I have frequently been surprised, these past couple of weeks, by the way in which even seasoned literary commentators still slip into the habit of referring to Alan Garner as a children’s writer. I am sure I’ve said this somewhere before, but I continue to think of my first encounter with Garner’s work – The Owl Service, which I first read when I was around twelve – as among my most significant primary encounters with adult themes in literature. I found the book utterly compelling – but if you had asked me then what it was about I would have found it hard to answer. There was simply a feeling I had, a palpable sense of having touched something mysterious, timeless and possibly dangerous. I experienced the same feeling, albeit with a greater understanding of what was going on, both in me and in the book, when I belatedly caught up with Red Shift, some years ago.
As regards the Booker commentators, what on Earth is wrong with saying that Alan Garner is a writer who often centres young protagonists?
Which is exactly what he does in his 2021 novel, Treacle Walker, recently shortlisted for the Booker Prize, a fact that has made me feel more personally excited about the award than I have done since Anna Burns won it for Milkman back in 2018. The Booker has become generally much more innovative, inclusive and interesting in recent years, and I follow the annual discussion surrounding it with great enjoyment. Garner’s shortlisting though speaks to me personally. It counts, for me personally,. This is simply a feeling I have.
Treacle Walker tells the story of a boy, Joseph Coppock. Joe has recently been ill, and seems to spend a lot of time alone. Are his parents at work? Who looks after the house? We are never told. We live, for the duration of this short novel, entirely inside the world and mind of Joe as he encounters a mysterious rag-and-bone man, Treacle Walker, and falls into a daunting adventure that will alter his universe.
Treacle Walker speaks to Joe in riddles, an affectation he clearly finds simultaneously annoying and compelling. He is eager to learn the secrets the old man wants to impart to him, at the same time impatient, as any boy might be, to set his own stamp on the world, to interpret its signs and wonders in his own language. Most of the dialogue in Treacle Walker is conducted in the dialect of Garner’s native Cheshire, and one senses keenly Garner’s desire not to confuse or obfuscate but to set down, to save this unique language from annihilation in the twenty-first-century rush to refute the past. There is also a fierce feeling of privacy being accorded, the boy and the man who were always meant to come together sharing knowledge neither could fully fathom, until now.
It is notable that in the moments of highest tension and drama, the two cease with their mutual ragging and speak in terse, plain English. In these exchanges, it is almost as if the two are of a similar age and level of understanding.
As with all of Garner’s work, the action takes place against a vividly described, living landscape. One might almost say that Garner’s writing becomes the landscape, revealing it in all its aspects: peace, seclusion, discomfort, joy, alienation and terror:
But night was in the room, a sheet of darkness, flapping from wall to wall. It changed shape, swirling, flowing. It dropped to the ground and ruckled over the floor bricks; then up to the joints and beams of the ceiling; hung, fell, humped. It shrieked, reared against the chimney opening, but did not enter. It surged through the house by cracks and gaps in the timbers, out under the eaves. There was a whispering, silence, and on the floor the snow melted to tears.
This passage speaks to me particularly, both in its heady choice of words and in the symbols they carry. There have already been suggested many possible and plausible explanations of Treacle Walker’s meaning. For me, it is a book about the rising tide of chaos that accompanies change, the corresponding forces of growth and new imaginings that bring about progress. People have spoken of this novel as Garner’s last hurrah, a gathering together of his familiar themes, a farewell coda. It may be all of these things. Yet it is equally a work of bold experiment and dynamism, a book that makes use of ancient fable to speak to us in our own time with uncanny acuity.
Treacle Walker is tired, and Joe is ready and waiting to claim his future. As the two change places, or become one another, they mirror the unquiet yet seamless passing of one season to another.
A couple of weeks ago I had the great pleasure of talking with writer and folklore enthusiast Mark Norman, the creator and host of the very excellent Folklore Podcast. We had a wonderful conversation about The Good Neighbours, diving deep into the original inspiration behind the novel and the long tradition of fairy folklore within literature. The opportunity to talk about this aspect of the book with someone so deeply attuned to it was especially welcome, and if you’d like to find out more you can listen to the episode here. While you’re at it, you might also want to check out the wealth of resources available at The Folklore Network, including all previous episodes of the podcast. It’s an inspiration.
Talking of which, now seems like an excellent time to give a shout-out to Mark’s latest book, Dark Folklore. Written together with folklore historian and playwright Tracey Norman, this book is an exploration of the more sinister side of folklore and looks like an absolute must for anyone interested in folk horror, either from a reader’s or writer’s perspective. You can buy the book here.
Dancing Girls, by Claude Arthur Shepperson, in Princess Mary’s Gift Book, Hodder & Stoughton 1914
In my fourth and final post on fairy mythology written to celebrate the publication of my novel The Good Neighbours, I want to take a look at one of the most famous fairy stories of the twentieth century. In the way it combines two of my greatest literary loves – the detective story and the mythological landscape of the British Isles – this tale has a feeling of strangeness about it that feels uncannily similar to that of The Good Neighbours itself, which makes it seem all the more fitting to have it round out this series of essays.
