readers as they are to fans of Victorian fiction, however, given the bold legend:

Howarth.
Yorkshire.
1846

on the back of my paperbook copy of the book. I suppose "Haworth" might well look like a misprint for "Howarth" if you hadn't been brought up on the arcane lore of the Brontës.

Frances O'Connor, dir.: Emily (2022)

I wrote an earlier post about about what sceptical historian Lucasta Miller called "The Brontë Myth" à propos of Frances O'Connor's 2022 film Emily.

Emily, the fiercest and most enigmatic of the three sisters, is at the heart of Tim Powers' novel, too, and the similarities between the two projects are quite revealing. Both O'Connor and Powers gift Emily with an illicit love affair: O'Connor with timid young curate William Weightman, Powers with surly (albeit reformed) werewolf Alcuin Curzon.

Both authors are at a bit of a loss at how to deal with Emily's elder sister Charlotte, so O'Connor turns her into a tedious, uncreative nag, while Powers makes her the only one of the Brontë children not to make a childish pact with the powers of darkness by smearing their blood on a rock in a nearby cavern.

Both take considerable liberties with the well-documented realities of the Brontë's lives, but in O'Connor's case this involves rewriting history to a startling degree, whereas Powers sticks to his usual artistic principle of feeling free to invent reams of extra supernatural action just as long as he's governed by the actual canonical timeline of his subjects' lives.

Branwell Brontë: Anne, Emily & Charlotte Brontë (1834)

I guess it's a matter of taste, but I myself found O'Connor's inventions more intrusive because they had the cumulative effect of somehow normalising the oddities of Emily's personality. As I said in my previous post:

I share director (and script-writer) Frances O'Connor's fierce appreciation of Emily's genius - she is, for me, the pick of the bunch, and her novel a masterpiece on a quite different level from Charlotte's and Anne's more numerous works ... She's the only one of the three sisters who's ever been regarded as a poet of distinction, and the ... clockwork machinery of her sublime Gothic novel belies any attempts that have been made since to write it off as hysterical melodrama.

However, "the film's decision to show Charlotte sitting down to write her own novel in the wake of Emily's death, and thus - in a sense - carrying on her work, just doesn't seem a necessary fiction to me." I don't see what it adds to our sense of Emily's deep strangeness as a human being to invent a lot of belittling lies about the other sisters.

As Carrie S. remarks in her enthusiastic review of Tim Powers' phantasmagorical reinvention of the Brontë saga:

I love my Brontës and I get so annoyed when either adaptations of their work or stories based on their lives get EVERYTHING WRONG ... My Brother’s Keeper is an eerie story involving the Brontë family, werewolves, and warring cults, and, darn it, it gets everything just absolutely perfect.

- Smart Bitches, Trashy Books (6/3/2024)

She goes on to quote a comment by fantasy illustrator Michael Hague to the effect that "the more outlandish the the things he wanted to represent, the more convincingly realistic the mundane details must be":

The story works because, first of all, the mundane details feel correct. Things that ought to be heavy do, in fact, cause the characters difficulty when they try to lift them. People have to eat and drink and sleep. Much mention is made of potatoes, either eating them or peeling them or cutting them up. Struggles are as much mundane as mystical. For instance, the characters make frequent references to their efforts to convince local government to move the town’s well uphill from the cemetery –- a real-life problem for the residents of Haworth ... was that the cemetery drained directly into their drinking water.
Secondly, the story works because, to me, the portrait of the Brontës, specifically Patrick, Branwell, Charlotte, Emily, Anne, their housekeeper Tabitha and Emily’s dog Keeper, is spot on. Everything they do and everything they say is perfectly in character. As bizarre as the plot is, it actually makes aspects of the Brontës’ lives make more sense rather than less.

The plot is definitely as busy and complicated as in any of Powers' other novels, but it somehow feels more weighty and serious this time. It was a little difficult to credit that he actually believed in the existence of his Dr. Polidori vampire (in Hide Me Among the Graves) or his stone-disease cursed poet Percy Shelley (in The Stress of Her Regard).

Branwell Brontë: Emily Brontë (1833)

I don't feel the slightest doubt that he's fallen in love with his own fearless Emily Brontë, though. As she strides across the moors, shooting at lycanthropes and guarding her worthless brother Branwell from the consequences of yet another betrayal, she gradually assumes the larger-than-life status which her admirers (myself among them) have accorded her all along.

If there could ever be such a thing as a human being whose ethical judgement and moral courage is definitively beyond question (for us true believers, at least) it's Emily Brontë - and Powers sets out to substantiate this view. Anne comes out pretty well, too - far better than in the O'Connor film. Admirers of Charlotte will probably be a little disappointed, but there's a good deal of Jane Eyre in Powers' story, too, so they won't feel as disgusted as they did by the lies and calumnies included in in the Emily film.

Emily Brontë: Keeper (1838)

Nor is it the smallest virtue of Powers' book that Emily's faithful dog has such a big part to play in the story. As Carrie S. succinctly expresses it:

He is a Very Good Dog.

