I came to read this, David Eddings’ first novel, via a rather insalubrious route. I wasn’t aware of it at the time, but around 2020 the revelation came out that, at the start of the 1970s, both David Eddings and his wife served a year in jail for the physical mistreatment of their 4-year-old adopted son. It seems they’d been keeping him in a cage in the basement, as well as administering physical punishment, seemingly because he was a fussy eater. (As a result, the couple had both the son and a more-recently adopted daughter permanently removed from their care, and weren’t allowed to adopt again.) As I’d read and re-read (several times) Eddings’ first fantasy series, The Belgariad, when I was 13, I found myself being drawn, car-crash-wise, into wanting to know more. A Reddit thread contained links to some of the newspaper articles of the day, but the most insightful piece was one by James Gifford, who’d actually done research in the Eddings archives. One of the things he said was that Eddings’ first novel, the non-fantasy High Hunt (published in 1973), was actually drafted in jail, and that it was “highly autobiographical”. I’m not the sort to demand the writers I read be paragons of virtue, but all the same, I felt the need for a little mental readjustment about Eddings, and ended up reading High Hunt. One thing to say about this case that sets it aside from, say, that of Marion Zimmer Bradley (whose Mists of Avalon I read around the same time), is that David Eddings and his wife were tried and sentenced, and served time for what they did—which is, in our society, supposed to give them a chance of rehabilitation. Perhaps, then, The Belgariad might have been informed by remorse and a greater self-knowledge.

The narrator of High Hunt is Dan Alders, who, at the start of the novel, is just getting out of his stint in the US army. (This is the era of the Vietnam war, but he was lucky in being posted to Germany.) Having no real home to go to (his father is dead, his mother is an alcoholic he’s pretty much cut himself off from, and his last steady girlfriend ended their relationship while he was abroad), he decides to look up his semi-estranged brother Jack. Jack, living in a trailer park with his (I can’t remember if it’s second, third, or what) wife and two kids, sets Dan up with a trailer for the few months before he goes to college, and Dan falls in with Jack’s friends, a collection of mostly dysfunctional males and their generally more functional wives (but also their very much dysfunctional mistresses), who spend their time in drinking and semi-casual womanising.

One of Jack’s friends suggests going on the High Hunt, an early-season deer hunt which takes place high up in the Cascade Mountains—in “some of the roughest, emptiest, steepest, highest country in the whole fuckin’ world”. (In contrast to The Belgariad, High Hunt contains a lot of swearing, drinking and sex. In the fantasy series, there are occasional jokey references to the sorcerer Belgarath’s dissolute ways. The first half of this novel, I think, gives the details of that sort of life.)

The group take a whole lot of baggage into the mountains with them: personal hang-ups, rivalries and resentments aplenty. One of their number, for instance, ex-Marine Lou McKlearey (who Dan describes as “a whole pile of bad trouble, just looking for someplace to happen”) is not only saddled with PTSD, but has been carrying on an affair with Jack’s wife, and has slept once with the wife of another member of the expedition—so, at least two of the group are pretty keen on turning their rifles on him, if he wasn’t already difficult, competitive, and obnoxious enough. Naturally, as well as rifles, they all take pistols, too.

Although High Hunt is mostly described as a thriller, and there’s a lot of tension throughout as the personal issues build up steam, it doesn’t deliver the thriller-type of ending that reviewers’ comparisons to Deliverance (filmed in 1972) might imply. Eddings’ novel isn’t about a shoot-out between supposedly civilised men, but the moral arc each character goes through. Jack, for instance, finally admits how scared of life he is; Lou doesn’t exactly turn his life around, but we at least get a glimpse of the kind of psychological pressure he’s under. Another member of the group, Stan, a somewhat henpecked academic, though he’s revolted by his killing of a deer, plays up the big hunter when he gets home and shifts the power balance with his formerly domineering wife (though Dan can see it’s all a bit fake—not all of the characters have entirely positive stories). Another, Cal, finally admits it’s time to grow up and drop all the drinking and womanising.

Dan’s turnaround, though the least dramatic, is the most explicit in what caused it. At the start of the novel, he has, as he describes it, a serious case of “plain, old-fashioned alienation”. Going up into the mountains—and, yes, killing a deer, poor thing—reconnects him with something authentic:

“There was no way to fake it… If you didn’t kill the damned deer, he wouldn’t fall down… He had too much integrity… He knew he was real. It was up to you to find out if you were.”

He gets almost poetic about it, though in a slightly Hemingway way:

“I slowly squeezed the trigger. When a shot is good and right on, you get a kind of feeling of connection between you and the animal—almost as if you were reaching out and touching him, very gently, kind of pushing on him with your finger. I don’t want to get mystic about it, but it’s a sort of three-way union—you, the gun, and the deer, all joined in a frozen instant. It’s so perfect that I’ve always kind of regretted the fact that the deer gets killed in the process. Does that make any sense?”