In 1917, ten-year-old Frances Griffiths returned to England from South Africa, and went with her mother to stay with the family of her sixteen-year-old cousin, Elsie Wright, who lived in the village of Cottingley, near Bradford in Yorkshire. The two girls formed a close friendship, playing together for hours in the woodlands adjoining their home. When their mothers expressed displeasure at the grubby state of their clothing after such escapades, the girls insisted they had only been tracking the fairies that liked to frolic and dance on the banks of the quiet stream that flowed beneath the trees.
To offer proof of their story, Elsie and Frances borrowed a camera belonging to Elsie’s father Arthur – who was interested enough in photography to have constructed his own darkroom – and promised to return with evidence of what they had seen. They produced two photographs– one of Frances gazing enraptured at a group of dancing fairies, the other of Elsie seemingly in conversation with a diminutive winged figure in the grass in front of her. Arthur Wright dismissed the photographs as a childish prank, though Elsie’s mother Polly was less quick to jump to conclusions. In 1919, she took the photographs along to a meeting of the Theosophical Society in nearby Bradford. The speaker was so captivated by the images he asked and received Polly’s permission to display them at the Society’s annual conference in Harrogate, which is where the famous Cottingley Fairies first came to public attention.
In 1920, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, who had
a longstanding interest in spiritualism and occult phenomena, heard about the
photographs from the editor of the spiritualist journal Light, and decided to
make them the subject of an article he was writing on the fairy world for
Strand Magazine. Doyle contacted Edward Gardner, one of the leading voices in
the theosophist movement, to find out more about the background to the images
and to gain an introduction to the Wright family. He arranged a meeting with
Elsie and Frances, at which he questioned them in detail about their
experiences. He also gave each of them a camera, in the hope that they would capture
further images. They soon came back with three more photographs. Doyle saw the
appearance of this new evidence as groundbreaking, proof of another world,
existing just a hair’s breadth from our own.
As the photographs gained wider attention, the girls began to feel uncomfortable with their fame. Anyone who has ever been in the unfortunate position of having started a rumour that blows up into something vastly grander and more far-reaching than ever intended can well imagine their feelings of helplessness and embarrassment as eminent men of science and philosophy did battle over the authenticity – or otherwise – of the plates and what they depicted. It was many decades before Frances and Elsie felt able to give an honest account of how the photographs had been created. Much as Elsie’s father Arthur had suspected all along, the figures had been traced from images of dancing girls in a popular children’s book. Elsie, a gifted artist, had added the wings. The way in which the two girls captured the images – using pins as props to hold the fairies in place – was a skilful and ingenious contrivance in its own right. The more time went on, the more impossible it seemed for them to come clean. ‘Two village kids and a brilliant man like Conan Doyle,’ Elsie says in a TV interview towards the end of her life. ‘Well, we could only keep quiet.’
Conan
Doyle’s obsession with the Cottingley Fairies would seem to be the ultimate
contradiction, the ultimate face-off between fact and fiction: a man of
science, not to mention the creator of the world’s most famous detective,
bewitched by a couple of children and some cardboard cut-outs? In fact, Doyle
was more sceptic than proselytiser, and for me his interest in the photographs
is indicative of his intellectual curiosity in general, the product of a lively
mind that never stopped asking questions about the world, nor presumed to have
all the answers.
In
his investigation of paranormal phenomena, Doyle takes nothing on trust. His
approach might even be called scientific, a weighing up of evidence; he does
not believe something to be true so much as conclude that it must be. In The Coming of the Fairies, the book he
wrote about the story of his involvement with the Cottingley case, Doyle posits
the possibility – not so different from the ideas expressed in many subsequent
science fiction or ghost stories – that there might be different ‘wavelengths’
of reality, with our own human existence occurring on a relatively limited
plane. Seeing ghosts, fairies or even making contact with the spirits of the
dead would not be a matter of faith, but of ‘switching up’, training one’s mind
and body to apprehend sound, motion and corporeal manifestation occurring on
hitherto invisible planes adjacent to our own.
‘If the objects are indeed there, and the inventive power of the human brain is turned upon the problem, it is likely that some kind of psychic spectacles, inconceivable to us at the moment, will be invented, and that we will all be able to adapt ourselves to the new conditions,’ Doyle writes, imagining a world in which anyone armed with the right technical equipment would be able to apprehend psychic phenomena with the ease of a biologist looking down a microscope at a single-celled amoeba.
It is so easy for us now to look at the
Cottingley photographs and wonder how anyone could have entertained the idea
that they were real. To a modern eye, the contrast between the
three-dimensional reality of the girls and the two-dimensional cardboard
cutouts appears laughably obvious. There is also the fact that the ‘fairies’ as
pictured conform so exactly to picturebook stereotypes: lithe, winsome figures
in scanty clothing with transparent wings, they are precisely the kind of
delicately beautiful fairy folk any imaginative child might long to see. But
fast-forward a hundred years, and are we not precisely as open to being
deceived?
