fantasy, page 4 of 82

When I read two Penelope Farmer books a few years back (the odd-but-ultimately-impressive A Castle of Bone and the more-adult-than-YA folk fantasy Year King), another that caught my eye was her second, The Summer Birds (1962), about a group of children being given the gift of flight, a theme that’s always grabbed me as it was there in my earliest non-nightmare dreams (and which has remained, thankfully, to see me through a few zombie dreams in later years). It’s taken since then for an affordable copy to pop up on AbeBooks, but once I’d got it, I realised it was only the first in a semi-linked trilogy of books about the Makepeace sisters Charlotte and Emma. So I got copies of Emma in Winter (1966) and Charlotte Sometimes (1969), and started reading.

The Summer Birds began life as a short story, though one that proved too long for Farmer’s first book, the collection The China People (1960). It starts with Charlotte (12 years old) and Emma (10 years old), who live in the large but dour Aviary Hall on the South Downs with their distracted and somewhat grumpy grandfather Elijah. One day on the way to school they meet a never-named boy who says he can teach them — their whole class, in fact — to fly. It initially seems a bit day-dreamish, as Charlotte is led out of a school lesson, unnoticed, and spends the day learning to swoop through the air. (There’s a technique to it, somewhat like swimming, and later one of the children finds that wearing flippers helps.) The next day it’s Emma’s turn, and after that the other kids in the class, one by one. Although dreams of flying seem to me to belong to the earliest days of childhood — and of course to the likes of Peter Pan — here it seems to conjure a stage of withdrawal from the muddy, knee-scrapingly grounded play of kids to a slightly more airy-headed state just prior to adolescence:

“There was a feeling of suppressed excitement in the school, mounting each day as another learned. The children became silent and stood in groups or alone, looking at each other sideways with wondering eyes. Could this really happen to others—was it really true? Less and less they played at football and skipping rope in the yard; more and more they put their heads in the sky and watched for birds. Those who did not know, who had not learned, grew worried and lonelier as each day their numbers evaporated like water in the sun. The rest did not fly together yet. It was as if they were waiting for something: waiting in half-shyness for someone else to move. They were self-conscious, like people with songs to sing yet frightened of showing their voice.”

The children go on to spend the entire summer holiday (when it’s not raining) getting together away from parents and other adults so they can fly, and although Farmer brings in a little bit of tension — one of the boys decides to challenge the boy’s leadership and asks never-answered questions about who he is and where he’s come from — the book has more the air of an idyll, an ideal childhood summer that will never be repeated.

Emma in Winter begins just over two years later, with the younger Makepeace girl finding herself alone for the first time when her sister goes to boarding school. A particularly severe winter descends, like the metaphor for isolation and emotional coldness that it is, and Emma starts to dream of the days when she could fly. In these dreams, she sees one of her classmates, Bobby Fumpkins, struggling to get off the ground in his own attempts to fly. She mocks him, and feels herself somehow being egged on by an unseen presence behind her, a presence that seems to be just a pair of eyes.

(Bobby Fumpkins’ ridiculous surname — sorry, all you Fumpkinses out there — is just one of many from the first book. Charlotte and Emma Makepeace have sensible names, but all the rest of the kids at school are called things like Jammy Hat, Maggot Hobbin, Ginger Apple, Totty Feather, Bandy Scragg, and Scooter Dimple.)

Emma, alone as she’s never been before, at first retreats into a temperamental spikiness befitting the severe winter that’s taken grip of the land, but the dreams of flying she shares with Bobby come to provide a much-needed escape from her isolation (making this book a bit like the connection-through-shared-dreams plot of Marianne Dreams). Unlike The Summer Birds, but just as in A Castle of Bone, the fantasy starts to develop in ways that veer away from the steadily meaningful path it seemed at first to be following. The (perhaps supernaturally) prolonged freeze that works as a perfect metaphor for the emotional chill of loneliness swerves into dreams of moving back through time, as Emma and Bobby’s night-flights take them to the age of the dinosaurs (briefly), then further back to the days before there was any form of life at all. Suddenly, they find themselves poised on the edge of an almost cosmic-horror abyss. As Bobby says, if they carry on:

“There might not be any world, just space, nothing but space… and whatever would happen to us then…”

Perhaps this is meant as a vision of the ultimate loneliness, a world of no people at all — of no world at all — but what of that dark presence, the eyes that Emma felt behind her as she was driven to mock Bobby? That doesn’t quite resolve as clearly, and I finished Emma in Winter feeling it had perhaps missed the simplicity of The Summer Birds by letting its fantastical element stray a little too far for so short a book.

