fantasy, page 62 of 92

I have an essay in the latest issue of Wormwood, on David Lindsay’s posthumously-published novel, The Violet Apple. Of all Lindsay’s novels, it’s the one I most wanted to write about, perhaps because it’s one of his lesser-known and rarely-read works, but also because, although his first novel, A Voyage to Arcturus, is undoubtedly the most impressive in terms of sheer ambition, The Violet Apple is his most muted, and human — the novel of a writer with some experience and craft — as well as perhaps being his most artistically unified. I even named my website dedicated to David Lindsay after it. (I’ve always thought it the most filmable of his novels, too, and would love to see it as a sort of Merchant Ivory style period piece!)

I hope I managed to set down exactly what it is I like about the book, and why it should be approached on its own merits, not just as “another book by the author of A Voyage to Arcturus“. It’s a great pity there’s no affordable edition out at the moment; I always feel guilty recommending a book it’s expensive to buy.

Anyway, I’ve been reading Wormwood since its first issue, so it’s great to be a contributor, and I’m now looking forward to reading the rest of the issue.

(My essay has gained a glitch in the first paragraph — the last sentence uses “He is described as…” to refer to a tower; I just had it starting “Described as…” — but hopefully it still makes sense!)

If you come to Curse of the Cat People (1944) expecting a sequel to Cat People in the usual sense of a horror sequel, you’ll be disappointed (as I was, the first time I saw it). Usually, in a horror sequel, the monster from the first film returns to wreak havoc on a new set of victims; here, the victims from the first film return to wreak havoc on a new monster — only, in this case, the “monster” isn’t a troubled young woman, but an over-imaginative young girl.

In Curse of the Cat People, all-American lukewarms Alice and Ollie (the couple from Cat People) are now married and have a daughter. Amy is an imaginative child, shunned by other children because she’s apt to forget the game they’re playing and wander off in her own little world. Her father Ollie is worried. His experience with Irena in Cat People has led to him being mistrustful of everything that smacks of his former wife’s mental problems. He thinks there’s “something moody, something sickly” about young Amy’s tendency to go “moping and dreaming” on her own. “She could almost be Irena’s child,” he muses to this wife, who gently reminds him that she’s the one to know this can’t be the case. But when, having been shown a photograph of Irena, Amy identifies this dead woman as her new playmate, Ollie first tries to get her to admit she’s lying, then gives Amy her first smacking. He tells Amy’s teacher that his first wife “told lies to herself and believed them”, and that she then went mad, killed a man, then killed herself. (And so he seems to have forgotten his own last words at the end of the previous film: “She never lied to us.”)

What makes it worse is that Amy’s imaginative friend, played by Simone Simon of the first film, is entirely benevolent. The “curse” of the sequel’s title isn’t the fact that Amy is haunted by her father’s first wife, but that Amy’s father is haunted by a fear of people who show any signs of being different. And although his new-found distrust of imagination does, finally, add a new dimension to his character, at two dimensions he’s still far short of the norm, and really not the best person to be deciding how to bring up a sensitive, imaginative child.

There are none of the shocks or spookiness of the first film, apart from a few moodily-lit Gothic moments thanks to a subplot involving a senile old actress who insists the woman sharing her house is not her daughter but an impostor. Instead, the film goes for gentle family melodrama and moments of lightly enchanting childhood fantasy. It’s a sequel to Cat People more in the thematic sense, as it deals with how those “normal, happy” people (or one of them at least, as Alice has much less of her husband’s phobia) of the first film can deal so badly with those who are a little bit different from them. Thankfully, this time there’s no lecherous Dr Judd to push things too far. Instead, Ollie gets advice from his daughter’s teacher, who points out that, as he builds ships, he’s not trained to deal with children but she is, and that it’s only natural for a lonely, imaginative child to invent a friend.