When any simple online search will
reveal dozens of constructed images or fake video clips that purport to be the
truth but are anything but, we have a duty to ask questions about our
continuing appetite for the unbelievable. We live in a media landscape where
image fakery has become so sophisticated it is possibly only a matter of time
before someone perpetrates an updated version of the Cottingley hoax, an act of
digital subterfuge that would doubtless garner more attention and followers
than Frances’s and Elsie’s five sweet photographs ever did. It is important to
remember that the Cottingley Fairies were not a fraud or a hoax in the accepted
sense of the word; Elsie and Frances never intended to hurt or make fools of
anyone, indeed they never expected their images to be seen outside their own
family. They were simply creating art, a harmless piece of trompe l’oeil. The
same could not be said of the multitudinous acts of online larceny taking place
in our digital underground, even as we speak.
As a postscript to the Cottingley story, in a 2009 episode of the long-running BBC series Antiques Roadshow filmed in Bridlington, Paul Atterbury can be seen interviewing Frances’s daughter, Christine Lynch, who has brought along her original prints of the Cottingley photographs, together with the box camera given to Frances by Conan Doyle. Atterbury talks about the intellectual climate of the 1920s, when spiritualism was experiencing a revival, largely due to the massive loss of life in World War One. As the case of Conan Doyle himself demonstrates, there were many, up to and including the most highly educated and erudite individuals, who remained stalwart believers in spiritual and other occult phenomena. Atterbury reminds us that the camera then was seen as a scientific instrument, incapable of lying. Photographs were still viewed as objects of wonderment and contemplation, and to imagine them being anything other than a factual representation of whatever was before the lens as the shutter descended was beyond imagining.
What I find especially magical about the Cottingley affair even today is the fact that right up to the end of her life, Frances insisted the fifth and final photograph was genuine, that it showed real fairies. When Atterbury asks Christine Lynch if she stands by her mother’s pronouncement, Christine hesitates for just a second before replying: ‘I do, yes’. It is a beautiful moment, an expression of faith and hope that lives on down the ages, revealing, as do the photographs themselves, the enduring power of stories and the myths that give life and richness to our time in the world.
FURTHER DOWN THE RABBIT
HOLE:
The Coming of the
Fairies by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. A full account from
Conan Doyle of his investigation into the Cottingley photographs and his own
conclusions. The wealth of contemporary detail makes this book indispensible. A
detective story in its own right, it’s as compelling as any episode in the life
of Doyle’s most famous creation and all the more so for being real.
Reflections on the
Cottingley Fairies by Frances Mary Griffiths. Frances’s own
memoir about her lifelong association with the story. This book is ridiculously
scarce at present, and thus ridiculously expensive. I for one am hoping that a
new edition will appear at some point to bring it within the reach of ordinary
mortals.
Fairy Tale: a true
story. 1997 film by Charles Sturridge that loosely
retells the story of the Cottingley Fairies starring Bill Nighy, Harvey Keitel
and Peter O’Toole. This is a delightful family film that hints at the truth
behind the photographs without ever entirely spoiling the story for a younger
audience. The facts are bent a little, especially with respect to the girls’
family circumstances, but so long as you go in prepared to enjoy yourself you
almost certainly will.
Photographing Fairies.
Also out in 1997 (make of that what you will) is this excellent movie starring
Toby Stephens, Edward Hardwicke and Frances Barber. The film’s director Nick
Willing is the son of artists Paula Rego and Victor Willing, and those
expecting something special from this, his first full-length feature, will find
all those hopes fulfilled. Adapted from a 1992 novel of the same name by Steve Szilagyi the film strays further
from the true events of the story but offers much more in the way of ambiguity,
darkness and adult sexuality. I first saw the movie not long after it came out
and it instantly became a favourite. Criminally, it is currently unavailable on
DVD, but there are second-hand copies floating about. If you are at all
interested in out-of-the-way movies of the British weird this is well worth
hunting down.
Fairy painting has existed for as long as fairy mythology, though as a genre it has come to be associated with its first great flowering in Victorian England. Various theories have been put forward as to why Victorian artists – and the Victorian public – showed such a fervent interest in the depiction of alien realms. Some suggest the fashion was tied up in the resurgence of enthusiasm for Shakespeare, and the consequent popularity of such plays as The Tempest and A Midsummer Night’s Dream in which fairies and the fairy world feature as salient characters. Others have seen the phenomenon as a form of escapism born out of the seismic social and environmental changes of the Victorian age. With rapidly increasing industrialisation and the growth of the suburbs, both artists and art lovers experienced a yearning for scenes and subjects that featured the natural world. The spiritual, mystical aspect of fairy paintings in some sense symbolised the innocence people felt they were losing, for some even seeming to act as a conduit between the living and the dead. There is also the possibility that fairy painting was seen by more forward-thinking Victorians as a way of beating the censor. Many of the bucolic scenes that form the bedrock of the genre reveal more than a tantalising glimpse of naked flesh, and are characterised by an openness about sexuality and physical attraction that would have been scandalous if the characters featured had not been fairies.
