Gollancz HB, 1974

I came across this novel while looking up reviews for another book. It sounded just like the sort of 1970s YA rural fantasy (though the fantasy is very light) with an otherwise realistic air that I’ve been reviewing on this blog for a while. The Ivory Anvil (published 1974 in hardback, 1977 in paperback) was Sylvia Fair’s first novel, and was runner-up in the 1974 Guardian Children’s Fiction Award. It also got a reading on Jackanory in February 1979.

The setting is rural Wales, often a presence in these 1970s YA books, such as The Owl Service and The Earth Witch, but in this case there’s an added authenticity as Fair was born in Wales, and based the main character on herself as a girl.

Sioned Jones is the daughter of a pharmacist in Nantyglyn, the sort of village, nestled in the Welsh mountains, where everyone knows everyone. Artistic but somewhat shy, Sioned has recently befriended the far more outgoing and good-with-words Anna Lind, whose family moved to a nearby farm from somewhere in England. Anna’s father is a sculptor, which fascinates the artistic Sioned. One day, her mother sends her on an errand to buy a new basin from Dinah China’s shop. Dinah (real name Meredith) is known throughout the village for her fractious relationship with her older sister Eva, though the two have lived in the same house all their long lives. Leaving the shop, Sioned is called back inside by the other sister, Eva, who wants to show her something: the treasures their uncle brought back from China. Among them is an ivory cube, a three-dimensional puzzle made up of three hundred and forty three (seven cubed) pieces. “When you see real beautiful things like these,” Eva says, “other things don’t matter. You can sense the power that beautiful things have?” And the ivory cube certainly has that effect on Sioned:

“Of all the treasure strewn about the room this one small glowing piece of ivory held her open-mouthed and blank-eyed, compelling her gaze until everything else around it blurred. As though it were suddenly in command of her soul, forcing her eyes to stare, reaching out towards her in an effort to grasp her mind, giving out signals she knew not how to receive. What does it want of me? she thought desperately.”

1977 Puffin PB

Sioned returns to Dinah China’s the next day, to show her a drawing she made of the shop, and is bowled over when Dinah hands her the ivory cube, saying “A little problem for you to solve… I think you’re the one to do it.” Somewhat overawed to be in the care of this surely priceless object, Sioned can think of nothing to do but keep it in her pocket, even when she and her friend Anna go on a bike ride into the mountains. It’s only afterwards that she gets the chance to sit down and examine it — to find one piece, shaped roughly like an anvil, and “no bigger than a baby’s tooth”, is missing. Horrified that she’s lost something of immense value, Sioned vows to search everywhere till she’s found it.

But, heading out with Anna again to look for it — even though it could be anywhere on the “huge, rocky, heather-filled sheep-speckled mountain” — Sioned instead finds herself drawn downwards: “Like a migrating bird she followed some guiding instinct which was pulling, tugging her down the valley so that she flew as though on wings…”

Like two similar books I’ve covered recently — The Grey Dancer and The Walking Stones, both set in Scotland — a valley near to Nantyglyn has been dammed up and turned into a reservoir, though where the damming in those books was seen as a threat to the rural way of life and a potentially exploitative disruption of the environment, Sioned (and, presumably, the rest of the village) see the dam as nothing but a positive. For her, the reservoirs “added so much charm and character to ordinary, everyday valleys.” And the possibility of a new, more modern dam is even a thing to be welcomed:

“The building of a new dam would mean new routines, new people, opportunities for exciting things to happen.”

At this point, after low rainfall, the reservoir is almost empty, and the fabled Drowned House can be seen in the reservoir bed — or its remains, anyway. And it’s here Sioned finds herself being drawn. She’s already been dreaming of a young woman in old-fashioned dress, standing in a triangular room, and now she finds the outline of that room in the levelled brickwork on the reservoir bed. Inspired, she starts digging in the mud, and finds it: the anvil-shaped ivory piece. Returning to Anna’s house, she, Anna, and Anna’s older brother Robert set about the intricate task of disassembling the puzzle so they can replace the missing piece, none of them realising till after it’s done that such a piece couldn’t have come loose on its own. It wasn’t Sioned who lost it. It had, she learns when she returns it to the Meredith sisters, been lost since they were children, and their cousin Lizzie had died trying to retrieve it when the valley was flooded back in 1894.

Aside from the many similarities in setting and its light air of fantasy, there’s a lot that’s different between The Ivory Anvil and, say, The Owl Service, The Earth Witch, or even something less intense like The Wild Hunt of Hagworthy. Usually in a book like this, the main character would be the newcomer to the rural setting. Here, even though Anna would be perfect for that role, it’s Sioned who’s the main character. And this allows her love of Wales, its landscapes, people, and language to provide a warm backdrop throughout the book. (Sioned doesn’t speak Welsh — everyone, she says, stopped speaking Welsh when the dam was built — but she wishes she could, and vows to learn.) Also, in any other 1970s rural fantasy of this type, there would be some sort of class tension, but here, there’s none. Aside from the lost puzzle, in fact, the only tensions are within Sioned herself: her shyness, and her sometimes finding Anna doesn’t appreciate Wales as much as she wants her to (though Anna comes round without any need for a confrontation). Perhaps the only real conflict in the book is between Dinah and her sister Eva, rooted deep in the past.

Overall, it’s an evocatively-written, gentle and sensitive tale, with a touch of the fantastic and an idyllic air of dwelling in the landscape of rural Wales. The book got some positive reviews on its release, as in this from the Birmingham Daily Post:

“Her heroine is intelligent, artistic and passionately fond of her Welsh heritage, and struggles to sort out herself and the mystery of an intricate Chinese puzzle which is somehow linked to the past. The people and emotions are refreshingly real.”

And this, from Sarah Hayes in the Times Literary Supplement:

“…a story which begins slowly but gathers momentum as the pull of the past becomes stronger, and as friendship develops between two very different girls. Wales plays an important supporting role, and the compelling natural descriptions are essential to the story itself.”

Fair was born Sylvia Price in Rhayader, Radnorshire, in 1933. She studied at the Bath Academy of Art and went on to teach art for a while. She married Keith Fair (who would go on to become head of art at Grosseteste College in Lincoln), and had five children. Her next book after The Ivory Anvil was The Penny Tin Whistler (1976), which was followed by two books for younger children, The Bedspread (1982 in the US, 1983 in the UK) and Barney’s Beanstalk (1989). She returned to YA in 1997 with Big Talk. By the 1980s she’d remarried, to poet Bill Turner.

The Penny Tin Whistler is already on my to-read shelf. It’s about telepathic twins!

Sylvia Fair in 1983, in The Lincolnshire Echo