fantasy, page 1 of 89

Published in 1986, Jenny Nimmo’s The Snow Spider is the first in a trilogy of pre-teen fantasies about a boy who discovers he’s a magician, and the glimpses he gets of another world of Welsh myth and magic. But if that makes it sound like a light, early Harry Potter-style adventure, I think it’s got a bit more depth than that.

For his ninth birthday, Gwyn’s Nain (grandmother) gives him a set of strange gifts: a tin whistle, a twisted metal brooch, a yellow scarf, a piece of seaweed and a broken wooden horse. Among these, the only thing he recognises is the scarf, which was worn by his sister Bethan on the night she disappeared—the night of his birthday four years ago, when he convinced her to go out in a storm to find his favourite ewe. Gwyn’s father blames the boy for Bethan’s disappearance, resulting in an “unbearable emptiness” between them. But Nain’s gifts, odd as they are, have a purpose: she wants to see if Gwyn, who she says is descended from the legendary Gwydion fab Dôn, is a magician. He has to offer these objects, one by one, to the wind, and in return, if he is a magician, he’ll get his heart’s desire.

Gwyn takes the brooch onto the mountainside and the wind snatches it from his hand. It’s snowing, and on the way back he thinks a particularly large and beautiful-looking snowflake has landed on his shoulder, but when he touches it, it proves to be a glittering white spider. That night, the spider spins webs in Gwyn’s room in which he can see another world, entirely white, as though made of ice and snow.

Gwyn, then, knows he is a magician. But his Nain has warned him what this means:

“You’ll be alone, mind. You cannot tell. A magician can have his heart’s desire if he truly wishes it, but he will always be alone.”

Being a nine-year-old boy, though, he of course tells his best friend Alun. Alun doesn’t believe him, and is a little annoyed at what he thinks is his friend trying to bring attention to himself (not to mention the fact Gwyn gets him out of bed to tell him he’s just given the seaweed to the wind and saw a ship sailing through the sky). Gwyn makes Alun promise not to tell anyone, but of course, being a nine-year-old boy, he does, and soon everyone at school thinks Gwyn is mad. Bullied by some of the boys in his class, he’s finally forced to use his magic for a practical purpose: to bash one of the bullies on the nose from a safe distance. In a more wish-fulfilling type of story, that might be the end of the bullying. Instead, the other boys pile on Gwyn and beat him up, after which the parents of the boy whose nose was bashed come round to complain to Gwyn’s parents. Being a magician, it seems, isn’t a lot of fun.

It’s at this point, though, that another character enters Gwyn’s story, a new girl at school, who helps him home after his beating. Eirlys (meaning “snowdrop”) is an orphan who has recently moved in with a local couple. But there’s something familiar about her, both to Gwyn and his father, who takes an instant liking to the girl. Although Bethan was dark-haired and ought to be older by now, and Eirlys is pale and white-haired and of Gwyn’s age, both Gwyn and his father start to suspect this is Bethan, back from wherever she went. (Gwyn’s mother, on the hand, gets distressed when it’s suggested Eirlys sleep in Bethan’s room—she’s evidently not ready to accept what is happening.)

But what is happening? It’s a long time before Gwyn asks Eirlys directly if she is his sister, and when he does, she says:

“I’m not Bethan… I might have been Bethan once, but now I’m Eirlys. I’ll never be Bethan again. I’ve been out there… Further than the mountain! Further than the sky!”

And she intends to return to that white otherworld that is now her home, a world populated entirely by children, “Only they’re not really children, they’re quite old, and very wise.” The fact that they’re small (little people) and that they and their world are entirely white (like Machen’s “white people”) all implies that Bethan wasn’t snatched away to some Narnia-like magical otherland or even the land of the dead, but to faerie. And that changes everything about The Snow Spider, from being a story about a boy magician, to being a story about a boy entangled in the difficult and deceptive Perilous Realm.