For this reason alone, it is no surprise that the artists of the pre-Raphaelite brotherhood, with their progressive approach to relationships and unconventional modes of living, showed a notable enthusiasm for fairy subjects. There were other artists who made a career specialism of fairy art, including Richard Doyle and his brother Charles, John Anster Fitzgerald, Joseph Noel Paton and most famously Arthur Rackham. Their paintings were characterised above all by jewel colours, translucent tonal effects and an intense focus on tiny details.
This delicacy of approach and emphasis on fairy-tale-like beauty has recently been taken up by the ‘new wave’ of immensely skilled and deeply imaginative fairy painters including Brian Froud, Terri Windling and Anne Sudworth. But perhaps the best known – and least understood – of all fairy painters is Richard Dadd, a nineteenth century artist who started his career as a prodigiously talented painter in the Victorian tradition and ended it in the asylum, painting scenes and subjects that owed more to the disturbed and ultimately unknowable landscape of his inner world than the pastoral idylls that form a defining feature of the genre as a whole.
Dadd is usually described as an outsider artist, a term that is often applied to those with no formal training and who have sometimes also suffered damage to their mental health. I’m not a big fan of the label, which is often used more as a form of gatekeeping – a way of subtly indicating who is and who is not worthy of being described as an artist, who is important enough to be classed alongside ‘real’ artists who studied at art school and know their way around the industry – than as a genuine attempt to engage with the characteristics and unique insights of art like Dadd’s. In the case of Dadd, it also erases the fact that he started out very much as an insider, admitted to the Royal Academy of Art at just twenty years of age. His talent was outstanding, and led directly to him being offered the commission that would alter his life forever.
In 1842, the gentleman traveller and former mayor of Newport Sir Thomas Phillips engaged Dadd as the official artist on an expedition he was planning to make through the nations of the southern Mediterranean and the Middle East, culminating in a voyage up the Nile amidst the wonders of Ancient Egypt. Dadd was in a fever of enthusiasm for the enterprise – his early paintings focus very much on re-imaginings of the ancient world, and in spite of his delicate constitution, the promise of seeing these scenes and places for himself was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity he could not forgo. Friends and witnesses say he worked in a kind of delirium, often remaining outside for hours in the boiling sun, in spite of being warned of the dangers, especially for a Westerner unaccustomed to the climate. He was encouraged to rest, to eat properly, But Dadd worked on.
And not even those closest to him fully realised how deeply he was being affected by the sights he saw. The multitudes of people, the unfamiliar customs, the poverty, the glaring new colours, the overabundance of detail and sensation were working a profound and cataclysmic change in the artist. At first, Sir Thomas and other friends of Dadd attributed the painter’s increasingly strange and violent behaviour to an attack of sunstroke. He was shipped home to England, where his father Robert accompanied him to Cobham, a quiet Kentish village that, his father believed, would be the perfect environment for his son’s recuperation.
Tragically, it was not to be. In August 1843, Dadd fatally stabbed his beloved father in a public park, having become convinced that Robert was the devil. After a brief time on the run, Dadd was apprehended, declared to be of unsound mind, and sentenced to spend the rest of his life in the Bethlem (later Broadmoor) hospital for the criminally insane. His doctors encouraged him to keep on with his art, and his greatest work, The Fairy Feller’s Master Stroke, was painted in the asylum. He was judged in many ways to be the model patient, retaining much of the friendliness and enthusiasm for life of his younger years. He never did lose his paranoid convictions, however, believing to the end of this days that he was the servant of the Egyptian god Osiris, sent to do his bidding here on Earth. Contemporary psychiatrists and neuroscientists who have studied Dadd’s case have mostly concluded that he was suffering from paranoid schizophrenia, a genetic inheritance that also affected other members of his family.
My own fascination with the life and work of Richard Dadd began with a postcard reproduction of The Fairy Feller’s Master Stroke my mother had purchased on a visit to the Tate Gallery in London, where the original painting is kept. The postcard is not the ideal format for a painting as intricately detailed as the Fairy Feller, but still I was captivated. I already had a bit of a thing for fairy art, but Dadd’s approach was different from any I had previously encountered. His colours are understated, the dour greys and greens of a winter in the country. His fairies are unfriendly-looking and almost threatening. More even than that, they seem completely immersed in their own world, their own private business; looking in on them feels like a dangerous act of trespass.
A number of years later, and I was finally able to see the real painting, on display at the Tate. I was struck once again by its resistance to human scrutiny, the profusion of detail. Seeing the painting in the flesh also helped to make plain the hours and years of work Dadd had lavished upon his masterpiece. In contrast with the minute brush strokes and refined surfaces that characterise much of Victorian fairy painting, The Fairy Feller’s Master Stroke is densely clogged and heavily textured, paint upon paint upon paint, as if to reflect the agony Dadd suffered in attempting to convey a vision so personal and so traumatic he could never escape its hold on him.