Charlotte Sometimes starts on the elder Makepeace sister’s first day at boarding school (so, a season before Emma in Winter). Going to sleep in a particularly old-fashioned bed, Charlotte wakes to find she’s not Charlotte, but Clare, a girl at the same school but in 1918. For a while, she finds herself in the past and the present on alternating days, but then, when Clare and her younger sister Emily (the same age and personality as Charlotte’s younger sister Emma) are moved to nearby Flintlock Hall and she’s no longer sleeping in the same bed, Charlotte finds herself trapped as Clare in the past. And, while the boarding schools of 1918 and 1963 (as a note on the Wikipedia page for the book successfully argues as the date of its present) aren’t really that different, the world of Flintlock Hall is very much that of the First World War, as it’s a house in mourning for its son, Arthur, who died in the fighting.

(Though Charlotte finds Flintlock Hall very much like her own home of Aviary Hall, which implies you don’t need actual time travel to find yourself oppressed by the weight of the past — a theme that pops up throughout 1960s/1970s British YA.)

Here, the theme is one I felt to be the main driver of the two Farmer books I reviewed previously: personal identity, particularly in situations where its edges become fuzzy or encroached upon. Finding herself living as Clare in the past, Charlotte isn’t sure how much it’s incumbent on her to act as this other girl, to the detriment of her ability to be herself:

“Clare had always been a kind of skin about her, Charlotte thought, containing what she did and said and was; but the skin had thickened imperceptibly the longer she stayed in the past… [and now] it began to thicken more rapidly than ever, pressing that part of her which still thought of itself as Charlotte tighter and smaller, until it lay deep down in her, like a small stone inside a large plum.”

Of the three, Charlotte Sometimes is the better book, going deeper than the simple idyll of The Summer Birds, but staying clear of the confusion of ideas and images in Emma in Winter. Unlike Emma in Winter, Charlotte Sometimes makes no mention of the events in The Summer Birds, which has enabled it to stand on its own as a book, rather than as the third in a sequence. It has, in fact, become Farmer’s most popular work.

As with the previous two Makepeace books, the main character in Charlotte Sometimes is mostly quite passive, but perhaps that’s part of the territory, with so much of childhood/adolescence being about phases you have to live through, rather than things you can do anything about. All three Makepeace books are about the dreamy stages of pre- or early-adolescence, but Charlotte Sometimes is much more about its main character’s sensitivity to the world and people around her, finding her place in a world with a troubled history, among other people with their many forms of unhappiness, and with a growing sense of responsibility. The world it’s set in (an early 1960s boarding school) is now even more remote from us than the period Charlotte travels back to (1918) is from her present, but the book’s still in print, and has taken its place, deservedly I’d say, as a classic of children’s/YA literature.

A second collection of Suzuki’s stories, following on from last year’s Terminal Boredom, this book contains her breakthrough SF story “Trial Witch” — a title which wrongfooted me, because those words inevitably conjure the phrase “witch trials”, whereas in this case it means “apprentice witch on her trial period”. It’s the comical story of a woman who, out of the blue, is told she’s been selected by the League of Witches to become one of their number. She’s granted magical powers for a limited period, but finds her main ability is to transform her husband into a variety of new forms, which she either can’t, or doesn’t want to (he’s unfaithful), undo by the time the trial ends. It’s fun to imagine this story as the image of Suzuki herself, self-trialling herself as a writer in the fantastical vein. Only, unlike with the story’s protagonist, Suzuki turned out to have, with this story, won herself a place as a writer of SF in Japan (though not, it turns out, to have been allowed into the all-male SF Writers Club of Japan).

