It seems like an auspicious sign that I should have run across a first edition of Mary Stewart's A Walk in Wolf Wood in a vintage shop on New Year's Eve.
It's not my favourite among her children's books, but it's still a nice piece of timeslip fiction, with werewolves, and enchantments, and enchanted talismans, and all the usual appurtenances of her stories.
The American edition was actually subtitled "A Tale of Fantasy and Magic", in case potential buyers might be in doubt on the matter.
More to the point, I'd only seen it previously as a rather scruffy little paperback, whereas this hardback looks exceptionally handsome alongside my copies of her other two books in the genre, Ludo and the Star Horse and The Little Broomstick.
The latter has recently been filmed - with a largely rewritten plot and somewhat sub-standard animation - as Mary and the Witch's Flower by Studio Ghibli. I'm normally a fan of their work, but in this case they didn't really succeed in catching the richly atmospheric simplicity of the original: a fantasy classic if ever there was one.
In particular, Endor College, Madam Mumblechook's School of Witchcraft and Wizardry seems like a definite prototype for J. K. Rowling's Hogwarts. And there are many other seemingly throwaway details in Stewart's story, such as the strangely offkilter nursery rhymes recited within the walls of the college, which have stayed stuck in my head for all these years.
The Little Broomstick is probably Stewart's best and most inventive children's book. And yet, despite that, I wouldn't call it my favourite among the three. Ludo and the Star Horse, her cleverly concocted guide to the signs of the Zodiac and other wonders of the night sky, is the one I never tire of.
Of course, as with most children's books, to get their full flavour you really have to have been there - to have read them when you were still a kid. The Little Broomstick was published when I was nine, and Ludo when I was twelve. I don't know when my parents first bought them, but probably on first publication, given the fact that both are first editions.
I certainly had no objections at that age to reading "girly" kid's books alongside the more boy's-own offerings of W. E. Johns, Arthur Catherall et al. My sister Anne was a fan of Mary Stewart's romance novels, which meant that I ended up reading all of those, too. Despite my initial misgivings, I found I really liked them - particularly the ones set in exotic locales such as Provence or the Greek Islands.
It's alleged that Charles Darwin had two criteria for the novels he read as a respite from his labours: they had to have a happy ending, and the heroine must be good-looking. Much ink has been spilt on the rich irony of this juxtaposition: the prophet of biological determinism a closet sentimentalist in his off-hours!
There's something to be said for such comfortable generic expectations, though. Mary Stewart, the uncrowned "Queen of Romantic Suspense", understood exactly what her audience wanted: a frisson of fear, some dark shadows at the heart of the narrative, but no devastating surprises at the end. She was always more of an Ann Radcliffe than a Monk Lewis.
And so it might have gone on indefinitely. She published a new book virtually every year between 1955 and 1968. Her publishers were happy; the fans were satisfied; she seemed to have found her ideal role both in literature and life, in her grand estate on Loch Awe in the Scottish Highlands.
But then something happened: something unprecedented and completely off-topic. She wrote the autobiography of a Dark Ages boy with prophetic gifts, a boy called Merlin. She called it The Crystal Cave, after a strange little poem by Orkney writer Edwin Muir:
O Merlin in your crystal caveFans of her romance novels had no idea what to make of all this. She did write a few more in that vein, at widely scattered intervals, but from now on she was firmly in the grip of the Arthurian bug, which I've written more about here and here.
Deep in the diamond of the day,
Will there ever be a singer
Whose music will smooth away
The furrow drawn by Adam's finger
Across the memory and the wave?
Or a runner who'll outrun
Man's long shadow driving on,
Break through the gate of memory
And hang the apple on the tree?
Will your magic ever show
The sleeping bride shut in her bower,
The day wreathed in its mound of snow
and Time locked in his tower?
I called it "England's Dreaming" in the second of these posts, where I tried to link this fascination with the possible historicity of a figure called "King Arthur" with the wider subject of literary psychogeography.
