fantasy, page 2 of 89

Unlike her later books (adult fantasy like Rats & Gargoyles, SF like Golden Witchbreed, and the massive alternative history Ash), Mary Gentle’s first novel, A Hawk in Silver, was a YA fantasy. It was mostly written between the ages of 18 and 19 (in one interview, she says it was begun when she was 15), and was first published in 1977 by Gollancz in the UK, then in 1985 in the US, with paperback editions in both countries (plus a German translation).

It starts with 15-year-old Holly Anderson finding a silver coin or medallion in the street. One side depicts a hawk, the other a woman’s face. A short while later, she’s approached by Fletcher, a young man with no shoes and a sometimes archaic mode of speech (but this is close enough to the 60s that it doesn’t seem too strange), who says he’s been looking for the medallion and thinks she has it. In a hurry, she hands it to him—or thinks she does, only to later find she gave him a normal coin instead. She shows the silver one to her friend, Chris Ivy, who goes to the same all-girls’ school as her, and they discuss what to do with it. At one point, they’re attacked—bizarrely, by a cat and a seagull, both of which seem to want the coin. When Fletcher turns up once again, Holly takes it out to give to him, but it fades into nothing on her palm. Fletcher asks them to come with him so they can receive an explanation. He takes them along a local river valley, to a hill, which he enters. Inside, he introduces them to Mathurin the Harper, Eilurieth the Keeper of Mirrormere and other elukoi, “an ancient and honourable people” who have pointed, furry ears and cat-like eyes, and who, it turns out, are exiles from Faerie. The coin was one of the “old things out of Ys”, which had been treated with “a binding spell… so that time does not decay them”, but something, evidently, broke that spell. The girls are invited to the elukoi city of Brancaer, to help understand what has happened. (Chris, something of a skeptic as far as magic is concerned, says she hopes it won’t take all day, as it’s a Saturday and “There’s some good programmes on the Box, Saturday evenings.”) But at Brancaer, before they can be properly introduced to Oberon, lord of the elukoi, Eilurieth is injured and the girls are told to leave and never return: it is their presence that is a danger, for humans are not only non-magical, but annul magic. That’s why the coin disappeared, and now their presence in Brancaer is affecting the spells that shield the elukoi from their deadly enemies, the sea-born morkani. Already they are open to attack.

The girls return to their mundane lives, which means encounters with the classroom bully Helen and her gang, the poor health of Holly’s grandfather, and generally gadding about the southern English coastal town where they live (it’s never named, but in interviews Gentle says it was based on Hastings, where she grew up). Another encounter with Fletcher leads to the girls learning that the hill where they initially met the elukoi has been destroyed by the morkani, and with it the hope of the elukoi returning to Faerie: the Harp of Math, which is needed to summon the Starlord Fyraire, was in that hill, but now is wreathed in hostile morkani magic. Then Chris says that, as humans, they’re immune to Faerie magic, so why don’t they go in and get it?

In an interview in the BSFA’s Vector in 1983, Gentle says there was a “trinity of writers” she “absorbed in childhood”: Tolkien, Lewis, and Alan Garner. There’s a hint of the first two here, as in for instance the female elukoi Eilurieth who, as Keeper of Mirrormere, a pool in which visions of the future can be seen, recalls Galadriel; or in Fyraire’s home, the Silver Wood, which “borders on all places”, and recalls the “Wood Between the Worlds” in The Magician’s Nephew. But the clearest influence (as almost every review of the book I’ve found points out) is Alan Garner, in the mix of the girls’ sometimes harsh real-world lives and their trips into a magical but somewhat forbidding otherworld. But there was a lot of Garner influence around at the time—to the point where you have to say it’s less down to one writer’s influence and more about a potential in the genre that was just waiting to come out—and anyway, that Garnerish mix of real-world drama and fantasy was what brought me to this book in the first place, so I’m certainly not going to complain about it.

The closest Garner comparison would be with Elidor (if only because both books feature a unicorn), and though Gentle’s novel doesn’t quite hit the sublime/tragic note of Garner’s, or make the otherworld her kids visit feel as powerful and strange, this is holding A Hawk in Silver against a very high bar. I’d say, perhaps, Gentle’s characters are a little more realistic than those in Elidor (though perhaps that’s just because Garner was writing for, and about, slightly younger children, and about a decade earlier). Holy and Chris suffer some genuine violence at the hands of their bullies, and apparently there’s some explicit swearing that was edited out of the US edition (which is the one I read, because I preferred the cover).