The main feeling I came away from in my review of Terminal Boredom was of emotional disconnection in human relationships, edging its way into emotional disconnection from oneself. With some of the stories of Hit Parade of Tears, that aspect is ramped up, with sometimes quite extreme self-alienation being a predominant theme in the longer, more serious tales.

That feeling of distanced relationships is still there, as in this, from the opening story, “My Guy”, about a young woman who finds herself picking up a man who says he’s an alien from another world:

“I guess I’d never really been in love, or even learned what was involved in ‘liking’ someone. This could be why I always seemed to wind up in relationships defined by mutual distaste and an inability to walk away.”

The alien man tells her things are the same on his world:

“Back home, everyone starts making love, so to speak, once they reach adulthood, except only with the partner that the government assigns them. Then they spend the rest of their lives as a happy couple who never fight. But that isn’t what you’d call ‘love’ now, is it…”

But elsewhere in the book — in what I feel is probably a later tale — Suzuki seems to have hit on something of a solution, only a messily human one, when in the story “I’ll Never Forget” she presents us with an ever-squabbling-and-making-it-up couple, who keep their relationship fuelled by the failures of previous ones:

“They were a strange pair, these two. They each prodded at some past infidelity, real or not, and that’s what formed the basis of their relationship.”

Which leads to the realisation:

“…love isn’t like a house you can just kick back and live in once it’s completed. No, it gets more worn and tattered day by day. So unless you keep on making it up, day by day, it disappears in all but name.”

But it’s the alienation from oneself that dominates Hit Parade of Tears. In what may be the longest tale, “Hey, It’s a Love Psychedelic”, a woman, initially called Reico, then Reyko, then Reiko, finds herself transplanted to what seem to be alternative versions of her own life. In each, she’s aware that things are wrong, usually through her knowledge of popular culture — an album that should have been out, or a brand of cigarettes that shouldn’t be available yet. The time-stream of her life is being manipulated by someone, taking her further away from the life she knew: whereas in the first section of this tale, she’s actively involved in the 1960s/70s rock music scene, by the last section she’s merely reading about it in a trashy novel called Groupie.

“The Covenant” starts with a somewhat useless-seeming husband figure who claims to be telepathic and in contact with aliens from another world, who he somehow helps with his mental powers. Then we meet a girl whose self-alienation starts out as an emotional self-disconnection similar to other Suzuki characters:

“Akiko had been alone ever since she was a child. She’d never had friends. She’d been a taciturn, expressionless, polite child. Her good grades had made her something of a teacher’s pet, but she never cared about any of that. After many long years of resenting the fact that no one loved her, she had conceived a vague hatred for this world.”

But she comes to realise these feelings are because she is (or so she believes), an alien from another world, here on Earth to fulfil the covenant of the story’s title. She forms a friendship with another similarly outsiderish girl, and things get a bit Charles Manson-ish.

The starkest image of self-alienation, though, is in “Memory of Water”. Here, the main character is a woman whose agoraphobia has led to her being mostly cut off from the world, and barely leaving her flat. But there are inexplicable (and, to her, alarming) intrusions into even that safe space, such as phone calls from a man who seems to know her, and items of clothing she’d never wear suddenly appearing in her wardrobe. Unknown to herself, she has a second self, one who is not anxious, depressed and sick, but whose idea of a free, adventurous life is one she’s so afraid of, she has cut that whole self off to the point that it has managed to break away and live an independent life. But instead of embracing this new self, the anxious woman only retreats further.

This feeling of being linked to another person, one whose mental and physical ill-health is dragging you down, also pops up in a tale I’ve already mentioned, “I’ll Never Forget”, which is actually a sequel to the story “Forgotten” from Terminal Boredom. “Forgotten” presented us with an alien but humanlike race, the Meelians, who never forget, which is why they don’t have war on their planet. In “I’ll Never Forget”, though, we learn there’s a downside to this never forgetting, as Meelians’ emotional experiences never fade; as a result, when “their heart has exceeded its capacity”, they tend to take their own life. (Human beings, on the other hand, merely descend into “a sort of hellish torment”. Thanks.) The main character, a Meelian woman who’s on Earth to do some modelling work, finds herself unconsciously targeted by the telepathic emanations of the human woman from “Forgotten”, who loved a Meelian man, Sol, who’s now dead. Alongside this feeling of being burdened by a stream of negativity that mixes physical ill-health, depression, and a feeling of life-failure, there’s the helplessness of not being able to do anything about it. In this sense, both “I’ll Never Forget” and “Memory of Water” are quite despairing tales.

