The haunted wood, p.38
The Haunted Wood, page 38
The sequence closes with the Dark routed and the Light – in the form of the Old Ones, King Arthur and the gang – retiring on a magic longship to Cooper’s equivalent of the Grey Havens. What’s left is the human, the here and now – something prefigured in what otherwise seems an uncharacteristic intrusion of contemporary politics into the sequence early in the final book when the Drew children interrupt the racist bullying of a Sikh schoolboy.
A series of books that put England in dialogue with its deep Celtic/Nordic mythic past now also, glancingly, noticed the multiracial society into which they were published. Though children’s writing would take another generation to really come to grips with that change – preferring to treat black or brown characters as comical or peculiar, and helpers rather than protagonists – it was making itself known. In 1977, when Silver on the Tree was published, the dark was rising in the real world. The UK’s fascist National Front was at the height of its popularity, and skinheads in Birmingham, Leicester, and London launched unprovoked assaults on Asian people, what they called “Paki-bashing.” 1976 saw the formation of Rock Against Racism; 1977 the forming of the Anti-Nazi League. There really was a fight going on in the world into which its readers were growing up.
In valediction, Merriman tells the children: “remember that it is altogether your world now. You and all the rest. We have delivered you from evil, but the evil that is inside men is at last a matter for men to control. The responsibility and the hope and the promise are in your hands – your hands and the hands of the children of all men on this earth.” That sounds a lot, in the context of a fantasy novel, like growing up. The last words of the book – echoing Kent in King Lear – are spoken by Will: “I think it’s time we were starting out. We have a long journey to go.”
Garner and Cooper were of a generation, as was Diana Wynne Jones (born in 1934, a few months before Garner and less than a year before Cooper) – third in the great triumvirate of British post-Tolkien writers of fantasy for children. Her star has now been somewhat eclipsed. Not all viewers of the Studio Ghibli hit Howl’s Moving Castle (2004) will at first have realized it was based on the work of a British writer – though its popularity among the anime-loving Generation Z gave her a whole new audience in the late noughties. Wynne Jones’s work has been influential on what followed, though. Her series of seven Chrestomanci novels are a fantasy in which a state bureaucracy regulates the control of magic and, in the first, 1977’s Charmed Life, two orphans are trained in the use of magic in Chrestomanci Castle. It includes a multiverse in which our own universe figures (the trainee witch Gwendolen swaps places with the version of herself that exists in our magicfree world) and contains, in the eponymous Chrestomanci, a “You Know Who” that characters are fearful of naming aloud. Her work is an acknowledged touchstone for both Philip Pullman and J.K. Rowling’s work.
* “Praise for Garner” in The Weirdstone of Brisingamen (50th Anniversary Edition) (HarperCollins, 2010), [p].
* Interview with author, 2022.
* If I were a Freudian, I might speculate that this structure has a psychological truth to it: that, even as these stories draw their child readers into the world of moral conflict that is part of growing up, they remind them that, down in the basement of all our existences, there’s an ancient, collective, amoral id that precedes morality and language itself.
* Robert Macfarlane, “Midwinter magic: Robert Macfarlane on the enduring power of The Dark Is Rising,” Guardian, 3 December 2022.
Pushing the Boundaries
URSULA K. LE GUIN · MADELEINE L’ENGLE
A Wizard of Earthsea; The Tombs of
Atuan; Tehanu; A Wrinkle in Time
ACROSS THE ATLANTIC, MEANWHILE, WERE TWO writers – Ursula K. Le Guin (1929–2018) and Madeleine L’Engle (1918–2007) – who sought with varying success to put a tweak on the white male inheritance of mainstream science fiction and fantasy. The first novel in Le Guin’s Earthsea trilogy, A Wizard of Earthsea, came out in 1968, capping off the decade that saw Garner and Cooper get their starts. She was no less important a writer, but she was in some respects a very different one.
