Four years have passed since the events of the previous two books in Jenny Nimmo’s Snow Spider trilogy, and The Chestnut Soldier (first published in 1989) feels a bit more grown-up, with boy magician Gwyn nearly thirteen and starting to notice girls in a different way (he thinks Nia Lloyd’s sixteen-year-old sister Catrin the most beautiful girl in Wales, but “Lately he had found it difficult to talk to her”). The narrative is divided between Gwyn and the now eleven-year-old Nia (the main character in Emlyn’s Moon), with Gwyn no longer feeling like the distant and wise boy-magician from the second book: he’s trying not to use his “power” (as he’s come to call it, thinking the word “magic” childish), partly because he keeps getting it wrong and making mistakes, but also because he feels he should be taller by now and is worried magic is stunting his growth.

One day, the Lloyds learn that their mother’s cousin, Evan Llŷr, is coming to stay. It has been ten years since they last saw him, and he’s now a major in the British Army. He has, though, been wounded somehow, and is seeking a place to convalesce. In his thirties, handsome and mysterious, he comes across instantly as something of a romantic figure. Nia thinks him “the prince from every fairy tale; he was fierce and kind—and immensely troubled”, and every woman in the narrative from Nia to Gwyn’s grandmother Nain are under his spell. Particularly so is Catrin, who neglects her boyfriend, an Irish lad called Patrick McGoohan, who likes to ride by on his horse to be admired, but now finds himself ignored.

The mystery of Evan’s “wound” takes a while to come out. It’s not physical. He went into a burning building while posted in Belfast, to rescue some of his men who were trapped inside, but he was the only one to escape alive. These elements—his being a soldier, an association with fire, and a potential friction with the Irish—act as a sort of mythic-magnetic pull between him and a story that has already appeared in the first volume of the series, the legend of Efnisien, who maimed the King of Ireland’s horses when the King came over to marry Efnisien’s sister, and whose angry spirit became trapped in the broken wooden horse that was among Nain’s gifts to the young Gwyn. Now, this wooden horse uses Nia’s younger brother Iolo to get itself free of Gwyn’s control, and the spirit of Efnisien enters, or blends with, Evan.

After this, Evan becomes increasingly dark and cruel. Poltergeist activity begins to surround him, breaking young Iolo’s toy horses and Idris Llewelyn’s carved unicorn, and driving Patrick McGoohan’s horse, Glory, to madness. Books fall off shelves, plates break, storms descend on the town, and the Lloyd home looks like it’s been hit by an earthquake. Catrin is hopelessly drawn to Evan, even when his kiss is rough and not at all to her liking. He becomes a sort of Heathcliff figure, romantic and dangerous in a way that skews into the supernatural.

Gwyn realises he has to do something, and after another few failed attempts which increasingly convince him he was never meant to be a magician at all, travels back in time to speak with his ancestor, Gwydion Gwyn, to work out how to deal with this demonic force. (Gwydion, who anachronistically asks “You’re not blaming your genes, are you?”, assures him that he, too, made plenty of mistakes.)

Like the preceding book in the trilogy, the supernatural element in The Chestnut Soldier enters gradually, at first being indistinguishable from the story of a troubled but handsome man suddenly entering the lives of the Lloyds. But unlike with Emlyn’s Moon, there’s not so much of an alternative story to be going on with while the supernatural builds. (In addition, although there’s just as much light comedy as in the previous book, it doesn’t feel as light, couched as it is amongst much more serious-seeming darkness.) In both books, everything is resolved in a brief but confusing showdown involving magic and mythical figures, but whereas in Emlyn’s Moon this released all the tension in the mundane narrative in a way that made sense, here it’s unclear how—or if—Evan’s real-life troubledness is fixed along with his supernatural possession. Things are resolved, but they don’t really feel resolved—though this could be taken as part of the series’ growing up along with its characters, having them face messier situations and messier resolutions.

I was disappointed to find no return of the faerie-like “White People” from the first two books, particularly as they were the most intriguing element, for me. Here, Gwyn only thinks of them briefly, to note that his sister is surely happy with them, so he feels no need to try and bring her back, and besides, he’s grown up and she is now a perpetual child, so what would the two have to talk about? It seems rather dismissive and cold, particularly as I can’t help thinking that Bethan’s supposed happiness with the fairy folk is the sort of happiness a cult member has with their cult—it may require deprogramming to reveal it’s not happiness at all. (I think The Snow Spider could do with a Boneland-style sequel, where an adult Gwyn has to either rescue his sister properly, or at least face up to the reality of what happened to her.)