As with Terminal Boredom, there’s no indication of when the Japanese originals from Hit Parade of Tears were first published, but I’m willing to bet that “The Memory of Water” and “I’ll Never Forget” date from the end of Suzuki’s career. That feeling of being burdened by longstanding physical ill-health, as well as mental ill-health and a feeling of the failure of human relationships chimes too much with Suzuki’s biography to ignore. (And I realised I should have taken my own advice from my review of Terminal Boredom: “I’d like to read some more stories by Suzuki, though perhaps I wouldn’t read them back-to-back, as that malaise of disaffection can be hard to read too much of.”)

There are some tales in Hit Parade of Tears that escape this negativity, though. Perhaps my favourite is one of the most explicitly genre-science-fictional, “Softly, As In A Morning Sunrise”, about the human crew of a spaceship exploring other planets, not for the purposes of scientific advancement — there are just too many planets out there for every one of them to be treated with such care and attention — but as part of “a get-rich-quick scheme to collect unusual animals for Earth’s leisure class”. This mismatched, flawed, and very un-military-SF crew, collect a bunch of animals from various planets, half of which die, some of which injure or poison the crew. On this planet, they find what seems to be a human baby, and their disagreements about what to do with it lead to a near mutiny. But the captain, who is equally fed-up with their mission, decides to take a new, and very un-Captain Kirk-ish solution: she says maybe they should give up and just live on this planet as they are.

It would be interesting to know when this story was written. The idea of a crew setting down on an alien planet and collecting specimens has been done in SF before, but the crew’s mismatchedness, and the detail that, back on Earth, there’s a “nerve centre linking the computers used by the various government ministries” called “MOTHER”, recalls the fact that the Nostromo’s computer is also called “Mother”, which makes me wonder if this isn’t a jokey take on Alien.

I think I like Suzuki most when she’s engaging explicitly with the sort of big ideas you find in genre SF — she inevitably has a fresh and meaningful take on them, alongside a carefree sense of humour and a wide acceptance of human foibles. But elsewhere there’s that overpowering emotional malaise and feelings of despair that just can’t be channelled into the sort of punky kicking back at society that would give this collection the life it needs. I really didn’t enjoy that aspect this time around.

Earlier this year, an idle whim made me wonder what sort of fiction Farnsworth Wright produced. As editor of Weird Tales from 1924 to 1940, he presided over its Golden Age, publishing key works of weird fiction and sword & sorcery, and establishing the careers of writers such as H P Lovecraft and Robert E Howard — as well as, it has to be said, rejecting some of their best works, including At the Mountains of Madness. So what about the products of his own imagination? I expected there to be a collection of his stories out there, but couldn’t find one, so I started looking up the tales in online scans. ISFDB listed 9 stories, but as I got into the project I found twice that number available in magazine scans online — though admittedly, most of them don’t contain any sort of fantasy or weird element. But once I’d started I got more and more interested and ended up with a collection of 19 stories and 9 poems (two of which are translations), enough for a slim volume (though I did drop one story, which I’ll explain below), so I decided to bring one out — not because I think Wright is likely to catch fire with a modern audience, just that I thought other people might, like me, be curious.

Wright had a pretty wide experience of life, and his fiction reflects that. He served in the First World War — mostly as a translator, in France — and three of his stories, “Enemies”, “The Vow” and “Lonesome Time” are about the war. Mostly they show him thinking through how it’s possible to fight for one’s country while believing very strongly in the wider brotherhood of humanity — something he actively engaged in by learning, teaching, and translating into Esperanto (including Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart”).

Both before and after the war he worked as a reporter, and his fiction features several stories of reporters, including a rookie in a last-ditch attempt to hold onto his job (“In the Depths”) and an experienced reporter investigating a suicide that seems more like a murder (“The Silent Shot”) — a story that also features a near-forensic description of a bullet wound to the head, which makes me think Wright must have seen such a thing (though I suppose he had ample opportunity during the war). He also worked as a music critic, and music features in both a comic tale of an opera star living beyond his means (“Out of the Frying Pan”), and a more serious, lyrical tale of a creative genius’s path to musical greatness (“The Stolen Melody”).

