The Conjurer’s Box by Ann Lawrence

1977 Piccolo PB, cover art by Gwen Fulton

Some more 1970s YA, though this is more pre-teen than YA. The Conjuror’s Box was first published in 1974, with a Children’s Book Club edition the following year, and a paperback in 1977.

Martin and Lucy Lovell, both under 13, are spending the last days of the Easter holidays with their Great Aunt Bea when they meet Snowy, a somewhat sarcastic talking cat who has been cursed to spend most of his time as the ornamental handle of a small jug. The one who cursed him is known as the Green Lady, who was herself originally an inanimate object, the statuette of a goddess bought by the Lovell’s great-great-great-grandfather, a sea captain who disappeared, was thought drowned, then reappeared many years later looking not a day older, before disappearing once again. Inanimate objects, in this world, aren’t really inanimate at all, as Snowy explains:

Things are like electric batteries you see… only instead of storing electricity, they store life, imagination, enjoyment… The Things in Captain Lovell’s house were particularly lively, because he had three energetic and imaginative children.”

Snowy’s own story, for instance, involves a dish and a spoon who walked off on their own accord. (And, yes, a jumping cow, and a fiddler. It’s all been passed on, in debased form, as the nursery rhyme “Hey Diddle Diddle”.) The Green Lady, meanwhile, gains her power by being the last remaining idol of a once-powerful goddess, who “held the seasons in her hands, the increase of herds and the opening of harvests.” Now forgotten, she seeks her revenge on humanity — if they won’t give her their power through worship, she’ll take it in her own way:

“If she could surround humans with lifeless, mechanical Things, she would draw off the power of their imaginations like water from a tap.”

Children’s Book Club HB from 1975, cover art by Angela Maddigan

The children return home, and learn that their neighbour, a young potter called Sarah Peach, also knows Snowy, and had various magical adventures with him as a child which she only vaguely remembers. Snowy asks her to locate her godfather, currently known as William Schwartz, but more generally known as the Fiddler. He and Snowy, it turns out, are two of the “Old Ones”, one being the Keeper of the Water Gate, the other of the Earth Gate — these Gates being doorways from this world into another. The Green Lady needs to get into that other world to gain two objects of power, a spear and a cauldron (and the fact these are referred to as “the Tokens” shows how thin a lot of the plot-reasoning is — their significance and power is never really explained beyond their sounding familiar from myth and legend, they’re just plot tokens).

In order to gain access to this other world, the Green Lady is seeking the Conjuror’s Box, an old prop from a stage-magician’s act that also happens to have genuine magical power (though only in certain places and at certain times). The box is currently owned by the descendent of that stage-magician, Henry Partridge, a young man whose passion in life is building small working models of steam trains. This, at first, is a worry, because the Green Lady has an affinity with machines, and it’s thought she might easily win influence with Henry, but two things stand in the way of that. One is that he obviously fancies Sarah Peach, the other, as explained by Snowy is:

“Look at the machines he likes — straight out of a time when people loved their machinery and treated their engines like people. The Lady’s idea is to have people treated like machines.”

Kestrel Books HB, 1974, cover art by Brian Alldridge

It’s an enjoyable romp of a book that makes up for any thinness in reasoning or plot (those plot tokens) by sheer rush of new ideas and events. That idea about “Things being like electric batteries” and having a life of their own sounds, at first, like the set up for a novel about the hidden life of inanimate objects, but it’s pretty much dropped almost as soon as it’s out, because there are too many other things bursting to happen: a mysterious toy-maker who tries to steal the box and, when foiled, opens his umbrella and flies off into the sky, after which he’s never met or mentioned again; a rocking horse (called Horse) who, it turns out, can not only move but fly; a pair of large, striped, talking mice who have spent their life studying the precise mathematics of the interaction between the two worlds; a film company that’s clearly a front for the Green Lady, who set up to film in the local village; a journey by hot air balloon; owls who watch the children’s house by night… So many things pop up quickly, making sense enough in the onrush of events, then disappear before you’ve had time to realise how any one of these might make the basis for its own novel, but here’s it’s just a chapter. We hardly get to meet the Green Lady at all, but it doesn’t seem to matter, as the main purpose of The Conjuror’s Box is the conjuring of a world behind the ordinary, full of hidden magic, wonder, and adventure. (A final tying-up of the “Hey Diddle Diddle” connection at the start, though, implies there may have been some planning behind the book: the dish that ran away with the spoon, the cauldron and the spear…)

The Conjuror’s Box shares a certain amount in common with Penelope Lively’s The Whispering Knights: one has a witch, the other a Green Lady, both being dark archaic powers from the past seeking to wreak havoc in the modern age, who ally themselves with machinery (the witch in The Whispering Knights marries a factory-owner). As I’ve said before, it seems to be a theme of British 1970s YA fantasies that their teen/child protagonists are caught between the dark superstitions and supernatural powers of the past and the more oppressive forces of encroaching modernity. (The Changes, and the trilogy of books it came from, being a key example.) The Conjuror’s Box isn’t at all a serious take on the theme, but shows how ubiquitous it was.