Like Alan Garner’s The Owl Service (which Nimmo hadn’t read, at least before writing the first book in the series), myth, here, is a thing that threatens to take over modern generations, replaying its tragedies and re-inflicting its suffering. But unlike in The Owl Service, Gwyn’s approach is to fight myth with myth: just as Evan becomes infected with the mythic presence of Efnisian, Gwyn allows himself to become, in part, his ancestor Gwydion Gwyn. (Which leads to some comic moments, as this Welsh ancient’s presence in Gwyn leads to him suddenly finding all sorts of aspects of modern life hard to deal with. Only, as this happens in the final chapters, with the darkness around Evan building, it’s hard to really feel the comedy.)

The series ends with Gwyn saying “I’m grateful for the adventure but I don’t believe I’ll need magic for a while.” Which leaves things somewhat unresolved—he’s still evidently living in a world where myth leaks through into reality, so how does he know he’s not going to need it?

For me, this may be the least successful of three books. The Snow Spider worked as an introduction to the difficulties and wonders of this world of myth and magic; Emlyn’s Moon was the most satisfying as a novel, with its nicely-balanced magical and mundane storylines; The Chestnut Soldier seems almost consciously messier, reflecting the main characters’ entry into adolescence and an awareness of greater moral ambiguity, but ultimately ending in a mood where the characters just felt they’d outgrown magic, as though it were their choice to make, in a world that seems dangerously fraught with myths and faerie.

Like its predecessors, The Chestnut Soldier was adapted for television, being broadcast in four parts in 1991 (produced by HTV Cymru/Wales), running from Wednesday 20th November to 11th December, and retaining all the same actors for the main roles. Interestingly, in McGown and Docherty’s encyclopaedic look at children’s TV drama, The Hill and Beyond, they say: “The Chestnut Soldier loses the subtlety of its predecessors, opting instead for a more teen angst approach”—but as I’ve said, this feels true of the book, too. I can’t help wondering how this third instalment would have been dealt with had the 2020 BBC adaptation got this far. On the one hand, that series clearly implied that there was going to be more of a showdown with the faerie-like people who’d taken Gwyn’s sister, and their by no means friendly intentions; on the other, how would a 2020s adaptation have dealt with the romantic relationship between sixteen-year-old Catrin and thirty-something Evan? It’s accepted without comment in the book (even from Catrin’s mother), but I can’t imagine how it would have been treated in the style of the more careful 2020 version of The Snow Spider.

I thought I’d take a side-step from re-reading Barker’s novels to look at some of his plays, written in the days prior to the publication of (but in some cases alongside the writing of) the first Books of Blood stories and The Damnation Game. A good selection are currently published in individual editions from the Clive Barker Archive, complete with Barker cover art, photos, and informative afterwords.

Barker had been creating plays since his days as a teenager at Quarry Bank School in Liverpool, which from the start were both horrific and fantastic in nature. According to Douglas E Winter in his Barker biography The Dark Fantastic, Voodoo (1967) was “a living horror film”, Inferno (1967) a “weird reinvention of Dante” complete with “Hell and Nazis and God knows”, and the title of Neongonebony (1968) refers to our current neon-lit age descending into a bone-choked post-apocalypse. The Holly and the Ivy (1970, when Barker would have been eighteen), was a three-hour take on the King Arthur story, ending with the revelation of a homosexual relationship between two of its main characters, which caused some consternation among the school staff—not for the first time, with Barker. These early works were collaborative and partly improvised (an approach Barker would encourage even in his later works, as he says in his introductions to the published editions: “These plays are not finished things, they’re invitations to collective work.”). Nevertheless, he was the one who assigned parts and determined the purpose of each scene within an overall narrative. Playwriting, acting and production continued for Barker throughout his time at university (where he switched from philosophy to English Literature), in first the Hydra Theatre Company, then the Theatre of the Imagination, and for a short while the Mute Pantomime Theatre. These all seem to have been small groups, mostly of the same people (Pinhead actor Doug Bradley, and Hellraiser II scriptwriter Pete Atkins, for instance). They all moved to London around 1977, and formed the Dog Company, where Barker, now out of university, concentrated entirely on the stage. He continued to act in his own plays for a while, but gave that up in 1980 to concentrate on writing and directing, and in 1982 gave up directing too.

The three plays I chose to read (and I’ve seen none of these performed, so I’m sure I’m missing a lot of how they’d actually be experienced) all had the more obviously fantastical titles. First among them was The Magician: A Farce in the Style of the Commedia dell’Arte, which was first performed from November to December 1978. As the title says, this is a take on the traditional comedy form the Harlequinade, with its set character-types (Pantalone, Columbine, Pierrot, and so on). Here, Pantalone is the governor of an unnamed European city-state, where rumours arrive that the great magician Cagliostro is on his way. But is he a real magician or “all reputation, no power”? It turns out he did perform one genuine act of magic many years ago, the creation of an homunculus, which he proceeded to drown, in horror at what he’d made. But the creature survived, and was raised in ignorance of what it really was, to become the governor of this city-state. The play ends with a reconciliation between the father/creator Cagliostro and his fantastical “son”.