I think you have to approach Curse of the Cat People prepared for something very different from what you’d expect of a film billed as a sequel to Cat People. It’s not a horror film, and, more importantly, it has none of the first film’s psychological intensity. Ollie’s very slow — and, at the end, not very convincing — coming to terms with the fact that his daughter isn’t as imaginatively shallow as he is (at the end, he refuses to look at where young Amy tells him Irena is standing, but lies all the same, saying he sees her too) isn’t even a truly satisfying resolution, but, as sequels go, at least the film attempts something interesting.

Ballantine edition from 1974, cover by Gervasio Gallardo

Beautiful, detached and magically powerful, the young woman Sybel lives atop Eld Mountain, “alone with [a] beautiful white house, a vast library of heavy, iron-bound books, a collection of animals beyond all dreaming, and the power to hold them.” The world outside her small domain may be wracked with conflict, but Sybel is only interested in adding one more fabulous creature to her already fabulous collection (which includes a boar that can answer riddles, and a gold-hungry dragon). She tries to call the Liralen, “a great white bird with wings that glided like snowy pennants unfurled in the wind, a bird that had carried the only Queen of Eldwold on its back in days long before.” And the closest she comes to engagement with the wider world is sneaking out to steal the occasional book of lore from some unsuspecting wizard.

Into this ivory tower fantasy, the real world must come. Coren, a young nobleman of the house of Sirle, which was recently defeated by the Eldwold King Drede, arrives bearing Drede’s baby son — Sybel’s nephew by a sister she never knew. Sybel agrees to look after the child, and comes to love young Tamlorn, though otherwise preserves her aloofness from the affairs of a world that would make young Tam into a political pawn. When he grows old enough to want to see his father, though, Sybel uses her magic to call King Drede, and lets Tam go to live with him.

Rodney Matthews cover (Avon books, 1975)

Up to this point, the book, like Sybel herself, has felt somewhat removed and cool. (Though the fantasy setting is brought alive by sparks of storyishness — it’s a land haunted by wizards, artefacts, hidden caves, ancient battle-sites and ghosts, which we learn about from fragments of stories and riddles.) Both Drede and Coren beg Sybel to use her magic to further their ends, but her power and indifference seem capable of sustaining her in her inviolability. Then suddenly, halfway through the book, things change. She has been feeling a vague tugging at her attention for some time, and realises with horror that she is the victim of the same sort of calling-magic she used for collecting her fabulous animals. In one incredibly dramatic chapter, not only her aloofness and neutrality, but her very ability to be herself, to retain her individuality, is so utterly threatened, it is now she who has to beg:

“There is part of me, like a white-winged falcon, free, proud, wild, a soaring thing that goes its own way seeking the bright stars and the sun. If you kill that bird, I will be earthbound, bound in the patterns of men, with no words of my own, no actions of my own. I will take that bird for you, cage it. Only let it live.”

This chapter hits hard, and absolutely repays the rather aesthete-like wish-fulfilling daydream of Sybel’s existence prior to that. The threat is intense but brief, and after it, The Forgotten Beasts of Eld turns into an intriguing study of the effects of power on its wielder, a moral fable about corruptibility and the near impossibility of anyone who has power preventing themselves from harming even those they love, as soon as they start to use it. For, as much as it allows you to avoid your fears, power also invites you to pander to your wounds, to play up to them rather than heal them. And even a successful revenge affects not just the revenger, but all who are close to them.

The Forgotten Beasts of Eld won the first World Fantasy Award, in 1975. It has a lyrical prose style, a slightly distant, fabled quality, which, whilst evoking the strangeness of a magical land wrought with riddles and fragments of story, can tend to make the characters seem distant. Here, McKillip seems to have a stronger grasp of the psychology of her characters than an ability to evoke their emotions, and I found I believed in Sybel’s desire for revenge far more than I did her love of Coren and Tam. But that chapter 6, at the mid-point, is wonderfully powerful, a near-Shakespearean clash of characters strong in both magic and feeling, each one eloquent in expressing their terrors and desires in a single, superheated encounter.