Le Guin’s fantasy setting was not a hidden palimpsest of our own: there is no portal to Earthsea in Berkeley, California; there is no Object of Power hidden somewhere in Portland, Oregon. Her imaginary world came with politics and detailed local mythologies and, satisfyingly, with maps – she said that when the idea for the book came to her “the first thing I did was sit down and draw a map […] on a very large sheet, probably butcher paper, which I had rolls of for my kids to draw on.”* Its connection with our real world was psychological and mythopoeic.
The protagonist of A Wizard of Earthsea, Ged, is a trainee magician in a world in which enchantment is a widespread technology and (in keeping with so many accounts of magic) the mastery of objects and forces comes through the knowledge of their occult true names. Her starting point was that “Back then, in 1967, wizards were all, more or less, Merlin and Gandalf. Old men, peaked hats, white beards. But this was to be a book for young people. Well, Merlin and Gandalf must have been young once, right?”*
So it’s a book about growing up. Ged’s powers are considerable, but uncontrolled – and it’s when he casts a forbidden spell, and it goes wrong, that he brings into being his principal antagonist, a “shadow-creature” of horrible and unceasingly shifting forms whose first attack scars him. For the first part of its existence the shadow implacably chases Ged; then, realizing he must confront it, Ged chases the shadow. Their final confrontation takes place in a tenebrous space beyond the bounds of the known world where Ged overcomes the shadow by speaking its name aloud. The name is his own:
Ged spoke the shadow’s name and in the same moment the shadow spoke without lips or tongue, saying the same word: ‘Ged.’ And the two voices were one voice. Ged reached out his hands, dropping his staff, and took hold of his shadow, of the black self that reached out to him. Light and darkness met, and joined, and were one.
Ged finds victory in a sort of defeat; defeat in a sort of victory: “Ged had neither lost nor won but, naming the shadow of his death with his own name, had made himself whole: a man: who, knowing his whole true self, cannot be used or possessed by any power other than himself, and whose life therefore is lived for life’s sake and never in the service of ruin, or pain, or hatred, or the dark.”
The book’s themes are the seductions of power, the perils of pride and the way in which evil is not something external to us – as it is in so many simpler children’s stories – but a part of every individual soul. Astonishingly, given how deeply the book resonates even at the level of vocabulary (“the shadow”) with Jungian thought, Le Guin claimed not to have read Jung when she wrote A Wizard of Earthsea.
Le Guin further pushed the normative assumptions of the genre by making Ged brown-skinned and his friend vetch black. Not that her publishers always noticed. As she complained, she had to contend for years with cover designers whitewashing her creation: “Earthsea was bathed in bleach.”* The second and fourth books (The Tombs of Atuan, 1971 and Tehanu, 1990) both had a female protagonist.†
Even so Le Guin, looking back, believed that the eighteen-year gap between the third and fourth books in the series was because “an increasing sense of something missing in my own writing, which I could not identify, had begun to paralyze my storytelling ability. Without the feminist writers and thinkers of the 1970s and ’80s, I don’t know if I ever could have identified this absence as the absence of women at the center. Why was I, a woman, writing almost entirely about what men did?”‡
She wrote passionately, too, against the association of fantasy writing with childishness.
The conventionality of the story, and its originality, reflect its existence within and partial subversion of an accepted, recognized tradition, one I grew up with. That is the tradition of fantastic tales and hero stories, which comes down to us like a great river from sources high in the mountains of Myth – a confluence of folk and fairytale, classical epic, medieval and Renaissance and Eastern romance, romantic ballad, victorian imaginative tale, and twentieth-century books of fantastic adventure such as T.H. White’s Arthurian cycle and Tolkien’s great book.