Perhaps, also, there’s a little less thematic unity in Hawk in Silver. Some ideas get raised (such as Fletcher, who proves to be a human changeling who has spent his life in the realm of elukoi, but who cannot return with them to Faerie, at one point expressing disillusionment with the world of magic: “half the things aren’t there, are not real. Magic is well enough in its way, but it’s all shadow play and illusion. There’s nothing left at the end but dead leaves and dust.”), but don’t get returned to or developed further. The core of the story, I’d say, is about Holly’s development. A keen painter, she sees, through her adventures, the sights that will inform her work throughout the rest of her life (and manages to persuade Fyraire to let her have a glimpse of the realm of Faerie, where no human can go, and finds she recognises it somehow). Her grandfather’s death teaches her the value of life, which adds a new dimension to the looming war between the elukoi and morkani, as she finds she can’t treat it as the sort of fantasy adventure type of battle you might expect in a YA book.

Humans not just being non-magical, but in a sense anti-magical, is a new element, to me, and perhaps the thing that makes A Hawk in Silver stand out most in genre terms. But the book’s also worth reading for the real-world sections which, based on Gentle’s own experiences as they are, are different to any of the other Garner-style books that came out at the time (many of which were written by a previous generation—Gentle was far closer in age to her audience). And there’s also a moment when the elukoi start showing signs of democracy in the face of their king’s insistence on war—a political revolution in fairyland! That’s something I wasn’t expecting.

First published in 1991, Imajica is Barker’s longest novel yet (and ironically for a novel whose main theme is unification, at one time it was split into two volumes in paperback). Another notable point about Imajica is that, unlike so many of the works I’ve already covered in this Barker re-read, when he wrote it he worked on Imajica alone. There were no plays (as with The Books of Blood I-III), stories (as with The Damnation Game) or films (several of the other novels) going on at the same time. Imajica became, virtually, Barker’s whole life for the eighteen (in some accounts fourteen) months he was working on it, during which he put in up to fifteen hours a day, seven days a week. He’d write Imajica during the day, then go to bed and dream Imajica at night. And I think it shows: there’s no sense of the distraction I sometimes felt with The Great and Secret Show, and it’s probably his best work since Weaveworld. (Barker’s biographer Douglas E Winter suggests this regime may have been down to the frustration of his experience directing the film Nightbreed, and how that was ultimately taken out of his hands. Barker wanted a major project he could feel proud of, and to do that, he needed total control, something in which a novel easily beats a film.)

Imajica is a hefty work, and not just in terms of page count (1,136 in my paperback copy). Even for a man who’s not shy at bringing in Heaven and Hell, demons and angels, and the whole great and secret show, it’s got more scope than anything he’d done before, not just in terms of length and geography (not one but five worlds), but depth and ambition of theme. If Weaveworld, with its magic carpet and gypsy-like tribe of Seerkind is a fairy tale, and The Great and Secret Show an attempt at a new myth along the lines of The Lord of the Rings, Imajica takes things further still, by being, essentially, a work of the religious fantastic. Barker had always dealt in such concepts as redemption, damnation, transcendence and revelation, but here he was giving himself the elbow-room to not just hint at these things, but see them through to the end.

The novel opens in 1990s London. But this, our world, is merely one of five Dominions that together form the Imajica. Ours, the Fifth Dominion, is cut off from the others. Whereas people can pass from, say, the Second Dominion to the Third, or the Third to the Fourth, between the Fifth and the others is an abyssal realm known as the In Ovo, populated by deadly monsters. This schism opened thousands of years ago, and although there have been multiple attempts at Reconciliation—the re-joining of the Fifth to the other Dominions—they’ve so far ended in disaster. Now the Fifth has all but forgotten its fellow realms, as well as the magical arts one can use to reach them. (In a neat detail, the Fifth has acquired a cultural cool in the other Dominions, whose peoples adopt our fashions, covet rare exports—including cars but not, for some reason, telephones—even naming their children using random Fifth Dimension words, like Hoi-Polloi, Huzzah and Coaxial.)

The other exception is the First Dominion, the home of the Unbeheld Himself—the Creator, Hapexamendios, swathed behind a wall of mist known as the Erasure. (Barker, I have to say, is very good at naming things. Types of magic, for instance: feits, sways, writs, pneumas, uredos. Goddesses: Uma Umagammagi, Tishalullé, Jackalaylau. Monsters from the In Ovo: voiders, and the fearsome gek-a-gek. You just know from the name alone that you do not want to meet a gek-a-gek.)

