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5.0 out of 5 stars
Four Fabulous Fantasists, November 16, 2011
This review is from: Four British Fantasists: Place and Culture in the Children's Fantasies of Penelope Lively, Alan Garner, Diana Wynne Jones, and Susan Cooper (Paperback)
I wish I COULD review this book. I have only just heard of it.
But I can say this.
In 1985 I completed a doctoral thesis on Penelope Lively's fiction, for children and adults.
As part of setting the scene for understanding what Lively was attempting, in ALL her fiction, I examined in great detail the background history of children's books such as Lively was writing.
Central to this was Alan Garner.
Garner did not invent, single-handed, the narrative theme of a great mythic event from an ancient past bursting into the modern lives of real people.
Charles Williams did something like this with "The Place of the Lion", in the 1930s.
Rudyard Kipling did something like this with "Puck of Pook's Hill" even earlier.
Mark Twain did the reverse, with "A Connecticut Yankee in Kind Arthur's Court", sending a modern man back into the ancient past.
But Harner certainly wrote some of the finest books based on this theme, beginning with "The Weirdstone of Brisingamen".
Superficially, this is like taking a slice of Tolkien's "Lord of the Rings", dwarves, elves, orcs, monsters, and all, and transplanting them into a modern British landscape of cross-country hikers, rambling rhodedendron woods, deserted tunnels and mines, and (hobbit-like) children who need to save their world from Ragnarok, the Norse End of the World.
Swords and Sorcerers, and Dungeons and Dragons, became popular AFTER Garner, and obviously AFTER Tolkien.
But Garner is a much better artist than such a superficial sketch might suggest.
Moreover, across successive books, increasingly the haunting-from-the-past stopped being Tolkien-like, and eventually became wholly NON-mythical, while retaining the sense of past-haunting-the-present.
Garner's "Stone Book" quartet, based on his own family across previous generations, is as haunted in the present by family-people from the past as anything else Garner ever wrote.
Susan Cooper, especially with her "The Dark is Rising" sequence, superficially looks like another Garner. But she sustains the conflict between ancient forces from the past and the current defenders across seven books.
Susan Cooper's large debt, in "The Dark is Rising", to John Masefield's remarkable children's fantasy novel "A Box of Delights" ought to be better known, although I think I have read that Cooper has acknowledged listening as a child to a radio serial of Masefield's story.
Bizarrely, at the end of the sequence, in "Silver on the Tree", Cooper dismisses the god-like quasi-religious Manichean theme (the dualist war of the Light against the Dark) that has been the fundamental core of the books, by declaring that there is NO Second Coming, and NO Messiah. She dispenses with faith, with religion, and maybe even with hope. If we are to be saved, no one will save us but ourselves.
Cooper's later novel "Seaward", as with Garner's later developments, retains the blend of realism and fantasy, but does so by moving the fantasy into the psyche of the central character.
Diana Wynne Jones has written prolifically in a similar vein, but with her own themes.
Her books about "Chrestomanci", a great wizard, and a universe of alternative realities, including one where magic really happens and talented magic-makers go to magicians' school, clearly anticipate the world of J.K. Rowling's "Harry Potter".
Fans of "Harry Potter" ought to know Jones!
Yet both Jones, and Rowling also surely ow much to Ursula Le Guin's seminal "A Wizard of Earthsea", a classic (children's) fantasy of a world where magic really happens, and talented young magic-makers go to wizards' school. Fans of "Harry Potter" ought to know Le Guin!!
Jones has written much else, besides, often with a strangely fascinating, teasing sense of mystery as seemingly ordinary everyday reality becomes twisted by darker magic forces.
Penelope Lively began, writing for children, with a not-so-Garneresque novel "Astercote", about a modern village that happens to be next to the (almost haunted, long forgotten) overgrown, possibly dangerous (!) ruins of a village that was destroyed centuries earlier by the Black Death.
She followed this by a thoroughly Garnerian "The Wild Hunt of Hagworthy" in which an ancient pagan ritual and legend comes dangerously alive in another modern village. Ancient rituals are not just folklorifically quaint, they can be dangerous! The past, even its fantasy, was deadly serious!
But Lively also quickly moved towards books where the haunting of the past is more in the psyche of the central character than in ancient mythological heroes who ride out of a magic hillside. Her great children's novel "The House in Norham Gardens" has fantasy only in the DREAMS of the central character. But much else from the past almost-haunts the waking hours, also!
Most interestingly, Lively has repeatedly used this psychological haunting from the past in her many excellent adult novels.
But this is not a review of "Four British Fantasists". I look forward to reading one.
Instead this is an argument to support any claim that these FOUR British authors deserve very serious attention.
I hope Charles Butler has done this well. (And I wish I could have found a publisher for my thesis.)
John Gough -- Deakin University -- jugh@deakin.edu.au
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