However you try to account for it, though, this fascinating mania was at its height in the 1960s and 70s - presumably as part of the contemporary revival of New Age ideologies of nature worship and revived paganism.
Geoffrey Ashe's Quest for Arthur's Britain was one of the Bibles of the new faith - even more than his slew of other books on the subject - principally because it seemed to promise concrete archaeological evidence for the existence of a charismatic warlord who flourished in the late 5th century, at much the same time as the romanticised "King Arthur."
A kind of orthodoxy grew up which took for granted that the resistance of the last Romano-Britains against the incoming Saxons had given rise not only to the idea but also a good deal of the detail of the exploits of this "Arthur" - whatever he looked like, and wherever he was based.
The intensity of Mary Stewart's imagination enabled her to flesh out this Romano-British world, still full of the relics of empire but gradually sliding into the chaotic world of tribal rivalries and local warlords.
Her book was, accordingly, a massive success. It remains not only tremendously readable but also strangely persuasive in its vision of those long-lost times, poised between Classical antiquity and the oncoming heroic age. It was as if she'd had a vision, or an out-of-body experience, along the lines of the "reincarnation novels" of English parapsychologist Joan Grant.
The difference was that Mary Stewart could write.
Am I the only one to have found the sequel a little disappointing? Merlin gradually retreats from centre stage to share the limelight with the boy Arthur who (I'm sorry to say) has little of the same incandescent star power.
There's less (I suppose inevitably) of the magic of a child's intense perceptions of the world, and more of the necessary politics involved in setting up a kingdom in Dark Age Britain.
It's still all very well written, mind you - and it's hard to imagine any normal reader actually stopping reading following Stewart's expertly woven story at the end of book one, but I'm afraid that it's The Crystal Cave which remains the masterpiece. The other books simply serve to flesh out the theme it proposes.
Those of us who read these books when they first came out had a long weary wait before we could get out hands on The Last Enchantment. And it was bound to be a disappointment on some level, given this level of anticipation.
It's good enough. It completes the trilogy - Merlin's story is told to its end, though there are still some aspects of Arthur's left to fill in. Or so Stewart must have thought, anyway, as she went on to write a further instalment, devoted to the equally crucial figure of Mordred.
He is, of course, in many ways the most interesting character in the whole story: the Judas to Arthur's Christ. No-one's exactly cracked him yet, but there have been some pretty good attempts along the way.
Is this one of them? Up to each reader to decide, I guess. ...
And finally, last and definitely least, there's The Prince and the Pilgrim. Stewart was nearly 80 when she published this last addendum to her Arthurian world, and by then the kettle was no longer really on the boil.
The only reason I knew this book even existed was because I found a copy in a bach where I was staying one summer. Of course I promptly read it from cover to cover.
It's not really part of her main Arthurian sequence - nor is it simply a romance novel set in those historical times - but it has elements of both of those things. There's no real harm in it, but it's doubtful if there's much point in it either.
From anyone else, it would simply seem a straightforward potboiler, but I guess it's just the contrast with the wildly passionate writer of The Crystal Cave which makes it seem an unfortunate coda to her career as a visionary historical novelist.
She published a few last novella-length fictions in her original romance vein, with occasional flashes of the old brilliance, but the heart of her work lies earlier: in those first fresh novels, intoxicated by the love of travel and romance in foreign parts; also in the magic of the three children's books.
Above all, it rests on the unforgettable intensity of The Crystal Cave.
- Novels:
- Madam, Will You Talk? (1955)
- Madam, Will You Talk? 1955. London: Hodder Paperbacks Ltd., 1971.
- Wildfire at Midnight (1956)
- Wildfire at Midnight. 1956. Coronet Books. London: Hodder Paperbacks Ltd., 1974.
- Thunder on the Right (1957)
- Thunder on the Right. 1957. Coronet Books. London: Hodder Paperbacks Ltd., 1972.
