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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.”

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!

I wasn’t sure at first whether I was going to read The Great When, but bought it on a impulse pretty much the day it came out. I haven’t read Moore’s previous novel, the imposing Jerusalem, and stalled on his short story collection Illuminations at the super-long “short story” satirising the comic industry (I’ll wait for the edition with footnotes, if there is one). But I’m glad I read The Great When; it was just right. It kicks off “The Long London”, a five book series that, I’m sure, Moore has got mapped out already, so there’s bound to be elements in this first book whose significance will become evident as the series progresses.

After a somewhat confusing prologue with glimpses of various characters and scenes from World War II Britain (some of whom don’t appear in the rest of the novel, though I can’t really complain about that because I like the opening chapter of A Voyage to Arcturus), the story settles down to one main character, 18-year-old Dennis Knuckleyard, a war-orphan now (1949) living and working at Lowell’s Books & Magazines, which is owned and run by the terrifying Ada Benson — or Coffin Ada, as she’s known, and not entirely because of the consumptive coughing that peppers her every sentence.

Ada sends Dennis on a seemingly simple task: to buy a box of Arthur Machen books from a fellow dealer, saying he can keep the change if he manages to haggle it down below £15. Imagine his joy when the dealer all-too-quickly offers the lot for £5. Included in the box is a book not by Machen, the Reverend Thomas’s A London Walk: Meditations in the Streets of the Metropolis — a book, it turns out, that’s not supposed to exist. It was invented by Machen, and mentioned in one of his more intriguing and subtle tales, “N”. Dennis, of course, doesn’t realise this, he just thinks Coffin Ada will only be pleased with him (or, knowing her, be a little less angry with him) for getting such a bargain. As soon as she discovers the rogue volume, though, she sends him back out with it, saying he’s not to return — and she means she absolutely does not want to see him again — till he’s got the book back to the dealer by any means possible. Of course, when Dennis tries, he not only finds the dealer now dead, but gets chased by a couple of heavies.

Running desperately, he takes an unusual turn — and finds himself somewhere else. Somewhere that shouldn’t be there. Almost as if there’s another version of London, lurking behind the scenes, and he’s somehow found his way into it. Which isn’t to say things have improved. He may have lost his thuggish pursuers, but the street itself — though paved with actual gold — keeps opening its crocodile jaws to try and eat him, while fragments of broken crates and litter begin to animate in a decidedly predatory manner…

Dennis has, it turns out, ended up in a particularly lively area — a “vividistrict”, in fact — of a place that’s variously known as the Great When, Real London, “the superior London”, “London’s theory, not its practice”, “the imaginary o’ London”, “London’s sacred essence”, “the Theoria”, “the Higher Town”. It is, one character explains, “a Symbolist substratum” of our London, “an ’idden attic o’ mankind’s imagination, what’s only accessible to them oo’s stairs go up that ’igh.” It’s the realm of “the Arcana”, as they’re known — living archetypes or aspects of London’s life and history — and my favourite summation is that it’s a “matter-phor”: a metaphor, only one that happens to actually exist, “built up across the centuries from dreams o’ London”.

The Reverend Thomas’s shouldn’t-exist book was a “breach” — an instance of that London leaking into this one. And that London takes such breaches seriously. The last time such a thing happened, when one Teddy Wilson somehow acquired a copy of the should-be-fictional Fungoids by Enoch Soames, he was subsequently found… inside-out.

Dennis’s quest to return the book brings him into contact with a number of lively characters, from the up-and-coming crime boss Jack Spot to the bookish streetwalker Grace Shilling, and brings in a number of real-life figures from the time, including occult artist Austin Osman Spare, Ironfoot Jack Neave, and Prince Monolulu — “the greatest racing forecaster this land has ever seen”, who claims to be an Abyssinian Prince. Moore, you can be sure, has done his research.

There’s something of an air of Mythago Wood about the relationship between London and its higher/archetypal other — something perhaps exaggerated in my mind because I’m also reading the mythago-themed anthology Heartwood at the moment, and one of the early stories there, Adrian Tchaikovsky’s “Paved with Gold”, treats the capital as a mythago-generating landscape. Both Tchaikovsky and Moore make use of one of London’s most evident archetypes, Jack the Ripper. Moore, of course, has dealt with the Ripper before, in From Hell, and I’m wondering if one of the themes that will play out in the Long London series is the existence of such killers, who murder coldly, and at random, or at least for seemingly impersonal reasons. One of Dennis’s friends, the reporter Tolerable John McAllister, remarks that “the war put paid to simple reasons, and we shan’t be seeing ’em again”, which is perhaps another theme the series might be exploring.

Moore’s style is playful throughout, and though that can make for confusing moments — as in the prologue, where it was occasionally hard to work out, at first, wether Moore was being playfully metaphorical or was describing something actually weird going on, which is one of the downsides of using a heightened style when the reality being described isn’t behaving as it should — but after that the narrative style got along nicely, leading to the one sentence that, for me, justified the entire novel:

“He was too full of unfamiliar voltage to consider sleeping straight away.”

— one of those so-it’s-not-only-me moments you get from a writer who tries.

