mewsings in July 2011, page 2 of 2

If there was any need to prove J K Rowling’s Harry Potter books weren’t created ex nihilo, but as part of an existing tradition of magical fantasy in English fiction (which includes Jill Murphy’s The Worst Witch series, and Mary Norton’s The Magic Bed Knob; or, How to Become a Witch in Ten Easy Lessons (filmed as Bedknobs and Broomsticks)), here it is. Joan Aiken‘s Armitage Family stories have very much the same feel of institutionalised magic, where spells work just like recipes, where fantastical beasts are as likely to wander into the story as their mundane counterparts — and just as likely to be adopted as pets, or hatched from the egg and raised till they get out of hand and have to be released into the wild — where BBC 13 is the radio station to listen to if you want to learn about magic (which you can also do by a home study course), where there’s a charity for replacing the worn-out wands of “fairy ladies” (the polite term for witches), and a Board of Incantation that can requisition your home to use as a seminary for young magicians… It all sounds and feels so Potterish, yet the first Armitage Family stories were published in 1958, and Aiken continued writing them throughout her career (the last to be published during her lifetime was in 1998, and this book collects them all, plus four previously unpublished).

There are differences, of course. Aiken’s stories, being short stories, don’t build up into an epic battle against evil, but are, rather, about the more mundane conflicts, botherations, quibbles and quandaries of childhood and family life. Mark and Harriet are perfectly normal children, constantly engaged in their own projects and interests, but quite level-headedly dealing with curses, spells, hauntings, and visits from fantastical creatures, sorcerers and minor gods, as well as that more fearsome antagonist, the awkward relative, in their four-decade long childhood (whose background details get quietly updated as the stories go along, so there’s mention of computers, and the wearing of jeans, though it never breaks the spell of timelessness around their childhood. There seems to be no TV, for instance — Mark and Harriet are simply too busy to watch it).

Andi Watson provides some wonderful illustrations to the Armitage Family stories

Aiken writes with a light narrative tone, perfectly suited to the air of casual, childhood magic and nonsensical surrealism she creates, and that tone never wavers, even when there are touches of genuine tragedy. There’s not a lot of tragedy, nor does it involve any of the main characters (unless you count Walrus the cat), but there is a rather awful, casual destruction of a magical portal (built using sections collected from the backs of cereal packets), that separates two lovers, perhaps forever; and elsewhere, a harmless minor character gets killed so suddenly in a road accident you can’t quite believe it’s just happened (nor that it’s not about to just as-suddenly un-happen, which it doesn’t).

Aiken’s Armitage family stories are full of magical invention, weird characters, and a sort of enduring faith in the resilience, adaptability, open-mindedness, and fair-mindedness of her child characters. (Who, I can’t help feeling, would deal with Lord Voldemort in somewhat under seven pages, never mind seven books!)

I was once asked, in an interview for a job in a bookshop (which I didn’t get), whether a book had ever changed my life, and if so, how. I remember being completely stumped by this (unprepared, as ever). The answer to the first part, I knew, was yes, several times over, but the how of it felt just too immense for a quick, slick answer. It was more the sort of thing I’d want to retreat and write about for several hours, editing, thinking, then leaving for a few weeks before going back to it and writing some more, perhaps producing something of a moderate book length by the end of it. Which is one of the reasons I was so interested in this book, The Film That Changed My Life, in which critic Robert K Elder gets thirty filmmakers to talk about the film (or, in a couple of cases, pair of films) that they think changed their lives.