art by Gwen Fulton

I only found two brief reviews of the book. One from The Times Literary Supplement (6 December 1974), by Sarah Hayes, who clearly hated it:

“Ann Lawrence’s first two books for children were stylish off-beat tales with a timeless quality that set them in the Farjeon and Thurber class. The load of old-fashioned junk piled into The Conjuror’s Box cannot quite smother Miss Lawrence’s humour and originality, but it is odd that a writer formerly so dependent on restraint should have shown so little here.”

One person’s “old fashioned junk” is another’s emporium of wonders, and I can’t help feeling Hayes was being a little harsh. The other take is from Valerie Brinkley-Willsher in Twentieth-Century Children’s Writers:

The Conjuror’s Box is an enjoyable fantasy with a dramatic climax and some thoughts about the nature of time, but neither characters nor plot has the originality of her other fantasies.”

Ann Lawrence

Ann Lawrence (1942–1987) seems to have mostly gravitated towards historical fantasy fiction for children. One of her later books from 1980, Hawk of May, about Sir Gawain, sounds interesting, but seems not to have made it beyond its initial hardback, perhaps because another book called Hawk of May, also about Sir Gawain, which came out the same year, by US author Gillian Bradshaw, seems to have been more successful.

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The Edge of the World by John Gordon

1985 paperback from Fontana Lions

Gordon’s 1983 YA novel The Edge of the World seems to have enjoyed a bit more success than his previous book, The Waterfall Box, as it had hardback editions in both the UK and US, and a UK paperback in 1985.

It takes place in the middle of the summer holidays in Wisbech in the Fenlands of Cambridgeshire. 13-year-old Tekker Begdale (real name Terence, though only his mother calls him that, and only when she wants to annoy him) and Kit Huntley, a girl of the same age, have seen, not a ghost, but a “ghost like thing”—“a man shape with a horse’s skull”—near the cottage of a local woman with a fearsome reputation, Ma Grist. Later, in the same area with Kit and her older brother Dan, Tekker indulges in one of his pet projects, seeing if he has mental powers. He’s already tried mind-reading with Kit (it didn’t work), now he tries telekinesis, willing the surface of a pond to ripple. To his delight he seems to have managed it, but the next moment the whole world changes: there’s a flash, and the fens become a vast red desert under a purple sky. Then it’s gone. They’re approached by old Mr Welbeck, who claims to have seen it once before, when, as a pilot during the first World War, he crashed his plane in the fens and found himself for a moment in that red desert world. He’d been showing off to his girlfriend, Stella, a woman who, he said, could see a whole other landscape in the fens, full of “Wonderful things”, “shining shapes”, and “a glittering mountain”.

Tekker discovers he can bring that red-and-purple world back with the same mental effort, and he and Kit find the wreck of Mr Welbeck’s Bristol Scout plane there. Later, trying to convince the still-sceptical Dan, they re-enter the world once more, but are attacked by the Horsehead-thing, which leaves Dan comatose. They learn from Mr Welbeck that Dan’s only hope is for Tekker and Kit to go further into this strange other world and find the woman he loved, Stella, who was imprisoned there, in a glass palace, by her jealous sister—the woman known as Ma Grist.

1983 UK hardback, cover art by Geoff Taylor

What follows is a tense journey across a constantly challenging landscape—first a vast red desert, then a climb down a massive cliff, then to the towering, labyrinthine palace of glass—where Tekker and Kit are pursued by the Mari Lwyd-like Horseheads. These are, surely, the best part of the book. Basically, they’re Tolkien’s Black Riders, combining as they do undead men and horses, who later take to the skies on lizard-winged flying machines. It’s their equivalent of the Black Breath that has felled Dan. (I wonder if, also, the horned cow-skull creatures from Time Bandits might have had an influence, too.)

There are hints this other landscape may have some relationship with the real world. An actual palace was planned to be built in the fens four hundred years ago, so perhaps the glass one is an echo of what might have been. Meanwhile, the dry desert and towering cliff are the exact opposite of the flat, watery fens. But it also seems these lands were created, or at least shaped, by Ma Grist and Stella: Stella, who saw that “glittering mountain”, now dwells in it, while the jealous Ma Grist has imprisoned her there thanks to the vast desert, cliff, and the Horseheads she commands.

Is this world, then, a parallel realm—perhaps one of many—that just happens to be accessible at this point in the Fens, or was it somehow created by events in the real world then taken up and crafted by Ma Grist and her sister? I suspect Gordon stayed clear of answering such questions because, to him, the important element was to open up reality to be stranger than we think it is. As Tekker says at one point:

“Look at all that land out there. It looks flat and dull but it’s full of things you’d never guess. I feel I could split it wide open like a skin and find something else inside it.”