The story itself did seem to conclude a couple of chapters short of the end of the book, and though it was pleasant enough to tag along with Moore’s cast of postwar Bohemians — to attend, for instance, an Austin Osman Spare exhibition — it did mean that an extra ending had to be achieved, and one that felt (to me) insufficiently foregrounded by the rest of the novel, so a little bit tagged on. But, no matter. I felt The Great When was basically there to introduce us to Moore’s other London, and perhaps a character or two. The fact that it works as a novel on its own — meaning you can read it without having to commit to the entire series — is a bonus.

The next book, apparently, is going to be called I Hear A New World, which, along with the mention of Joe Meek in the epilogue, makes me sure the legendary pop producer will be appearing in it. (And, I wonder, as it’s presumably going to be set in the 1950s, will Colin Wilson be popping up too?)

Mister Magic (2023) is a variant on the “cursed film” genre I’m drawn to, the cursed kids’ TV show. Thirty years ago, Mister Magic, the longest-running TV show in history (it began on radio, then transitioned to TV) ended in mysterious circumstances. Now, the kids who made up the final cast are invited back to the remote desert location in Utah where it was filmed, to be interviewed for a podcast. Of the six kids, only four have been found until Isaac (one of the cast, now grown up and working as a private investigator) tracks down Val, who has remained completely hidden until now. Unfortunately — or fortunately — they find her on the day of her dad’s funeral, her dad being the one who took her off the show and kept her hidden ever since. Val, meanwhile, has no memory of Mister Magic at all, knowing only that she has had to be ready to leave at a moment’s notice, should some unidentified someone track them down. Suddenly learning her mother is not only alive but living near the reunion location (in the town of Bliss), Val decides to go along, to find out what happened to her and the show that she’s wiped from her own memory…

Along the way we start to learn more about Mister Magic. The show was about six children playing in a world that made their imaginings real. One of the cast, Marcus, would “paint” scenery, and the kids would interact with it. For additional help, and to extract themselves from the scrapes they’d got into, they could form a circle and summon the black-cloaked Mister Magic. (Nobody can remember if he was played by an actor in a costume, was a puppet, or a special effect. To the kids in the show, he was real.) Towards the end, though, Val — who, it turns out, was the leader in the group — tried to get them to rely on Mister Magic less and less. What had she learned about their supposed benefactor?

The novel is peppered with nicely-done little extracts from the internet — a Wikipedia page, a chat forum, social media posts, and so on — of people trying to recall the show, which they evidently feel nostalgic about. But no video, stills, or documentary evidence exist, and the occasional article that pops up with genuine information always disappears. A key thing about the show everyone remembers, though, is the little songs the cast were constantly singing, all of which were trite little morals, like:

When we care about others
We share what we’ve got
But if you don’t work for it
Nothing is your lot

The novel does a good job of building an air of mystery and nostalgia about the show, and of increasing darkness, even supernatural evil, about it, too — at first, anyway. The house where the reunion is to be held (and where the cast used to stay while it was being filmed), gets its Hill House moment:

“Val wonders if all houses have deep roots, whole sections of their bodies hidden beneath the ground. But this house, this inexplicable house, refused to stay buried and is rearing to its full height, ready to strike.”

But ultimately, I think the novel spent too much time on this “air of mystery” stage. Not so much with regards to the show itself and how the kids left it, but the questions that arose once I knew all that. For instance, the supernatural element. There’s two things you can do with the supernatural, once you’ve spent time setting it up as mysterious and scary. One is to let it remain unexplained, the other is to describe something of its nature, and thereby give it more of a specific meaning. Here, the supernatural has to be explained in some way, because it’s wrapped up in a children’s TV programme, and that’s not the sort of thing the vast and unknowable cosmic entities of, say, a Lovecraftian horror would be found doing. The trouble is, because White hasn’t dropped any hints about the nature of her particular supernatural thing, we get a situation I don’t think works well (I also wrote about it in my look at John Gordon’s The Waterfall Box), where a character has to suddenly intuit all the information they need about this thing right near the end, mostly in one go. Which, unless you’re really wrapped up in the story, just feels like a writer telling rather than showing, in a situation which really benefits from showing rather than telling.

Another element that was unexplained, for me, was the operation behind the TV show. As a mild spoiler, this proved to be a cult-like group, a split-off from the Mormons. At this point, I’d already taken a quick glance at the author’s note at the end of the book, where she says “Yes, I was a Mormon. No, I am not anymore.” The story obviously has a lot of personal meaning for her, but I think perhaps this led to her fictional cult being underdeveloped. Just what were their beliefs? Why were they doing what they were doing? How did they justify it to themselves? Did they have larger, world-threatening plans? Were they using the supernatural thing, or was it using them? And how was that power-balance likely to go? A lot of questions were left unsatisfactorily even unhinted at. (This sort of thing leaves me with the sinking feeling the author might have decided to put it all in a sequel, which I’ll never read.)

There’s a certain similarity to Stephen King’s IT, with its grown-ups returning to put an end to an evil they’d faced as kids, but IT, through its very lack of any specificity, managed to make itself into a universal tale about childhood fears. Here, we’re dealing with something more specific, though still widespread — the coercive need to make children behave — but the story fails to hit that archetypal note that would really make it feel universal.