Overall, I'd say that My Brother's Keeper is Powers' best book since his defining fantasy novel The Anubis Gates some forty years ago. And given that this one made me cry - though Emily's death tends to do that to me, even in O'Connor's film - I think that it's very probably better.

Chapeau bas, messieurs! as old Doctor Rieux in Camus' La Peste dreams that his readers may someday say when they read the opening sentence of his own novel: "Hats off, boys!"

Tim Powers: The Anubis Gates (1985)

•

Emily Brontë: The Annotated Wuthering Heights (2014)

Another surprisingly difficult feat which Powers pulls off with style and panache is weaving so many vital details from Wuthering Heights into the even wilder action of My Brother's Keeper.

"Heathcliff's lost years" is the approach many writers have taken to the problem of how to continue - or supplement - the storyline of Emily's masterpiece. Powers takes the opposite tack. He makes the character Heathcliff a dim avatar of the actual demon "Welsh", who has haunted the Brunty family (renamed Brontë, accordingly to Powers, not by analogy with Admiral Nelson's title as Duke of Bronte, a commune in Sicily, but as an invocation of Brontes, one of the three Cyclopes who forged Zeus's thunderbolt) for three generations.

I won't go into all the ins-and-outs of the foreshadowings and connections Powers manages to excavate from Emily's plot, but suffice it to say that a rereading of Wuthering Heights, perhaps in Janet Gezari's 2014 annotated edition, might help to appreciate that aspect of his work.

For the rest, I'm a little surprised to see that Powers has managed to produce yet another novel since My Brother's Keeper, set - this time - among the American expatriates in 1920s Paris. I suppose when you're on a roll it pays to keep going. In any case, I look forward to reading what mayhem he's managed to wreak amongst Ernest Hemingway, Gertrude Stein and the other Moderns:

Tim Powers: The Mills of the Gods (2025)

•

Tim Powers (2013)

Timothy Thomas Powers
(1952- )

Novels:


1. The Skies Discrowned [aka Forsake the Sky, 1986] (1976)
   • Included in: Powers of Two: The Skies Discrowned & An Epitaph in Rust. 1976, 1986, 1989. Framingham, MA: The NESFA Press, 2004.
2. An Epitaph in Rust (1976)
   • Included in: Powers of Two: The Skies Discrowned & An Epitaph in Rust. 1976, 1986, 1989. Framingham, MA: The NESFA Press, 2004.
3. The Drawing of the Dark (1979)
   • The Drawing of the Dark. 1979. London: Granada, 1981.
4. The Anubis Gates (1983)
   • The Anubis Gates. 1983. London: Triad Grafton Books, 1986.
5. Dinner at Deviant's Palace (1985)
   • Dinner at Deviant's Palace. 1985. London: Grafton Books, 1987.
6. On Stranger Tides (1987)
   • On Stranger Tides. 1987. New York: Ace Books, 1988.
Polidori series:

The Stress of Her Regard (1989)

• The Stress of Her Regard. 1989. London: HarperCollins, 1991.

Hide Me Among the Graves (2012)

• Hide Me Among the Graves. 2012. Corvus. London: Atlantic Books Ltd., 2013.

Fault Lines series:

Last Call (1992)

• Last Call. Fault Lines, 1. 1993. New York: Avon Books, 1996.

Expiration Date (1995)

• Expiration Date. Fault Lines, 2. London: HarperCollins, 1995.

Earthquake Weather (1997)

• Earthquake Weather. Fault Lines, 3. 1997. London: Orbit, 1998.

7. Declare (2001)
   • Declare. 2001. New York: HarperTorch, 2002.
8. Three Days to Never (2006)
   • Three Days to Never. 2006. William Morrow. New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 2013.
9. Medusa's Web (2015)
   • Medusa's Web. 2015. Corvus. London: Atlantic Books Ltd., 2016.
Vickery and Castine series:

Alternate Routes (2018)

• Alternate Routes. Vickery & Castine, 1. A Baen Books Original. Riverdale, NY: Baen, 2018. [Uncorrected Proof Copy]

Forced Perspectives (2020)

• Forced Perspectives. Vickery & Castine, 2. A Baen Books Original. Riverdale, NY: Baen, 2020.

Stolen Skies (2022)

• Stolen Skies. Vickery & Castine, 3. A Baen Books Original. Riverdale, NY: Baen, 2022.