For such a big novel, the main focus is on only a few main characters. First we have John Furie Zacharias, known as Gentle, whose day job is painting forgeries, and whose time is otherwise given over to his singular obsession for women. Then we have the beautiful Judith Odell, whose abandonment of her rich husband kicks off the action when the jealous Estabrook, unable to live without her, decides to have her assassinated. The man hired to do the job turns out not to be a man at all, but Pie’oh’Pah, a being from the other Dominions known as a mystif, who is seen, by each person who looks at it, as the person they most desire. When the first attempt on Judith’s life fails, she contacts Gentle, and Gentle, seeing Pie’oh’Pah, becomes entranced. Pie, in turn, evidently recognises Gentle, though Gentle doesn’t know why. Gentle has a peculiarity, that every ten years or so he remakes his life and forgets the previous decade. Almost as though he were under a spell of some sort. But whose spell, and why? The answer to that question will eventually lead to the next attempt at the Reconciliation of the five Dominions.

Imajica came out during the height of Barker’s fame as a creator. It was widely, and—according to the book’s Wikipedia page—positively, reviewed. (The reviews from UK sources I’ve been able to find, including a few newspapers and Interzone, weren’t entirely positive. Perhaps the UK was engaging in its usual practice of denigrating anyone once they started to get too successful. Or perhaps it sensed Barker was leaving: he’d finished writing Imajica in his empty London house, after his possessions had all been shipped to his new home in the US.) The criticism most often levelled at it, though, seems to have been about its length. At about a third of the way through, when Gentle has left the Fifth Dominion and started exploring the Imajica, I might have been inclined to agree. At this point, the growing mystery and hints of dark fantasy of the first third were replaced by outright otherworld fantasy of the sort done just as well—if not better—by so many other writers, and I found myself wondering if Barker would have made such a name for himself if he’d started off writing fantasy rather than horror. But as things in the Dominions darken, and even more so when Gentle returns to the Fifth in the final third of the book, things not only got back to being as good as they were at the start, but began to reap the rewards of this novel’s breadth of narrative, invention, and theme. It’s hard to put a finger on, but after a thousand pages of talk of redemption, transformation and revelation, when the point arrives for Barker to start delivering on his promises, he actually does, in a way it’s hard to imagine many other writers being able to.

The writers that most often popped into my head while reading Imajica were C S Lewis and Philip Pullman. Lewis, primarily, for this being a similar set-up to the solar system of the Space Trilogy. The Fifth, isolated as it is from the other Dominions, recalls Earth/Thulcandra from the Space Trilogy, and how it has become cut off from the other planets, as well as any awareness of the higher spiritual reality behind it all. But the similarity to Pullman’s His Dark Materials is more evident, as both his and Barker’s novels feature protagonists going through multiple worlds leading to a confrontation with God, who in both cases is a deity and a sort of physical being. But Barker—do I need to say?—adds more, often weird, sex into the mix than either.

Lewis, Pullman and Barker were all directly working with Christian myths: Lewis as one he believed in, Pullman as one he was attacking. Barker, ever ready to see the potential in anything that partakes of the imagination, seems to have employed it due to its being the most resonant Western-world myth of our times, and long overdue exploration in the literature of the fantastic. In interviews (here, from the Starburst Yearbook 1991/92, with David J Howe), Barker is frank about this being the seed of the whole novel:

“Imajica started with my thinking about the images which appear in the great paintings of Christian mythology. Whether or not they’re true, they seemed to me to be potent, powerful and important cyphers of image and meaning.”

But, as he said in another interview (in Cemetery Dance, Winter 1992), “I don’t think I’m going to get good reviews from the Christian Monitor, you understand…” Because, Barker’s God Hapexamendios does not come out well in this. Imajica is a deepening and further exploration of a theme that’s been in his fiction from the start (in such Books of Blood stories as “Skins of the Fathers”, “Rawhead Rex” and “The Madonna”): the imbalance caused by masculine domination, and the necessity of re-accessing the power of the female divine. Hapexamendios wants to be the only god: “only one name on your lips, one prayer, one altar”, though this leads to a “joyless, loveless, corrupt thing”—super-powerful, but with no human sympathies. Hapexamendios is “One, and simple”; the goddesses are “many, and diverse”. But, as Barker says, you cannot go against the deepest nature of things:

“Creation and its maker are one and the same… And Creation’s as full of women as it is of men.”