Most of this marvelous flood of literature was written for adults, but modernist literary ideology shunted it all to children. And kids could and did swim in it happily as in their native element, at least until some teacher or professor told them they had to come out, dry off, and breathe modernism ever after.*
By the time the series concluded, she said: “I […] abandoned any attempt to suit my vision of Earthsea to a publisher’s category or a critic’s prejudice. The notion that fantasy is only for the immature rises from an obstinate misunderstanding of both maturity and the imagination.” Or as she also put it: “Despite what some adults seem to think, teenagers are fully human. And some of them read as intensely and keenly as if their life depended on it. Sometimes maybe it does.”†
Madeleine L’Engle’s Newbery award-winning A Wrinkle in Time (1962) freely mashed up fairytale and mythic elements with hard science fiction, sending its protagonists Meg Murry and her younger brother Charles Wallace Murry on an adventure across distant planets in search of their missing scientist father. Here’s another writer for whom the poetic resonances of post-Newtonian physics offered possibilities. Meg and Charles’s means of travel is “tessering” through wormholes when spacetime is folded (the tesseract is the name given to a five-dimensional cube); yet her fictive universe also includes a trio of ancient and eccentric creatures called Mrs Who, Mrs Which, and Mrs Whatsit, who are something between benevolent witches and guardian angels. Charles Wallace – bullied by his classmates as a “moron” – seems to be what we’d now call neurodivergent; he has savant-like linguistic abilities and, for the purposes of the book, an ability to “read” other people and predict their behavior that borders on telepathy.
Like C.S. Lewis, L’Engle drew explicitly on her Christian faith for her Time Quintet (A Wrinkle in Time had four sequels). The principal antagonist is a “Black Thing” – evil reified, essentially – that is swallowing planets and which, only from a very great distance, can be seen threatening our own world. When the children find their way to the planet of Camazotz, where it holds absolute sway, they find a world of unbroken uniformity and obedience, plus some hellacious bureaucracy. The Black Thing is metaphysical, but it’s also totalitarian. It is temporarily seen off – and its hypnotic grip on Charles Wallace broken – only by the application of the one thing antithetical to it: love.
L’Engle celebrates parental and sibling love, and childhood difference – Meg is worried about being plain, and impatient, and aggressive and “an odd man out”; her friend Calvin lacks love in the home and finds it with the Murry family; Charles Wallace is special in a way that the world cannot understand. The world didn’t understand Madeleine L’Engle either. Her celebration of nonconformity was too nonconformist for most publishers, and A Wrinkle in Time was rejected (in L’Engle’s account) by something between twenty-six and forty of them before finally finding its way into print. Her diagnosis, which has the ring of truth about it, and which tells us something about how siloed children’s publishing was even then, is that publishers just weren’t prepared to countenance a science-fiction novel with a female protagonist. Children’s writers were starting to push the boundaries – but the boundaries, at this stage, were still prone to pushing back.
* Author’s Introduction to The Books of Earthsea (Gollancz, 2018).
* Author’s Afterword, ibid.
* Author’s Introduction, ibid.
† Tehanu was originally subtitled “The Last Book of Earthsea,” though it wasn’t – Earthsea turned out to have other ideas.
‡ Author’s Introduction, ibid.
* Author’s Afterword, Ibid.
† Author’s Afterword, Ibid.
Wars of the Worlds
NICHOLAS FISK · ROBERT WESTALL
Grinny; Starstormers; Trillions; Monster Maker;
A Rag, A Bone and a Hank of Hair; Pig Ignorant;
The Machine Gunners; Fathom Five; Futuretrack 5;
Children of the Blitz; The Making of Me
IT’S ODD TO THINK THAT SCIENCE FICTION AND HORROR or ghost stories don’t really become visible in modern children’s writing until the second half of the twentieth century. They’re present in the deep past, and they’re present, here and there, in the nineteenth century. But for the first half of the twentieth century, they were thin on the ground.
Jules Verne’s prototypical science fiction undoubtedly had child readers. Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers had been presences in American comics since the 1930s, and Dan Dare appeared on the cover of the first issue of the Eagle in 1950. Boys’ short-story periodicals such as The Boys’ Friend kept up a plentiful supply of speculative tales from the end of the nineteenth century – from pre-steampunk airship adventures to tales of imperial defense. But it was only after about 1960 that science fiction took serious hold in published books rather than ephemera. In part, as often, the burgeoning of a genre in children’s writing accompanies or trails a vogue in adult writing. The great age of literary science fiction arrived in the mid-century – its booster rockets being the atom bomb and the moon landings – and bled across into children’s and young adult writing.