As well as interacting with (and shooting at) mother nature, Dan gets a dose of re-parenting, thanks to the two men who are their guides for the hunt: Miller, an impressive, white-bearded father-figure (who “looked a little bit like God himself”), and the older, smaller Clint, who, as he does all the camp’s cooking, comes across as something of a mother-figure. Both come to thoroughly approve of Dan, and Dan gets to feel a bit of self-respect in the process. He goes home, commits to his studies, and even manages to convert his hippie-ish girlfriend into a more conventional wife.

I couldn’t help noticing a few similarities with The Belgariad. The opening, with its reminiscence of a rural childhood, “on the bare upper edge of poverty”, in which Dan’s father tells a story, echoes the opening chapter of Pawn of Prophecy, with the boy Garion’s upbringing on a farm and the storyteller Belgarath’s visits. The narrator’s surname, Alders, immediately made me think of the main god, Aldur, in The Belgariad. And the section in the final Belgariad book where Garion, Belgarath and Silk—just the men, for the first time in the series—set out into country that feels very much like the gold-rush era US, has echoes with the world and characters of High Hunt, if I’m recalling it right.

High Hunt was better than I’d expected. I’d say it’s better written than The Belgariad, and that’s probably because Eddings was writing about people and places he knew, and felt something about. There’s definitely an air of authentic feeling towards the landscape he describes:

“The road out to Miller’s wasn’t the best, but we managed. The sun was up now, and the poplar leaves gleamed pure gold. The morning air was so clear that every rock and limb and leaf stood out. The fences were straight lines along the road and on out across the mowed hayfields. The mountains swelled up out of the poplar-gold bottoms. It was so pretty it made your throat ache. I felt good, really good, maybe for the first time in years.”

There’s also a lot of technicalities about guns and hunting that went over my head, but at least it left me feeling that the author knew his stuff. It’s the sort of novel where someone says “Why don’t you get the horses while I rig up a drag?”—and I have no idea what a drag is, but I’m pretty sure Eddings does.

A lot of drinking goes on. It’s full of scenes where two guys get together and decide to go out for a drink, but first have a few drinks at home to get in the mood, and stop off on the way to buy a bottle to keep things going. Then, once they’re at the drinking establishment, they go from beer to something stronger, then decide to go to someone’s house, and do some more drinking there. (It makes me wonder what Dan was really on about when he accused his mother of being an alcoholic.)

In this sense, it’s a novel about a particularly male sort of toxicity—a lot of the women are treated abominably by the men, and I can’t say the author is particularly sympathetic towards them—but ultimately it’s about rising above this Slough of Despond, connecting with something authentic, and getting on the right path once more.

Which may well be what Eddings himself was doing by writing the novel. I wouldn’t say I detect any regret about the treatment of the Eddings’ son—there’s pretty much nothing about children in the book, aside from references to the narrator’s own childhood, which clearly contained a certain amount of the sort of corporal punishment Eddings himself would have grown up with. (Jack’s kids get barely a mention, and neither adulterous Jack nor his equally adulterous wife seem to take much care of them, which can’t help feeling significant.) Instead, this is about Eddings backing himself out of a moral dead end and (presumably) deciding to live a more authentic, or upright, life from now on. It’s about Eddings himself, not what he did to someone else.

One strike that’s perhaps against it, is that there’s a certain amount of the sort of light but firm paternalistic moralising in High Hunt that I recognise from The Belgariad. Dan’s hippie girlfriend, who leaves off the political demonstrations, starts wearing a bra, and agrees to get married, as though she’s finally come to her senses, is one case in point: Eddings has always had something of the attitude that everyone will one day see the world as he thinks it should be and correct their wrong ways, and this makes me wonder a bit if he was fully capable of the moral self-evaluation you’d expect a year in prison to give him. High Hunt isn’t about regret for what he did, but a recognition of the bad path he was on, which isn’t quite the same thing, but is at least part of the way there.

In the piece linked to above, Gifford writes of how the revelation about Eddings’ crime cast a whole new light on The Belgariad, finding it to be “an impossible attempt at atonement, a desperately failed wish put to paper, and a tortuously painful digging out of his and his wife’s shame”. I hope that, ultimately, no atonement is impossible, but the sense I get is that the Eddings attempted to put what they did behind them (they certainly made sure to avoid the limelight once their fantasy novels were so successful, and perhaps part of that was fear of what might be dug up about them), and that any thoughts or feelings Eddings might have had about it would be deeply buried. But it would be interesting to give his break-through fantasy series a re-read, I have to say.

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.”

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.”

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.

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 (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.

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.

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.”

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.