Imajica is too vast a novel for me to even list its many themes. Pick a Barker trope (reviled and persecuted tribes, for instance), type (the magical-murderous sidekick/servant), or image (the slow and painful formation of a living body, like an “anatomy lesson, raw and wet”, in a bare dusty room, a la Frank in Hellraiser), and you’ll find it here, in some new or deeper variant. Perhaps the main thing I noticed that I hadn’t before (but which I’m sure I’d find in his earlier fiction if I looked) is a concern with identity. Gentle, whose name is also John Furie Zacharias, as well as another name by which he went many years ago, not only has lived multiple lives (separated by his regular amnesias), but has a magically-created identical twin, who is sometimes his close brother, at others his greatest enemy, but nevertheless deeply tied to him: his shadow, his other self. Judith has a similar multiplicity of pasts, as well as her own mirror self. In a novel about a return to wholeness, and a unification of what has been sundered, such themes run deep, uniting the psychological and personal with the religious, philosophical and mythical.

Plus, of course, there’s so much simply on the level of imagination: a sea that only moves when the sun shines on it; a woman imprisoned for centuries in a doorless cell beneath the ground, wreathed so tightly in cords they cover her entire body; beings whose heads resemble pairs of giant hands; a city of tents on the edge of the world; an ancient society dedicated to repressing all magic; the ghost of a lover who died from AIDS—there is so much in this novel, and no sense at all that its size means the invention has been spread thin.

I still, perhaps, prefer Weaveworld, but maybe only because it’s a little bit shorter, a little bit less overwhelming in scale. (If nothing else, it’s easier to hold while reading.)

Ultimately, this is a novel about unification:the balancing of the rational and irrational, the masculine and the feminine, the mundane and the divine. The Imajica, Barker tells us, is “a single, infinitely elaborate pattern of transformation”. What can you add to that?

I’ve previously written about Joan North’s The Cloud Forest and The Light Maze; The Whirling Shapes came out between those two, and so completes the trio of her gently mystical early-teen novels. (I assume I’ll never find a copy of her first published book, The Emperor of the Moon, which is so rare the only review on Amazon is from North’s own daughter wanting to find a copy!)

Published in 1968 in both the UK and US, The Whirling Shapes begins with 14-year-old Liz Blake going to live with her Aunt Paula, Uncle Charles, and their 16-year-old daughter Miranda, while her mother has to spend time in a sanatorium (it’s not said why in the book, but one reviewer says it’s a TB sanatorium). Aunt Paula is a bit of a North type: a busybody, always rushing out to this class or that event, usually to do with some faddish idea (she herself teaches the “Helen Tregonna method of dancing”), while also imposing her busyness on others: “an overwhelming sort of person”, “it never occurs to her that she could possibly be wrong about anything” . Fortunately, she’s out most of the time, so is too busy to make much of an impact on the story.

Far more to Liz’s liking is Great Aunt (but just called Aunt) Hilda, who lives at the top of the house. A retired anthropologist, her grandfather was the famous explorer Sir William Harbottle, and she’s currently writing her memoirs. Aunt Paula has already introduced Liz to the paintings of a young man called James Mortlake—all of vaguely whirling shapes, which Liz finds rather depressing. At Aunt Hilda’s she meets the man himself, and he turns out to be as morose as his art. (It’s only later revealed, and pretty much as an aside, that his father, a millionaire, shot himself when James was only four years old, after which his father’s business collapsed and his mother took an overdose of pills. Nobody seems to think of this when considering the generally dark tone of James’s art. When later speculating on why this young man paints such miserable pictures, and is somewhat miserable himself, Liz says he can’t help it, it’s just the sort of face he has!)

Strange things begin happening from the first night of Liz’s stay. The house is on the edge of a London heath, and looking out of the window that first night, Liz sees another house that, the next day, isn’t there. Later, the whirlwind-like shapes from James’s paintings begin to appear in reality, and a fog—only visible, at first, from inside the house—starts to surround the household and cut it off from not just the rest of the world, but reality itself. Aunt Paula and Uncle Charles disappear, and pretty soon the others find they can’t get far from the house before the whirling shapes surround them and threaten to make them disappear, too. Finally, though, the little group—Liz, Miranda, Aunt Hilda, James Mortlake, and Miranda’s medical student/poet boyfriend Tom—have no choice but to set out into the fog and find their way back to reality, before the house itself fades away entirely, and them with it.