- Nine Coaches Waiting (1958)
- Nine Coaches Waiting. 1958. London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1964.
- The Castle of Danger [Young Adult version] (Longman simplified TESL Series, 1981)
- My Brother Michael (1959)
- My Brother Michael. 1959. Coronet Books. London: Hodder Paperbacks Ltd., 1973.
- The Ivy Tree (1961)
- The Ivy Tree. 1961. Coronet Books. London: Hodder Paperbacks Ltd., 1975.
- The Moon-Spinners (1962)
- The Moonspinners. 1962. Coronet Books. London: Hodder Paperbacks Ltd., 1973.
- This Rough Magic (1964)
- This Rough Magic. 1964. London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1966.
- Airs Above the Ground (1965)
- Airs Above the Ground. London: Readers Book Club, 1965.
- The Gabriel Hounds (1967)
- The Gabriel Hounds. 1967. London: Hodder Paperbacks Ltd., 1968.
- The Wind Off the Small Isles (1968)
- The Wind off the Small Isles. Illustrated by Laurence Irving. London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1968.
- Touch Not the Cat (1976)
- Touch Not the Cat. 1976. Coronet Books. London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1977.
- Thornyhold (1988)
- Stormy Petrel (1991)
- Stormy Petrel. London: BCA, by arrangement with Hodder and Stoughton, 1991.
- Rose Cottage (1997)
- The Merlin Chronicles (1970-1995)
- The Crystal Cave (1970)
- The Crystal Cave. 1970. Hodder Paperbacks. London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1971.
- The Hollow Hills (1973)
- The Hollow Hills. London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1973.
- The Last Enchantment (1979)
- The Last Enchantment. 1979. Coronet Books. London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1980.
- The Wicked Day (1983)
- The Wicked Day. 1983. Coronet Books. London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1984.
- The Prince and the Pilgrim (1995)
- The Prince and the Pilgrim. 1995. Coronet Books. London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1996.
- The Crystal Cave (1970)
- The Little Broomstick (1971)
- The Little Broomstick. Illustrated by Shirley Hughes. Leicester: Brockhampton Press Ltd., 1971.
- Ludo and the Star Horse (1974)
- Ludo and the Star Horse. Illustrated by Gino D’Achille. Leicester: Brockhampton Press Ltd., 1974.
- A Walk in Wolf Wood (1980)
- A Walk in Wolf Wood. Illustrated by Doreen Caldwell. Hodder and Stoughton Children's Books. London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1980.
- Frost on the Window: And other Poems (1990)
Series:
Children's novels:
Poetry:
- Aquarius: The Water-Bearer (January 20 – February 18)
- Deity: GANYMEDE, cupbearer of the gods
- Pisces: The Fish (February 19 - March 20)
- Deity: APHRODITE & EROS, goddess of love & god of desire
- Aries: The Ram (March 21 – April 19)
- Deity: ARES, god of war
- Taurus: The Bull (April 20 – May 20)
- Deity: ZEUS, king of the gods
- Gemini: The Twins (May 21 – June 20)
- Deity: APOLLO & ARTEMIS, the divine siblings
- Cancer: The Crab (June 21 – July 22)
- Deity: HERA, queen of the gods
- Leo: The Lion (July 23 – August 22)
- Deity: ZEUS, king of the gods
- Virgo: The Virgin (August 23 – September 22)
- Deity: DEMETER, goddess of agriculture
- Libra: The Scales (September 23 – October 22)
- Deity: THEMIS, goddess of justice
- Scorpio: The Scorpion (October 23 – November 21)
- Deity: ARTEMIS, goddess of the hunt
- Sagittarius: The Archer (November 22 – December 21)
- Deity: APOLLO, the archer
- Capricorn: The Sea-Goat (December 22 – January 19)
- Deity: PAN, god of the wild
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