10. My Brother's Keeper (2023)
    • My Brother's Keeper. 2023. Head of Zeus. London: Bloomsbury Publishing Plc, 2024.
11. The Mills of the Gods (2025)

Short Story Collections:


12. Night Moves and Other Stories (2000)
    1. Itinerary (1999)
    2. Night Moves (1986)
    3. Pat Moore (2004)
    4. The Way Down the Hill (1982)
    5. Where They Are Hid (1995)
    6. [with James P. Blaylock] The Better Boy (1991)
    7. [with James P. Blaylock] We Traverse Afar (1995)
13. [with James P. Blaylock] The Devils in the Details (2003)
    1. Introduction (Tim Powers)
    2. Through and Through (Tim Powers)
    3. Devil in the Details (James P. Blaylock)
    4. Fifty Cents (James P. Blaylock and Tim Powers)
    5. Mexican Food: An Afterword (James P. Blaylock)
14. Strange Itineraries (2005)
    1. Itinerary (1999)
    2. The Way Down the Hill (1982)
    3. Pat Moore (2004)
    4. [with James P. Blaylock] Fifty Cents (2003)
    5. Through and Through (2003)
    6. [with James P. Blaylock] We Traverse Afar (1995)
    7. Where They Are Hid (1995)
    8. [with James P. Blaylock] The Better Boy (1991)
    9. Night Moves (1986)
    • Strange Itineraries: The Complete Short Stories of Tim Powers. Introduction by Paul Di Filippo. San Francisco: Tachyon Publications, 2005.
15. The Bible Repairman and Other Stories (2011)
    1. The Bible Repairman (2006)
    2. A Soul in a Bottle (2006)
    3. The Hour of Babel (2008)
    4. Parallel Lines (2010)
    5. A Journey of Only Two Paces (2011)
    6. A Time to Cast Away Stones (2008)
    • The Bible Repairman and Other Stories. San Francisco: Tachyon Publications, 2011.
16. Down and Out in Purgatory: The Collected Stories of Tim Powers (2017)
    1. Salvage and Demolition (2013)
    2. The Bible Repairman (2006)
    3. Appointment at Sunset (2014)
    4. [with James P. Blaylock] The Better Boy (1991)
    5. Pat Moore (2004)
    6. The Way Down the Hill (1982)
    7. Itinerary (1999)
    8. A Journey of Only Two Paces (2011)
    9. The Hour of Babel (2008)
    10. Where They Are Hid (1995)
    11. [with James P. Blaylock] We Traverse Afar (1995)
    12. Through and Through (2003)
    13. Night Moves (1986)
    14. A Soul in a Bottle (2006)
    15. Parallel Lines (2010)
    16. [with James P. Blaylock] Fifty Cents (2003)
    17. Nobody's Home: An Anubis Gates Story (2014)
    18. A Time to Cast Away Stones (2008)
    19. Down and Out in Purgatory (2016)
    20. Sufficient Unto the Day (2017)
    • Down and Out in Purgatory: The Collected Stories of Tim Powers. Foreword by David Drake. Introduction by Tony Daniel. 2017. Riverdale, NY: Baen, 2019.

Chapbooks:


17. Night Moves [novella] (1986)
    • Included in: Down and Out in Purgatory: The Collected Stories of Tim Powers (2017)
18. [as 'William Ashbless', with James P. Blaylock] The Complete Twelve Hours of the Night (1986)
19. [by Phil Garland] A Short Poem by William Ashbless (1987)
20. Where They Are Hid [novella] (1995)
    • Included in: Down and Out in Purgatory: The Collected Stories of Tim Powers (2017)
21. [as 'William Ashbless', with James P. Blaylock] On Pirates (2001)
22. [as 'William Ashbless', with James P. Blaylock] The William Ashbless Memorial Cookbook (2002)
23. The Bible Repairman [novella] (2006)
    • Included in: Down and Out in Purgatory: The Collected Stories of Tim Powers (2017)
24. Nine Sonnets by Francis Thomas Marrity (2006)
25. A Soul in a Bottle [novella] (2006)
    • Included in: Down and Out in Purgatory: The Collected Stories of Tim Powers (2017)
26. Three Sonnets by Cheyenne Fleming (2007)
27. A Time to Cast Away Stones (2008)
    • Included in: Down and Out in Purgatory: The Collected Stories of Tim Powers (2017)
28. 'Death of a Citizen.' In A Comprehensive Dual Bibliography of James P. Blaylock & Tim Powers, by Silver Smith (2012)
29. Salvage and Demolition [novella] (2013)
    • Included in: Down and Out in Purgatory: The Collected Stories of Tim Powers (2017)
30. Nobody's Home [novella] (2014)
    • Included in: Down and Out in Purgatory: The Collected Stories of Tim Powers (2017)
31. Appointment on Sunset [novella] (2014)
    • Included in: Down and Out in Purgatory: The Collected Stories of Tim Powers (2017)
32. Down and Out in Purgatory [novella] (2016)
    • Included in: Down and Out in Purgatory: The Collected Stories of Tim Powers (2017)
33. More Walls Broken [novella] (2019)
34. The Properties of Rooftop Air [novella] (2020)
35. After Many a Summer [novella] (2023)

Secondary:


36. [Katz, Brad. “An Interview with Tim Powers (21/2/96).” Brow Magazine (1996).]

•

Tim Powers: The Last Call Series (1992-1997)

Tim Powers: The Vickery & Castine Series (2018-2022)

Pierre Mornet: The Brontës’ Secret (2016)

•

'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.

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

Favourite Children's Authors: Jane Langton

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.

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Jane Langton (1922-2018)

Favourite Children's Authors: 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)

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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.

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