Things get even more complicated when Gwyn’s mother, discovering the snow spider and thinking it’s just a spider, throws it down the sink. Desperate to get it back, Gwyn takes up the only one of Nain’s presents he’s not used, the broken horse. But this is the one his Nain warned him not to use:

“I’m afraid of that horse,” she said thoughtfully. “I tried to burn it once, but I couldn’t. It was still there when the fire died, black and grinning at me.”

The horse’s broken-off ears and tail tie it to the legendary story of Efnisien, who, offended that the King of Ireland had come to marry his sister Branwen without asking his permission, cuts off the king’s horses’ ears, tails, lips and eyelids. It’s one of those savage images from myth that capture an almost ineffable degree of anger and pain, and which would be more at home in the adult work of Robert Holdstock than a book for children.

Giving the horse to the wind unleashes a dark, wild power in the valley, which rages as a storm, breaks into Nain’s house, wrecks the place and kills her pet bird, then kills Gwyn’s family’s cat. And, in a replay of Bethan’s disappearance, Alun gets lost in the storm, and Alun’s parents blame Gwyn for it.

Even if Gwyn’s heart’s desire wasn’t the return of his sister, it was at least the hope for “something that would change the way things were, to fill the emptiness in the house below” (the coldness between himself and his father), but it seems that involvement in the world of magic has only led to, as his Nain warned, loneliness: bullying at school, the loss of his friend Alun, and the revelation that his returned sister is only here temporarily. There are other moments that underscore Gwyn’s isolation even beyond his involvement in magic, such as:

“He tried to respond to his mother’s probing chatter without giving too much away for he felt he had to protect her. He did not want her to know that his friends thought him mad.”

But, as if that final unleashing of rage and destruction into the valley was what was really needed all along—as if that power wasn’t just from ancient Welsh myth, but represented all the unspoken anger and betrayal surrounding Gwyn, his father, Alun, and Bethan—things change. Gwyn recaptures the angry power back into the broken horse, Alun returns, and everything is, somehow, resolved. But Eirlys says she’s returning to the white land, and even, faerie-like, tries to persuade, then drag, Gwyn with her.

All this might sound as though The Snow Spider were about nothing but isolation, peril and darkness, but Nimmo presents it in such a way that it can easily be read as a straightforward tale of a boy magician encountering the thrills and exciting dangers of the world of magic. The faerie-like perils, and the deeper emotional currents beneath it all are treated lightly, as though leaving them there for the reader to notice, if that’s the sort of tale they’re ready for. I’m certainly interested to see where Nimmo takes the next two books, and what light it throws on the people of the white land, and their true nature.

The Snow Spider has been adapted for TV twice, once in 1988 for ITV (when it was followed by adaptations of the other two books in the trilogy), and once more in 2020 by the BBC. The 1988 adaptation is quite faithful, while the 2020 adaptation, though it feels a bit more polished, makes a number of minor changes. (For instance, in the novel, when Gwyn’s father sees Eirlys, he’s keen to offer her a lift home after her visit, and later says he’ll drive her back whenever she wants to visit. In the 2020 adaptation, it’s Gwyn’s mother who gives her a lift home—the Beeb evidently didn’t want to encourage girls to get into cars with men they don’t really know. Another change is that it’s not Gwyn’s mother who throws the snow spider away: its clearly magical, so she never gets to even see it. Instead, it’s Eirlys who temporarily banishes it, underlining her moral ambiguity as a character.) The only change I really didn’t like is the fact that the snow spider makes cute squeaking noises.

The 2020 adaptation has a title sequence and music oddly reminiscent of A Game of Thrones (pounding drums while the camera hovers over close-up rotating objects), which makes the ash-blonde Eirlys start to seem like a young Daenerys. The ending, clearly setting this up to be followed by further adaptations, makes it clear Eirlys and the other “White People” aren’t to be trusted, but presumably the pandemic put paid to any further adaptations, which is a pity.

A couple of years ago, I decided to write up the research I’d gathered about the life of David Lindsay, the author of A Voyage to Arcturus, into what I assumed would be a short booklet, an expanded version of the biographical essay I’d had on my website about Lindsay, The Violet Apple.org, for several years. This was basically because the main research resources I had at my disposal—family history records, newspaper archives, and so on—weren’t providing much in the way of new information, and I wanted to put a line under my biographical research and move onto something else. The result, though, was a modest book rather than a short booklet—60,000 words or so, plus footnotes, index, etc.—which I’ve finally got to the point of being able to publish, as I Dream With Open Eyes: The Life of David Lindsay, Author of A Voyage to Arcturus.