A couple of tales touch on a traumatic event that occurred when Wright was in college and went into the sea with a friend called John P Rauen. Both got into difficulties in the currents around a deep submerged hole and while Wright managed to keep himself above the surface until he was rescued, Rauen drowned. As John Locke says in his biography of Wright in The Thing’s Incredible: The Secret Origins of Weird Tales, this traumatic underwater struggle made its way into Wright’s story “In the Depths”, but it’s even more evident in “The Pole-Star”, published in the February 1921 issue of boy’s magazine The Open Road. This is about a trio of boys who go on a swimming trip and one gets into serious difficulty — made only the worse by being under a fairground fortuneteller’s curse that he’ll die when he next sees the pole-star.

There’s another, rather surprising, class of stories in Wright’s output, to do with the moral edification of young women. “Mother” and “The Medal of Virtue” are both about young women being brought into a realisation of how much they’ve strayed down the wrong path. In the former, the “wrong path” involves the wearing of stockings and hanging around with young men who smoke. Egad! “Mother” is a particularly interesting tale — not so much as a piece of fiction, as in the fact that it came from the future editor of Weird Tales. It’s the story of a shopgirl who embarks on a career in a chorus line in search of a little more excitement and better pay, who’s given the opportunity of her first solo performance when she impresses everyone with her suggestive embellishments to a song called “Shimmy, Jimmy”. What makes this story particularly notable is where it was published, a journal called The Light, “the Official Organ of the World’s Purity Federation”, whose byline was “The White Slave Traffic and Public Vice Can and Must Be Eliminated”. This from the man who, just over a decade later, would be putting Margaret Brundage’s art deco nudes on the cover of Weird Tales, often in scenarios with a distinct air of bondage about them (and not a stocking in sight!)…

Wright’s fiction only really turned toward the weird once he got involved in Weird Tales — initially as its chief slush-pile reader, then as its editor (whereupon he used the pseudonym Francis Hard for his own fiction). His early efforts, “The Closing Hand” and “The Teak-Wood Shrine” are a little crude, the former in particular being nothing but a camp-fire scare, but his later weird stories are a bit more sophisticated — though never, it has to be said, anywhere near the likes of the writers Weird Tales is remembered for: Lovecraft, Robert E Howard, Clark Ashton Smith, and so on. They also, quite notably, stay away from the supernatural. Wright favours poisonings and madness rather than monsters and ghosts — apart from one foray into the blatantly fantastic, “An Adventure in the Fourth Dimension”, where the weird is employed entirely for humorous purposes. Or, should I say, “humorous” purposes.

(And, speaking of “humorous” — that tale I left out. One of Wright’s stories for Weird Tales was “The Great Panjandrum”, and I decided to leave this one out because, a humorous tale, it relies entirely on racial stereotypes for its humour, while also being disappointing as a story — I kept expecting a twist of some kind, but there was none. So, in the end, it was easy to leave out.)

If I were to say anything about Wright’s later fiction it’s that it seems to be playing with the idea of the double. Characters who share a name turn up in a couple of stories — “The Medal of Virtue” and “Poisoned” — while characters who suffer a complete moral transformation, until they become their own opposite, can be found in “The Picture of Judas” and, again, “The Medal of Virtue”. (And a link between apparent enemies is a theme from his earliest tales, the war tales.) His longest story, “The White Queen” is very much of the era of the The Sheik (1919), and the whole Orientalist-romantic-fantasy of a young woman being abducted by/falling for the menacing/commanding/ravishing (in both senses) desert-dwelling prince of the east.

Wright’s fiction is no must-read (I’m not over-selling this, am I?), but I found it interesting enough, considering his importance as a figure in the history of modern weird fiction. The Snake Fiend and Other Stories (which also contains all the poems by him I could find) is out now in ebook, kindle and paperback. There are a few illustrations reproduced (some of which I did my best to rescue from moiré-pattern hell). For, like me, the idly curious.

The full table of contents and other details can be found here.