Of course, as they’re all filmmakers, the answer to the first part of the question (did a film ever change your life) is always going to be yes, if for no other reason than there must have been a film, at some point, which made them realise they wanted to make films, or showed them the style or approach that best suited them — in other words, that provided them with some technical release, some final polish to themselves as filmmakers. And for many of the interviewees in this book, it’s that film — often seen in their late teens, or while at film-school — that they talk about. But there are others (and these are my favourites) who talk about a film they saw, usually as a child, which just blew them away, not for any technical reasons, but for the sheer magic of it, and which has remained as magical throughout their lives. (Perhaps it’s no surprise that the three obvious ones of this type, Brian Herzlinger on E.T., John Landis on The 7th Voyage of Sinbad, and George A Romero on The Tales of Hoffmann, are all fantasies.) Herzlinger says “when I left the theater, I just wanted to go in again. I’ve never done any drugs in my life, but I think that is what an addiction feels like.” Romero says, “I was just blown away. I was in a great theater with terrific projection, a really big screen, and it was just beautiful. I was knocked out.” And Landis: “The film itself just made a huge impression on me in creating a completely different world. Instead of being this little kid in a theater in west L.A., [I was] being transported to this magical place, really going on these adventures.” A later, more mature reaction, though of a similar type, comes from Frank Oz, who says (of A Touch of Evil), “I don’t remember the first time I saw it. All I remember is every time I look at it I am never ever bored with this thing.”

I think the answer to the question of how a book or film can change your life is difficult because books and films don’t so much change you as bring into the open what was already there but hidden, or not understood, but which was waiting, if not bursting, to find a way of coming out. That’s why, looking back on a life-changing encounter of this sort, you can’t articulate what it was that changed, because as a result of the encounter you are simply more truly yourself, and in order to articulate the change you have to remember (and explain) a time when you were less yourself, which is really quite difficult to do.

Books, films — everything arty — are really only about one thing, when it comes down to it, and that’s how to be human. How to exist in this world, caught between your imagination and whole inner world on the one hand, and reality on the other. The great thing about art — films, books, etc. — is that it works at bringing the inner (imagination) into the outer (reality), and it’s when you see it being done in a way that reflects (or releases) your own attempts, your own style or personality, that a book, or film, or act of cake decoration or whatever, changes your life. And, really, the only way to explain that is to either make someone watch the same film (or read the same book) but as you, and as you were at the time, (which is of course impossible), or to make your own film, or book, and use that to put them through the same process.

Perhaps it’s simply that the best, most life-changing, books and films simply leave you speechless.

Anyway, I don’t think that answer would have got me the job in the bookshop, but it’s the best one I can come up with!

Oops, a bit more 70s TV. This 1977 series belongs to that subgenre of horror/science fiction stories (which includes John Wyndham’s The Midwich Cuckoos, Ramsey Campbell’s The Hungry Moon, and the Jon Pertwee Doctor Who story The Daemons) in which a village is isolated by a magical barrier, so that some evil/alien force can gather its strength before moving on to take over the rest of the world. With Children of the Stones, the evil force is, oddly enough, happiness; those villagers affected greet each other with a “Happy Day”, know what each other is thinking, and tend to be inordinately good at maths. But of course the reason this happiness is evil is that it’s one man’s idea of happiness, imposed on its subjects without their consent.

It’s the end of this 7-part series that really makes it a children’s serial. This isn’t a criticism; it’s just that you need to have a certain amount of awestruck credulity (or childlike sense of wonder) to accept the final explanation for what’s going on. The bowl-shaped rock beneath the village is a transmitter for pure evil? So that it can be sent towards a black hole? Right.

I’m not ruining the story by revealing this, because Children of the Stones is best accepted as you’d accept a weird dream — for its sense of mystery and menace, not its logic. This is particularly true for the way the story comes to an end, because I really have no idea what happened there. Something to do with time. All very odd. But before that you have plenty of the sort of thrills and weird chills any devotee of 70s horror TV and film will love: a mysterious stone circle, an old painting depicting an ancient ritual being held there, a mad lord-of-the-manor type with an oddly purposeful interest in astrophysics, a boy with burgeoning psychic visionary powers…

Peter Demin and Gareth Thomas as son and father in Children of the Stones

For me, the best part of the series was the relationship between the two main characters, the father and son who arrive as outsiders in the village. There’s something very affecting about the way they get on with each other, how naturally they work together, and the trust they have in each other, that takes their characters that little step beyond the usual sort of stock relationships encountered in this type of story.

And here’s a nice little YouTube clip of Stewart Lee using Children of the Stones and The Changes (reviewed on a previous Mewsings) to discuss how the representation of teenagers on TV has changed from the 70s.