Dadd laboured for ten years, and still chose to leave the painting unfinished. Amidst the jostling figures, the tangled undergrowth there are scattered patches of canvas that remain bare of markings. That one of these lacunae is the fairy feller’s axe? We can read into that what we will. What must be plain to any viewer is the sense of enchantment, of time forever stilled that rises up from this painting. Dadd could not bear to let his vision go. In this sense at least, he is still with us.
Almost from the moment I published my first story, I knew in my gut that at some point I would attempt to say something about Richard Dadd, to try and tell his story in a way that felt appropriate to his legacy. Dadd has left us with much to think about: the nature of genius, the traumatic fallout of mental illness, the sometimes fatal difficulty of trying to exist in a world that cannot tolerate difference. When I first began writing The Good Neighbours, I did not know that Richard Dadd would finally be making his appearance in the pages of my fiction. Which is not to say I was surprised when he chose to show up. Even today, information on Richard Dadd is scarce, and leaves many gaps, not least in relation to other members of his family. I feel certain there is more of his story to be uncovered. In the meantime, we have his paintings, and I can only hope that catching glimpses of them in The Good Neighbours will encourage more people to seek them out.
FURTHER READING:
Victorian Fairy Painting edited by Jane
Martineau.
A catalogue that was produced to accompany a 1997 exhibition at the Royal
Academy, this lavishly illustrated book includes essays and a wealth of
supplementary information from experts in the field. If you are into fairy art,
this is a must-have!
Richard Dadd: the artist and the asylum
by Nicholas Tromans.
This is the most comprehensive biographical work on Dadd to date. Here you will
find images of many of his most important paintings, including a series of
enlarged plates that reveal The Fairy Feller’s Master Stroke in full and extravagant
detail.
Bedlam by Jennifer Higgie. An
experimental novel that attempts to convey Dadd’s genius and breakdown through
a series of poetic vignettes. Higgie is an art critic and editor and her
approach to Dadd is powerfully felt. This is an essential work in the Dadd
bibliography and deserves to be better known.
Come Unto These Yellow Sands by Angela Carter. Written in 1985 as a play for radio, Come Unto These Yellow Sands attempts to conjure the world of Richard Dadd by bringing his own fantastical creations verbally to life. I was lucky enough to catch a rare broadcast of this small masterpiece on Radio 3 in 2018, while I was still deeply engaged in the writing of The Good Neighbours. To my mind it comes closer than anything previously attempted in conveying both Dadd’s heightened state of consciousness and his tragic collapse. I wish the BBC would make this work of Carter’s permanently available. Luckily the full script is included in the anthology of Carter’s plays The Curious Room.
My fourth novel The Good Neighbours is published today! It has taken its time getting here and I’m not just talking about delays due to COVID. Right from the beginning, The Good Neighbours was an elusive, troublesome book that – like the fairy folk that skitter between its pages – needed a great deal of persuasion to reveal its true form. I loved working on the novel though, even as it played its tricks on me, because the characters of Cath and Alice, Shirley and Johnny – especially Johnny – seemed to be counting on me to get their stories told. I hope you enjoy them, and that the book speaks to you, leading you along pathways you might not have explored otherwise.
As The Good Neighbours makes its way out into the world, I thought I would celebrate its arrival with a deep dive into the world of what must count as THE work of fairy literature, John Crowley’s perplexing, genre-defying, mind-expanding, World-Fantasy-Award-Winning novel Little, Big.
*
When celebrated literary critic Harold Bloom, author of The Western Canon, described the Harry Potter books as ‘rubbish, only fit for the dustbin’, and decried Stephen King as ‘an immensely inadequate writer on a sentence-by-sentence, paragraph-by-paragraph, book-by-book basis,’ he stirred up a backlash that is still ongoing, even in spite of Bloom’s death in 2019. His polemic has often been seen as a denouncement of speculative fiction in general, although those with more than a passing interest in Bloom’s pronouncement will quickly discover that his expanded canonical lists include many works of science fiction and fantasy, including H. G. Wells’s scientific romances, David Lindsay’s A Voyage to Arcturus, Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, Ursula Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness, Russell Hoban’s Riddley Walker, Thomas Disch’s On Wings of Song and most famously John Crowley’s 1981 novel Little, Big, which Bloom described as ‘a neglected masterpiece… the most enchanting twentieth century book I know’.
When I look at The Western Canon and Bloom’s unbending defence of his entrenched position on what counts as ‘important’ in literature I tend to feel sad and vaguely troubled rather than outraged. Bloom’s passion for literature is self-evident: he spent a lifetime reading it, studying it, writing about it, defending it. Yet his determined rejection of all schools of criticism other than his own led him ultimately towards a blinkered understanding of how fiction works. The defence of any so-called canon over and above another will always run the risk of becoming little more than a defence of one’s own personal taste over someone else’s. Goodness knows it is difficult – I myself have often found it difficult – to accept that objectivity in criticism, the idea of objective standards of literary excellence, is a chimera, but in order to progress as a critic one needs not only to accept it, but to take it as a starting point.