It was my brother’s extensive family history research that started me off. Demonstrating the sort of records you could find, he showed me the 1881 census record that included a five-year-old David Lindsay, living with his family (and one domestic servant), in Lewisham. Even though it was just a set of tabulated data, it felt like I was getting a time-travelling glimpse of the family, lifting the roof off their house and seeing them inside. At the time, due to a few errors in other books on Lindsay, there was a little ambiguity about his actual birth year and place (England, or Scotland?, 1876 or 1878?), so, when I ordered a copy of his birth certificate soon after, it felt good to be able to put on my website a definite date and place (3rd March 1876, in Blackheath, England) for his birth. After that, I started getting into doing my own research in online family history archives (with plenty of help from my brother, alerting me to other types of records, such as the Army Pension Record), the British Newspaper Archive, and so on.

My first aim on the BNA was to affix a definite date for the disappearance of David Lindsay’s father, Alexander, who walked out on the family without telling them (going to Canada, it turned out), with the result that for a while they weren’t sure what happened to him. When I found a newspaper notice relating to his disappearance, it was one of those rare events where the result gives much more information than you’re expecting (and also raises more questions). It came on about the thirtieth page of search results, after looking at every reference to “Lindsay” in their local paper, the Kentish Mercury. The odd thing is, once I found it, I found it in a load of other places, too, as the notice was reprinted throughout the country:

But this also points to a limitation of public research archives. There’s no way to know why this man disappeared (or even to be sure he went to Canada—he doesn’t seem to be listed on the available census records, but of course may have been using a different name).

Unlike H P Lovecraft, Lindsay didn’t write many letters, and didn’t reveal much about himself in the ones that have been published. There’s an awful lot that just will never be known about him. In a review of a previous book about Lindsay, Bernard Sellin’s Life & Works of David Lindsay (in which the life part is only one chapter), Gary K Wolfe noted that while “Readers of A Voyage to Arcturus are almost inevitably intrigued by the kind of man who could have produced such a strange book”, Sellin’s Life & Works doesn’t “do much to put our curiosity to rest… [or] substantially explain his fiction”. I don’t think anything’s going to come along to explain Lindsay’s fiction from a biographical perspective—the fiction has to be taken as an expression of his intense inner life, and all the evidence that we’re going to have of it—so I Dream With Open Eyes is basically an attempt to tie as many facts and figures to the man as I can, with no promise to “explain” the fiction. (Okay, I do make a few comments, but I really want to write something separate, and at length, on Lindsay’s fiction some day.) Perhaps someone with more resources can take things further. If so, I hope they’ll find the research I’ve done helpful.

That said, who knows what will turn up? Shortly after finishing the manuscript and preparing it for publication, Mark Valentine published a piece that revealed Lindsay had, in fact, written at least two novels before A Voyage to Arcturus, and attempted to place them with a publisher. (This came, ironically, a couple of weeks after R B Russell opened a post on the Tartarus Press blog—having recently published a biography of T Lobsang Rampa—with: “It is inevitable that the publication of a biography prompts new material to appear.”)

I Dream With Open Eyes strays a little bit from being merely a biography of David Lindsay. I take a good look at the reviews his books received in his lifetime (and I think these go to prove not that he was misunderstood in his day and we get him better now, but that he was always misunderstood, and sometimes hated, but he also always had people who liked what he did—he’s very much a Marmite kind of writer—and this is as true today as it was in 1920). I also devote a chapter to Lindsay’s brother Alexander, and a long chapter to the afterlife of Lindsay’s works in the century following his death. In that sense, this is as much a biography of Lindsay’s works as it is of the man himself.

I Dream With Open Eyes is available now as a hardback. I’ve also uploaded it to Archive.org, where it can be read online or referred to for free. I’ll probably follow it with paperback and ebook versions at some point.