What caused this incursion of the unreal? James’s paintings are a key part of it, as well as his insomniac wanderings on the heath, but another part is Aunt Hilda’s use of an artefact brought back from an anthropological trip, an egg-shaped thing carved from the wood of “the sacred tree of the Dingas—the Tree of Dreaming True” (the Dingas being “a very exclusive and retiring Central Indian tribe”). She had been holding this object and thinking of the house she grew up in when that very same house started to appear on the heath—the house which Liz then saw. As Aunt Hilda explains, “when I hold it in my hands, my thoughts have great power”. So, James’s depressiveness has been attracting the attention of the whirling shapes, but Aunt Hilda seems to have been the one to finally open the way from their world to ours. (The odd thing is, once things get desperate in the fog-enshrouded house, nobody thinks of using the power of this sacred artefact again. It’s utterly forgotten.)

As for the whirling shapes, they are, it turns out, “spiritual scavengers”, who “feed on dead mechanical desires”. Dementor-like, they surround their victims, chilling them both physically and spiritually, before making them disappear. They aren’t so much villains (though they’re described as the “messengers of greater and darker powers”) as simply one of the perils of the otherworld where Liz and co. find themselves—a dream-like realm of symbolic trials and archetypal landscapes.

As this is the last of North’s books I’m reviewing, it’s worth looking at the similarities between them. North evidently likes a feisty, no-nonsense but open-minded heroine, though often one more inclined to speak her mind than think about the effect of her words. This heroine is sympathetic towards others, though, and it’s one of the strengths of North’s books that although she presents us with casts of characters with widely different temperaments, they’re generally quite accepting of one another, and there’s rarely any real tension between them. Her feisty main female characters, for instance, are often paired with a slightly sorry-for-themselves older boy, but get on well. (And even busybody Aunt Paula isn’t presented as a villain, merely one of those annoying types of people you have to put up with when you’re a child.)

There are often understated aspects of loss and even tragedy lurking in the background of North’s books. The younger main characters are always parentless, even if only temporarily (as in this book), but there are also the genuine tragedies: here, the twin suicides of James’s parents, in The Cloud Forest the death of Raymond Annerlie’s brother’s family in a car accident, and in The Light Maze the sudden disappearance of Sally’s husband. These never impose themselves too much on the narratives, but it’s notable there’s always something of the sort present.

The fantasy element in her books is the presence of another realm that quite clearly represents the imagination or the inner world, but which is nevertheless a very real place, with genuine dangers. This realm is formless and changeable rather than being a solid otherworld like Narnia, and the presences within it are representative of psychological or spiritual dangers, but (as in the serpent and eagle guardian figures Liz meets in this book) also of positive forces. The general feeling is that humans, though connected to this realm, shouldn’t be interacting with it in such a direct way, and it’s only misguided or greedy people (as with the occult-tinged groups of The Cloud Forest and The Light Maze) or those with unhealthy unconscious preoccupations (James Mortlake’s gloomy art in this book) that threaten to bring that realm directly into contact with human beings, making it much more perilous. The message is that this realm, and the imagination or unconscious generally, should be treated with seriousness, respect, and disinterest rather than power-hunger or desire.

Throughout, though, North’s writing is light and gently humorous. (I particularly liked her description of Uncle Charles as looking “like a gently enquiring camel”, though there’s not a lot of that Wodehousian use of language.) Her plots take their time (perhaps too much for a modern readership—I certainly wondered why Liz and co., trapped in a fog-beset and slowly disappearing house, didn’t do something about it far earlier), and though they’re about genuine dangers, they’re never oppressive or overly dark.

In general, North’s books seem to belong to that end-of-the-sixties period of spiritual seeking, where they veer mostly towards a Buddhistic detachment from worldly passions and a moderation in all things, along with an easy tolerance of the many sorts of people to be found in the world (though, at the same time, a lightly satirical eye cast on those that North disapproves of: the faddish, the busybodies, and those who want power). But her books aren’t really part of the trend that most interests me in YA fiction as it headed into the 70s, with that greater sense of socially-conscious realism, starker drama, and darker fantasy from the likes of Alan Garner, William Mayne, Louise Lawrence, and so on. Perhaps the closest equivalent is Penelope Farmer’s Castle of Bone—though North is no way near as outright weird as that book.