Bloom later disowned his extended lists, claiming they had only been included as an appendix to The Western Canon at the insistence of his publisher. I would dearly love to know which of the several hundred works Bloom cites in those lists were indeed his true choices, which he would stand by today if he were still around to argue. I cannot help believing that Little, Big would assuredly be among them. Bloom claimed Crowley’s novel as ‘the closest achievement we have to the Alice stories of Lewis Carroll’ – and it is surely no coincidence that one of Crowley’s key characters is named Alice. (There is an Alice in The Good Neighbours, too, but I swear that was an accident.) On a sentence-by-sentence basis, to paraphrase Bloom, I would find it impossible to categorise Crowley’s novel as anything but a masterpiece. For any sad soul out there who might still be willing to insist that fantastic literature is not literature, I would like to see that person tying themselves in knots trying to put the screws on Little, Big.
Is Little, Big the ultimate fairy fiction? Probably. When he was asked in a recent interview why he chose the fairy world as the secret subtext of his novel, John Crowley answered thus:
It might be more true to say that the fairies chose me. I was trying to write a long family chronicle novel, and I wanted my family to have some sort of special thing, some secret knowledge passed on from generation to generation. I couldn’t think what it could be. I can remember the day when somehow thoughts about the book intersected in my mind with some Arthur Rackham fairy pictures I’d seen, and the two just fell together. I can almost remember the street I was on.
I first read these words on Saturday June 5th, in the course of preparing this article, yet they conveyed themselves to me as an uncanny post-figuring of what I myself had written here at this blog last week about the fair folk nudging their way into The Good Neighbours. So this is where we are, and Little, Big is exactly that kind of book.
Like so many family sagas, Little, Big opens (more or less) with a wedding. Our protagonist, Evan ‘Smoky’ Barnable, has fallen instantly in love with Daily Alice Drinkwater (you want to know why she’s called that, read the book) a very tall, very unusual young woman he happens to meet at the house of his friend, George Mouse, who is Alice’s cousin. Invited to meet the family at Alice’s home, Smoky is given some very strange instructions on how to get there. The home in question is called Edgewood, an upstate mansion originally designed and built by Alice’s great-grandfather, John Drinkwater. Drinkwater was an architect, (in)famous for his monograph The Architecture of Country Houses, an abstruse and complicated thesis that argues for the existence of a parallel realm. Drinkwater’s theory of faerie, if I may call it that, posits that the visible world of human beings is but one ‘circle’ of the Earth’s existence, the outer ring in a concentric maze of worlds, each more magical and harder to penetrate than the last.
There are doors between worlds, Drinkwater believes, doors not everyone believes in and few will find. The further in you go, the bigger it gets.
For Alice and her sister Sophie, their magical inheritance – the ability to see fairies – is simply a part of life. For Smoky it is a troubling facet of his beloved he would rather ignore. As with all family stories, the further in you go, the more complex it gets, and though Smoky’s love for Alice and hers for him is never brought into question, that does not mean their allegiances will not be tested. Meanwhile, in the world beyond Edgewood, troubling changes are taking place. As the balance of power between kingdoms threatens to tip from light to dark, the struggle for political ascendancy in the human realm turns deadly. The repercussions are terrible, for ordinary people most of all. For Smoky and Alice’s youngest child Auberon, adrift in a New York that has become almost an alien city, the youthful quest for independence quickly becomes a struggle for ordinary survival:
It was all upside down now. At Edgewood, upstate, night held no terrors, the woods there were tame, smiling, comfortable. He didn’t know if there were any locks that still worked on the many doors of Edgewood, certainly he’d never seen any of them locked. On hot nights, he’d often slept out on open porches, or in the woods themselves, listening to the sounds and the silence. No, it was on these streets that you saw wolves, real and imagined, here you barricaded your door against whatever fearful thing might be Out There, as once the doors of woodsmen’s huts were barred; horrid stories were told of what could happen here after the sun has set; here you had the adventures, won the prizes, lost your way and were swallowed up without a trace, learned to live with the fear in your throat and snatch the treasure: this, this was the Wild Wood now, and Auberon was a woodsman.
The shattering disjuncture between the first half of Little, Big and the second brings to mind another great family chronicle, J. B. Priestley’s Time and the Conways, a 1937 stage play that follows the fortunes of a family from the years immediately after the first world war up until the eve of World War Two. In the first act, the Conway family celebrate the birthday of Kay, the eldest of the Conway children, as well as the return of Robin, who has just been demobbed. The prevailing mood is one of optimism and energy as they look towards the future and the fulfilment of cherished ambitions. The second act takes place twenty years later, and everything has changed. As the clouds of war begin to darken the horizon yet again, no one’s life has turned out as they envisaged, and the waste of potential and squandering of dreams is a palpable grief. Alan, the quieter and more reflective of the two Conway brothers, comforts Kay by explaining his theory that time is not linear, but spatial, that all time exists simultaneously and nothing good is ever truly lost.