Then there’s horror, spooks, and things that go bump in the night. Ghosts and murderers have long played an outsized part in children’s ghoulish imaginations, and in adult anxieties about children. The oral tradition is full of them. Children formed a vast segment of the audience for the “penny-blood” publishing craze that reached its peak in the mid-nineteenth century – cheaply printed serial pamphlets about crime and violence distributed to the working classes at a fraction of the prices at which “respectable” novels were circulated. The great moral panic in the US that led to the introduction of the 1954 Comics Code saw William Gaines, the publisher of EC horror comics, testify before a senate subcommittee on Juvenile Delinquency.
Where did all that fear go? To be a child, in any generation, is to be afraid: of the dark, of strangers, of being lost, of the unknown. Fairytales, which lie at the back of the whole canon of children’s writing, are substantially about the frightening and inexplicable: monsters, magic and transformation. Growing up is a process of getting your fears under control, or at least swapping them for different fears. Adult fear (or the type adults will admit to) is, by and large, rational. Childhood fear – where the world is still an unknown quantity, and the border territory between fantasy and reality is still contested – is peculiarly intense. You don’t know, as adults do, that monsters don’t exist.
In his fine book Danse Macabre (1981), Stephen King writes about how his storytelling imagination was fueled by a 1950s provincial American childhood filled with campfire stories, EC comics, urban legends, B-movie horror flicks. (King, if it’s not a paradox to say so, seems to me to be someone you could think of as writing children’s books for grown-ups.) The fantasy writer Neil Gaiman, author of the matchless Coraline, told Desert Island Discs in 2021 that childhood terrors fed his adult imagination, too. What was he scared of? “You name it, definitely the dark, shadows, witches, anything that really did exist and anything that didn’t… I couldn’t switch that off and I thought of that as my big weakness.
I didn’t realise that one day I would grow up and that would be my superpower.”*
Nicholas Fisk (the pen-name for David Higginbottom, 1923– 2016) shared that superpower. By now a largely forgotten writer of science fiction and fantasy for children, he was a major figure in the genre in the late twentieth century, producing a book or two a year between the mid-sixties and the mid-nineties. He was described in D.L. Kirkpatrick’s Twentieth-century Children’s Writers (1995) as “the Huxley-Wyndham-Golding of children’s literature.” Fisk’s books are marred by the odd of-its-time racial crassness (you’ll find “Jap” used casually) and by a sexism that is wearisome when it isn’t mildly alarming. But as a storyteller he has a lasting power, and a visceral ability to inhabit the worldview of a child.
His work, which explores human cloning, alien intelligence and time travel, has a disconcerting strangeness to it. The otherwise average Starstormers series, which describes the adventures of children who escape from boarding school in a home-made spaceship and take to the stars in the hope of joining their parents off-planet, has as its principal antagonist a planet of animate dust (does he prefigure Philip Pullman here?); and Trillions describes the panicky human response to an alien hive-mind whose moral status is almost indecipherable.
Aliens, in Fisk, really are alien. The traumatized astronaut Blythe tells one of the protagonists in that book that space is:
‘Alone, Apart, Foreign. Unlike anything known to man. Alien.’
‘Alien good, or alien bad?’
It took a long time for Blythe to reply. At last he said, ‘That’s the puzzle. That’s the mystery. How can you tell? How can you begin to understand something completely alien? Good, bad, I don’t know. All I know is – alien.’
Space, for Fisk, is the haunted wood. His key work – and certainly, the one that made the strongest impression on this reader – is his 1973 novel Grinny, which brings the science fiction and horror genres together to startling effect. Its narrator is eleven-year-old Timothy Carpenter, who lives an ordinary suburban existence with his father and mother and seven-year-old sister Beth. In the very first paragraph, the doorbell rings and he answers it. On the step, “with two gi-normous trunks,” is a little old lady. “‘I’m your Great