Or Kit (in what I like to think of as the book’s trailer moment):

“There’s always something just beyond the edge of things, and sometimes you learn the trick of getting there.”

1983 US hardback, art by Michael Hays

The fraught nature of male-female relationships, particularly in their early stages, are one of the driving elements of Gordon’s YA fiction. Tekker and Kit are incapable of admitting their feelings for each other, but are quick to feel jealousy and turn spiky, accusing one another of breaches of a relationship that can’t, it seems, be acknowledged in any other way. The dry desert, forbidding cliff, and confusing glass labyrinth, then, could be seen as an actualisation of the emotional barriers people place between themselves. They are, after all, what’s between Mr Welbeck and his love Stella, created by the jealousy of Stella’s sister Ma Grist. But Mr Welbeck needs no fantasy land, as he talks of sticking to his house because it’s his “fortress” and “bolt-hole” — but against what? The Horseheads, or human relationships? And there’s a hint, I think, that Stella and Ma Grist may even be one person, with Stella the loving aspect that can only be reached once Ma Grist’s forbidding nature is overcome. It’s all quite emotionally complicated.

And crossing this landscape, facing its dangers together, might not lead to Tekker and Kit speaking more openly of their feelings, but it forces them to work together, often in actual physical contact. “We balance each other,” Tekker says at one point, because they’re having to move with their arms tight around each other to avoid falling, but it’s as close as he comes to admitting the other aspects of their growing relationship.

For me, The Edge of the World doesn’t work as well as Gordon’s more ghostly or subtle supernatural fiction. Tekker’s use of mental powers to enter the other world are dropped once he and Kit are given a flat disc of “bog oak dug up from the fen” which allows them to enter that other world by turning it. Why not just have the disc and do away with the complication of the mental powers? (Or make better use of the mental powers and have Tekker employ them in some way in their quest?) And Gordon’s terse, impressionistic prose style, which is great for capturing immediate sensations and fleeting moments—and so, perfect for adding a ghostly edge to a real-world narrative—doesn’t work, for me, so well with this sort of outright fantasy, which requires a clear establishment of the landscape and situation, at least initially. It’s hard to get an overall feel for some of the situations Kit and Tekker find themselves in, and as a result, dangers arrive suddenly, as do their solutions. It all feels like it’s filmed with nothing but too-close handheld camera-work, which can create a lot of tension, but can also be disorientating and confusing.

But the very oddness of the fantasy aspects at least gives it a sense of authenticity. You never feel Gordon is rehashing something generic, but rather that he has his imaginative eye set on some world he’s discovering within his own head, and relating it exactly as he finds it, even if it doesn’t make perfect sense.

Gordon does seem to produce some books I can’t quite get on with as much as others, and the ones that don’t work for me, such as The Ghost on the Hill, largely don’t because they’re too impressionistic and confusing; they leave me needing to read them a second time but not really wanting to because I didn’t enjoy the first read. The Edge of the World is more of that type than I’d like (because I love the theme of boy-and-girl-go-to-another-world—key examples being Le Guin’s Threshold and Catherine Storr’s Marianne Dreams), but at the same time it’s obvious there’s a genuine artistic intent behind all of his works, which makes the best of them—The House on the Brink, for instance—all the more special.

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The Human Chord by Algernon Blackwood

The British Library’s 2024 PB of The Human Chord

Published in 1910, The Human Chord is perhaps Blackwood’s most weird-fiction-friendly novel, which makes it fitting it has been republished by the British Library as part of their Tales of the Weird series.

The story centres on 28-year-old Robert Spinrobin, a somewhat ineffectual fellow, wandering through life via a series of secretarial posts (much as Blackwood himself did for a while), but with an ultimate aim of somehow, somewhere, finding his very own “authoritative adventure of the soul”. He responds to an unusual ad:

“WANTED, by Retired Clergyman, Secretarial Assistant with courage and imagination. Tenor voice and some knowledge of Hebrew essential; single; unworldly. Apply Philip Skale.”

Applying, Spinny (as he’s mostly known) finds himself in an isolated house in Wales. Skale is an impressive figure, tall, deep-voiced, and intent on pursuing a certain “philosophical speculation” “wheresoever it may lead”. This speculation is that “Everything in nature has its name, and he who has the power to call a thing by its proper name can make it obedient to his will.” Some names, though, are more complex to speak than others, particularly when it comes to “the so-called ‘Angels’; for these are in reality Forces of immense potency, vast spiritual Powers, Qualities, and the like”, who are “all evocable by correct utterance of their names.” Skale wants to utter “a certain complex and stupendous name”, for which he needs four voices: himself (bass), his housekeeper (alto), her niece Miriam (soprano), and a tenor. So far, twelve young men have applied for the latter role, but all have failed to harmonise, in various subtle ways, with the others. Spinny, though, fits perfectly — not only providing the tenor, but instantly clicking in other ways with young Miriam. (Though is there a significance in his being the thirteenth applicant?)