J. B. Priestley was fascinated by time as a dramatic element, and by the theories of J. W. Dunne in particular. I first encountered Priestley’s Time Plays in a Radio 4 adaptation of Dangerous Corner in 1984, followed by a BBC production of Time and the Conways a year later. Priestley’s treatment of his themes – the treachery of time, the shifting sands of memory and the double-edged outcomes of the choices we make – had a profound effect on me, and I’m pretty sure that for me as a writer the Time Plays have left as great a mark as any other work of literature I have encountered.
Crowley’s genius in his use of fairy mythology is his insistence – like Priestley’s – of treating the two impostors of fantasy and mimesis just the same. In Priestley’s Time Plays, we see layers of time unravel as one version of the future is played off against another. We are never told, exactly, which outcome is ‘real’ – only that the potential for both exists simultaneously and is balanced on a knife-edge. In Crowley’s Little, Big, Smoky Barnable struggles to come to terms with the conflicting versions of reality experienced by himself and by his wife, Alice. Smoky sees his lack of belief as a lack, period. For Alice, the matter of belief is unimportant; what is, merely is, and time – like the concentric realms described in her great-grandfather’s magnum opus, like the theory of non-linearity described by Alan Conway – is circular and therefore infinite.
The final chapters of Little, Big, in which Crowley describes how the Drinkwater family leave the world of Edgewood and pass into another, still more secret realm, are as elusive and brilliantly imagined as anything I have encountered in the literature of faerie. But Little, Big is greater even than that. A work of deep metaphysical imagining that poses as a soap opera, a mythical perspective on our own troubled century, an examination of class and privilege, a Tale of true love(s)? Truly, the further in you go, the bigger it gets…
June 10th sees the publication of my fourth novel The Good Neighbours. By way of celebration, I’m going to be posting an essay a week through the month of June under the #FolkloreThursday hashtag, delving into the magic and mystery of the fairy mythology that forms one of the book’s defining strands. To begin, I’m going to cast an eye over humanity’s timeless obsession with the fairy world, as well as sharing a handful of my own favourite fairy fictions.
*
Most
of us learn about fairies at an early age. It seems strange, when you think
about it as an adult, that our parents and grandparents, from whom we most
commonly hear our first fairy tales, are so eager to impart to their young
children stories of an eldritch otherworld that might swallow them forever. A
secret kingdom that exists in tandem with our own, from which magical beings
might emerge to visit us, to spy on us as we sleep, to trick us into dangerous
behaviours or, on occasion, to steal us for themselves. What were they thinking? we might ask ourselves now, even as we
ourselves pass on similar stories to our own best friends, cousins, step-brothers,
children or children’s children. Because fairy tales are strange tales,
designed to give us pause for thought, structured to demand our deeper
engagement with what we really believe, parables that teach us, more than
anything, that appearances can be deceptive, that the world we see before us
may be more than it seems. Such duality can be frightening. It teaches us that
our human lives are built on shifting sands.
I
loved – no, rather, I was obsessed with fairy stories from the time I could
first understand them. Happy to consume dark, sordid tales such as The Snow
Queen and Rumpelstiltskin alongside Arthur Rackham’s rapturous fairy paintings,
Enid Blyton’s Your Book of Fairy Stories and Cicely Mary Barker’s Flower
Fairies of the Garden, my first encounter with fairies in the real world came
with the loss of my first milk tooth, and my parents’ immediate insistence that
I offer it as a gift to the tooth fairy. You might get a reward, they hinted,
and I can still remember the excitement I felt, slipping my hand beneath the
pillow as I awoke, the feel of that bright piece of silver, different somehow
from other money and what with that nagging mystery tugging at my brain – how
on Earth could anyone get that coin under my pillow without waking me up? – it never
occurred to eight-year-old me to wonder what
were the fairies doing with all the teeth?? If I were to consider the
question now, the story I would tell would have something to do with biological
data capture, with the fairies’ collating of human code for nefarious purposes.
And we give it over voluntarily, you see, that’s the horror of it. Our
children’s DNA, sold for a shilling…
You
can see how my imagination is apt to fly away with me, how the subject of
fairies still exercises its mystical allure. As a writer, what I love about the
fairy world is its dark ambiguity. Even as children, we learn that fairies
grant wishes but they also throw curses, that lurking behind every fairy
godmother is a bad fairy at the christening. Be careful what you wish for, in
other words, and a deeper, more considered dive into fairy mythology reveals
that the fair folk are neither good nor bad, only themselves. We humans are the
alien invaders, clod-hopping beasts in a numinous realm we cannot hope to
safely navigate, or understand.