I’d long meant to read The Purple Cloud, partly because it appears in a number of “Rare Works of Imaginative Fiction” lists alongside David Lindsay’s A Voyage to Arcturus and The Haunted Woman. I think I’d been aware of it, though, since reading King’s The Stand, on which it had a minor influence (The Stand’s “Trashcan Man” and The Purple Cloud’s Adam Jeffson are both post-apocalyptic pyromaniacs). But perhaps the closest he comes to any author I’ve covered on this blog is John Wyndham in Day of the Triffids. Shiel’s is, in some ways, more of a “cosy catastrophe” than Wyndham’s: at one point, Shiel’s narrator reflects how, in the post-catastrophic world, “Everything, in fact, is infinite compared with my needs”—food is somehow preserved forever in Shiel’s world, and there are no pesky triffids to upset his narrator’s wanderings; on the other hand, for the bulk of Shiel’s novel, its narrator believes himself to be the last human being alive, which isn’t the case in Triffids.

The Purple Cloud was first published in 1901, initially as an abridged serial in The Royal Magazine, then in hardback towards the end of the year. Later reprints, from 1929 onwards, incorporated edits Shiel made, which downplayed some of the increasingly unfashionable religious references in the text. I read the Penguin Classics edition, based on the 1901 hardback.

The narrator, Adam Jeffson, a young Harley Street doctor, finds himself part of an expedition attempting to be the first to reach the North Pole, after his fiancé, a scheming countess called Clodagh, deliberately poisons the doctor who was due to go. Adam turns out to be the only member of the expedition to reach the Pole (a massive pillar of ice, inscribed with indecipherable writings), but returns only to find that an enormous volcanic cloud of poisonous gas has swept the globe, killing all human and animal life. He searches for survivors, initially in towns and cities, later in mines, where he believes people might have sealed themselves in to escape the gas, but finds no one—no one alive, anyway, for everywhere is thick with preserved corpses, including the many people fleeing foreign countries as the gas cloud advanced. (Shiel is particularly effective in peppering his narrative with numerous tableaux of the dead caught in a variety of end-of-life dramas, including a massive, tight-packed crowd of “the standing dead… propped by their neighbours”.)

Eventually, he has to accept he’s the last human being left alive, and it’s at this point he starts to indulge a new hobby: the burning of entire cities, starting with London. After a long bout of this, he flips to the other side of the creative/destructive coin, and decides to build, single-handed, a combined temple and palace, complete with gold roofs and wine-filled pools (not, he insists, out of luxuriousness, but for reasons of aesthetics and practicality). Finally, in one last bout of pyromania (Constantinople, if I recall), he accidentally sets free a young woman who was born, and spent her entire life so far, in a large, sealed cellar (which fortunately was filled with a lifetime’s supply of white wine and dates—how this must have affected her digestive system is never discussed).

Used to having the world to himself as he is, Adam’s first impulse is to kill her, and even when he finds himself incapable of that, spends most of the rest of the novel believing they should live a world apart, to prevent the slightest chance of restarting the human race. (Aware of the irony of his own first name, he quickly dismisses the idea of calling this young woman Eve. He opts for Clodagh, as a warning reminder of his poisonous fiancé, but she insists on Leda.) Eventually, after one final attempt to kill either her or himself, hints that another purple cloud of volcanic gas might be on the way (though this might be a fib of Leda’s to force him to rethink their relationship), Adam renounces his murderous impulses, admits his love for her, and a new human race is begun.

The main argument against this being what Brian Aldiss called a “cosy catastrophe”, is Adam’s descent into madness once he accepts he’s the last of the human race. He first of all passes through a phase of cosmic-level horror at the situation (“and I can feel now that abysmal desolation of loneliness, and sense of a hostile and malign universe bent upon eating me up”), then comes to feel that, no, this is how things are meant to be:

“…the arrangement of One planet, One inhabitant, already seems to me, not merely natural and proper, but the only natural and proper condition…”

It’s only when he sees Leda, and decides to murder her, that he realises (or the reader realises—it takes Adam a while longer) how far he’s gone. But though he later admits that “after twenty years of solitary selfishness, a man becomes, without suspecting it… a real and true beast, a horrible, hideous beast, mad, prowling…”, and that “man [is] at his best and highest when most social… for the Earth gets hold of all isolation, and draws it, and makes it fierce, base, and materialistic,” there is also a sense in which Adam is quite glad to be free of the bulk of humanity (“putrid wretches—covetous, false, murderous, mean, selfish, debased, hideous, diseased, making the earth a very charnel of festering vices and crimes”, as he says, at one point).