There are, though, risks. Housekeeper Mrs Mawle is deaf and has a withered arm thanks to Skale’s fumbled attempt to speak her true name. To mispronounce the angelic names is “to attract upon yourself the destructive qualities of these Powers”, and unleash far greater levels of mayhem. Skale, however, is utterly confident that with his new assistant’s E-flat, they can proceed.

1972 HB from Tom Stacey

Spinny, of course, wonders what that “complex and stupendous name” is — and in this, it has to be said, he’s alone, because it’s obvious there can only be one name Skale is aiming for, and that’s the top one, a name so complex that even four human voices will be inadequate. Skale has, it turns out, already succeeded in somehow trapping the four sounds that make up but the first syllable of that name, which are confined (thanks to a combination of coloured drapes, wax forms, and other esoteric devices) in four of the rooms of his large house. Each of the four members of his “human chord” will utter the sound that unleashes these sounds, which will lead to the formation of a greater sound — itself but the first of the four syllables of the Great Name he’s ultimately intending to speak.

And the aim of sounding that name? To both become part of the named entity and to command it — to become, Skale says, “as gods”. Spinny — little, comical Spinny — is bowled over by Skale and agrees to do whatever he says. But doubts creep in, particularly as his relationship with Miriam deepens — if “deepens” is the word, for the pair are as shallow as puddles. Both are innocents, described as “two bewildered children” before Skale’s awesome endeavour, though this is not the childlike nature-mystic type of innocence that really works in Blackwood’s fiction; these two are more comically innocent, wide-eyed and somewhat blank-minded in the face of everything that’s going on. When Spinny agrees with Skale that, yes, they will become “as gods”, I can’t help wondering what Spinny would do if he actually became “as a god”. And anyway, you can’t have an “adventure of the soul” if you are “as a god”, because a god can’t have peril, mystery, or wonder, nor can its already-ultimate soul grow or change as a result.

Like Blackwood’s 1911 novel The Centaur, this is a story whose main character is presented with two worlds, and has to choose between them. In The Centaur, O’Malley was caught between cosmic nature-mysticism and the modern world of “Humanity and Civilisation”, and, like Blackwood, opted for the former. Here, Spinny is presented with a choice between the world of magic, power, knowledge and being “as gods”, and the more human world of love for Miriam. Skale is a magician who never seems to question that anyone would want anything but power, knowledge and godhood. But when, at the end, he sings his note and the world starts to transform, the vision Blackwood presents is far more of the sort found in The Centaur — where nature is one, already-perfect thing, with no need for a magician-figure to take charge of it — so Skale might not have been satisfied with the results even if he had succeeded:

“The outer semblance of the old earth appeared to melt away and reveal that heart of clean and dazzling wonder which burns ever at its inmost core—the naked spirit divined by poets and mystics since the beginning of time. It was a new heaven and a new earth that pulsed below them… All nature knew, from the birds that started out of sleep into passionate singing, to the fish that stirred in the depths of the sea, and the wild deer that sprang alert in their wintry coverts, scenting an eternal spring. For the earth rolled up as a scroll, shaking the outworn skin of centuries from her face, and suffering all her rocky structure to drop away and disclose the soft and glowing loveliness of an actual being—a being most tenderly and exquisitely alive.”

This is a world of “poets and mystics”, not power-seeking magicians, and in the end, Spinney realises that “the great adventure he sought was only the supreme adventure of a very wonderful love”.

Algernon Blackwood, photo by Douglas

Mike Ashley has called The Human Chord Blackwood’s “one complete hermetic novel” arising out of his time in the Order of the Golden Dawn, which Blackwood joined in 1900. But such magickal occultism was only ever a step on the way to the nature mysticism that was Blackwood’s true “note”, and I can’t help feeling The Human Chord is Blackwood’s dismissal of the quest for magical power as opposed to seeking oneness with a mystical Nature. (Meanwhile, Aleister Crowley’s somewhat snide review of The Human Chord, in his own journal The Equinox in March 1911 — signed “Georgos” — called it the result of “indigestion brought on by a surfeit of ill-cooked Theosophy”.)

This is probably Blackwood’s most accessible novel, if you’re looking for something like the sort of weird fiction he’s known for, but The Centaur is far more characteristic of what he was really aiming at. Spinny is perhaps just a little too shallow to make The Human Chord rise above a parable about the overweening quest for power in a world where simply being human might, in the end, be much more satisfying.

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