I
believe in fairies as the imaginative embodiment of the unknown, the kingdom we
enter in dreams or glimpse at twilight from the corner of an eye, the promise
inherent in all of art that there are other worlds than these. At a more
prosaic level, fairies are symbolic of the fact that we often fail to notice
what is under our noses. My first published story ‘The Beachcomber’ might be
classified as a piece of fairy fiction. ‘Fairy Skulls’, written ten years after
that, identifies itself. My fourth novel, The
Good Neighbours, started out as a mystery novel loosely inspired by a
family murder in the West Country. It was not until I began writing about
Johnny Craigie, the taciturn carpenter who everyone has pegged as a murderer
but who might just be a genius, that the little people – the Good Neighbours of
the novel’s title – began inveighing themselves into the narrative, and I
realised I had embarked upon a journey still more difficult and more mysterious
than the one I’d first imagined.
It
was almost as if I’d been tricked – pixie-led – into writing The Good
Neighbours, as if the fair folk themselves were demanding to be included in
what turned out to be, after all, their story.
Over
the next few weeks I will be delving deeper into fairy mythology, exploring
more of the works and ideas that make these stories so compelling and so perennial.
In the meantime, I will leave you in the company of five of my favourite works
of fairy fiction – disturbing and beguiling in equal measure, these are books
to spirit you away to another world.
The Stolen Child by Keith Donohue. This 2006 novel tells the story of a boy who is taken from his home by fairies and forced to become one of a gang of changelings. These wayward creatures mature in mind as the years pass, though their bodies remain frozen in childhood, at the moment of their abduction. Henry Day, or Aniday as he is rechristened, roams the countryside in search of food and shelter, becoming increasingly forgetful of his human self. Meanwhile, the changeling left behind in his place begins to develop memories of a time before his abduction, when he had a place and a rightful future in the world of humans. Chilling, beautiful and poetic, Donohue’s novel was inspired by Yeats’s poem ‘The Stolen Child’, a magnificent piece of fairy fiction in its own right.
The Iron Dragon’s Daughter by Michael
Swanwick.
Jane is a human slave in a dragon factory managed by elves (which is all you
need to know, right?) After forging a relationship with one of the sentient
machines, she bands together with some other changelings and plots their
escape. Released into a world of unstable factions and multitudinous dangers,
Jane travels deep inside the fairy realm in pursuit of her true identity and
ultimate purpose. Swanwick’s exploration of fairy mythology is dark and original
and desperately real, made all the more frightening by the glimpses of our own
world – Jane’s world – that are briefly offered up to us before being ripped
away. The Iron Dragon’s Daughter is simultaneously a thrilling adventure and a
philosophical investigation of reality itself.
The Good People by Hannah Kent. Kent’s second novel has its roots firmly in historical reality as we meet Nora Leahy, an Irish countrywoman who inherits the care of her grandson Micheal when her daughter tragically dies. Once a healthy, well developed child, the little boy who comes to live with her seems utterly changed, and utterly impervious to Nora’s desperate attempts to love and care for him. Convinced that her real grandson has been replaced by a fairy changeling, Nora enlists the help of Nance Roche, a local wisewoman, in forcing the fairies to return the boy. The results are horrific and disastrous for both women. Kent’s use of language in summoning a world of rural isolation – a world in which ancient beliefs and superstitions have as much influence on people’s everyday lives as the weather and the local priest – is a miraculous intersection between the keenly observed and the fearfully imagined. Most of all, her summoning of changeling mythology as a tool with which to interrogate the entrenched misogyny of the period makes The Good People an essential work of feminism as well as a cornerstone of fairy literature. I reviewed the book for Strange Horizons here.
Under the Pendulum Sun by Jeannette Ng. An original
and marvellous twist on the missionaries in space trope, Under the Pendulum Sun
gives us missionaries in fairyland. Laon Helstone has journeyed deep into
Arcadia, the kingdom of the fae, in search of new understanding and new
converts. Nothing has been heard from Laon in some time, and so his sister
Catherine, desperate for news of him, decides to follow in his footsteps. Arriving
at the castle of Gethsemane, Catherine finds herself a virtual prisoner, with
the mansion’s strange and secretive inhabitants reluctant to reveal even the
smallest amount of information about the whereabouts and wellbeing of her
absent brother. Ng’s novel is one of the most interesting and well achieved
fantasy debuts since Susanna Clarke’s Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell, drawing
on classic gothic tropes, the lives and literature of the Bronte sisters as
well as philosophy and theology to deliver a story that is striking in its
literary ambition and in places genuinely chilling.
The Absolute Book by Elizabeth Knox. A modern, sharp-eyed take on some classic tropes, Knox’s epic takes us on a journey that sees the fairy realm invaded by demons with our own world held to ransom. Taryn Cornick is still desperately grieving for her dead sister. She believes Beatrice was murdered – but has no idea why. She especially has no idea about the finer details of her own past, or the true nature of the house at Prince’s Gate, from which all her most precious memories ultimately stem. Knox’s fairyland can be a dangerous place, but then so can our own world, and as Taryn struggles to overcome her own demons she is not always a safe person to be around. The Absolute Book is a rich and complex achievement, a new masterwork of fantasy, which I reviewed for the Guardian here.