Shiel belonged—or wanted to (he was published by John Lane, but never appeared in the aesthetic movement’s defining journal, The Yellow Book)—to the aesthetic/decadent crowd of the 1890s, and I can’t help reading The Purple Cloud as being driven by the key themes of literary decadence. When Adam sits back to watch London burn—itself a scene redolent of that founding myth of cultural decadence, Nero fiddling while Rome burns—he does so in Oriental dress, and having supplied himself with “a jar of pale tobacco mixed with rose-leaves and opium, found in a foreign house in Seymour Street, also a genuine Saloniki hookah, together with the best wines, nuts and so on, and a golden harp of the musician Krasinski”. (He uses to the harp to play Wagner’s “Ride of the Valkyries” as the city burns—Wagner being the Decadents’ favourite composer. It’s an image that would conjure thoughts of Apocalypse Now!, if only it weren’t so hard to imagine “Ride of the Valkyries” being played effectively on a harp.)

The complete depopulation of the world can’t help feeling like a Decadents’ dream—so much of literary decadence celebrates solipsism—while Adam’s creative impulse to build a temple/palace is just as Decadent as his burning of cities:

“I will build a palace, which shall be both a palace and a temple: the first human temple worthy the King of Heaven, and the only human palace worthy the King of Earth.”

It’s perhaps telling he can’t separate the ideas of temple and palace—or whether it’s dedicated to God, the King of Heaven, or himself, the King of Earth—as a luxuriant materialism combined with guilt-ridden hints of intense religiosity is another characteristic of the Decadent movement.

There are elements of the fantastic in The Purple Cloud. It’s hinted, for instance, that the North Pole is a forbidden place, and that it was Adam reaching it, and touching it, that released the purple cloud. (Another, more misogynistic reading, is that the “sin” which leads to the unleashing of the purple cloud is Clodagh’s poisoning of Adam’s rival, making her a sort of anti-Eve.)

More explicitly fantastic is that Adam has, all his life, been aware of two voices in his head, urging him to good (the “White” voice, as he calls it) or evil (the “Black”), and that these may have been behind the whole story of his reaching the Pole, surviving the purple cloud, going on to burn entire cities (which eventually releases Leda) and finally restarting the human race.

Leda herself is an element of The Purple Cloud that pushes it into cosy catastrophe/daydream territory. Because she has spent her life in a cellar, she’s entirely innocent of the world. She’s so much younger than Adam that he can, effectively, overrule her in everything and, through education, shape her how he wants her to be (he even says “For she is my creation, this creature”). Her lisp, by which she replaces every “r” with an “l” (perhaps meant to be endearing, quickly becoming as irritating as Van Helsing’s cod-Dutch accent in Dracula) can’t help but infantilise her, which is particularly troubling considering the revelations that came out about Shiel in 2008, that he spent a year in prison for sexual relations with a twelve-year-old girl—certainly not the only such incident in his life.

Lovecraft mentions Shiel in his essay, “Supernatural Horror in Literature”, and the reaction is pretty similar to how he felt about Hodgson’s Night Land: the book as an imaginative narrative is great—in fact, it’s written with “a skill and artistry falling little short of actual majesty”—but “Unfortunately the second half of the book, with its conventionally romantic element, involves a distinct ‘letdown’.” Shiel’s “romantic element”—mostly consisting of Adam’s trying to bring himself to murder Leda, or at least abandon her—is hardly conventional, but all romance was, I suspect, “conventional” for Lovecraft: he simply couldn’t understand any other reason why it might be there.