The History of the Devil was first performed in September 1980, and went on to have a run at the Edinburgh Fringe, where it was listed among the twelve best plays of the festival. It would be the Dog Company’s most performed play. In it, the Devil has himself put on trial in the hope that, if found innocent, he’ll be allowed back into Heaven. Witnesses (most of them summoned from the grave) appear, and their testimonies turn into on-stage enactments, including the story of the Devil’s first arrival on Earth (in what seems to be medieval Russia), his encounter with Christ in the desert, his attempt to get a Renaissance architect to build him a palace (if not on Earth, then in Hell), and his freeing some women accused of being witches in Puritan America. For me, although these episodes provide plenty of variety, they don’t really add up to an argument for or against the Devil as a source of evil, and it’s the court scenes that are the best parts of the play. The Devil’s ultimate justification is that none of this would be any different if he weren’t here:

“Is there a moral sky over me? No. Does this dirt suffer morality? No. In all the natural world there’s no moral thing. You ask why you are unhappy. Why, why? Morality. You go against nature.”

Frankenstein in Love was first performed from April to May 1982, after which it was taken to Holland, Belgium, and again to the Edinburgh Fringe. It’s set in an unnamed South American country at the point where its current dictator, Perez, is being overthrown by the revolutionary forces led by El Coco. Perez’s chief executioner, it turns out, is Doctor Frankenstein (who has been allowed to experiment to his heart’s content on the regime’s political criminals), while El Coco is actually his first creation, the famed “monster”. After the revolution, El Coco is assassinated, but, being dead already, cannot die, and returns to revenge himself on Doctor Frankenstein, arriving on his wedding day (where the doctor is marrying one of his experimental subjects). Of the three plays, this is the most out-and-out horrific, dripping in gore, death, shock and transgression, including a man’s heart being ripped out on stage, another having his head trapped in a box of knives, and another having a new face sewn on, all wrapped up in an air of political oppression, medical experimentation, plague, cannibalism, and the misuse of corpses (“hardly the standard ingredients of British theatre” as the reviewer for The Scotsman put it).

Despite the political background, Frankenstein in Love doesn’t feel like a political statement (unless it’s in the overall tone of misused power and constant backstabbing), but rather presents a vision of a world in which all is merely flesh and death, but in which flesh is not ended by, but transformed by, death. As Veronique, one of Frankenstein’s experiments, says:

“Yes, I’ve learned that lesson. Flesh is trash. Its natural state is meat. Everybody is just meat. The rest is the will to be more than meat.”

Or, Frankenstein himself:

“We look at our bodies and we see them putrefying around our living minds and we know, finally, that the enemy is our flesh. The body is a prison and must be escaped by metaphysics, or changed by wit and knife and courage.”

Far more relentlessly grim than anything Barker put into his fiction—perhaps doubly so because it was being put on live, on stage, where the horror is unrelenting—it was actually written shortly after the most powerful of Barker’s initial Books of Blood stories, “In the Hills, the Cities”.

Aside from the general air of horror, these plays are speckled with hints of what was to come in Barker’s more well-known works. For instance Christ, in The History of the Devil, when planning his means of martyrdom, asks “Isn’t there something they do in the East with hooks in the skin?”, which recalls the hooks in the skin in Hellraiser. In Frankenstein in Love, after El Coco’s assassination (by fire), he becomes a skinless walking corpse, “A walking anatomy lesson”—which recalls Frank from Hellraiser, as well as the “anatomy lesson, raw and wet” of Gentle’s homunculus in Imajica.

More generally, I think it’s possible to see how Barker’s approach to writing fiction has been informed by his background as a playwright. All three of these plays feature a narrator who speaks to the audience and interacts with the characters, and who talks knowingly of the events being played out as a drama (somewhat like Puck when he addresses the audience at the end of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, only in this case throughout the play), and there’s certainly a similar tone in Barker’s fiction, where he’s always highlighting archetypal aspects like character roles and story-types (it’s so ingrained in Barker’s prose style it’s hard to isolate in a good quote, but here he’s describing Gentle and Judith’s love affair in Imajica: “one death short of tragedy, and one marriage short of farce”). In addition, I think his penchant for making his monsters such eloquent, often philosophical beasts, is rooted in writing them as characters for the stage.

The theme that kept standing out for me, even if it wasn’t the main one of each play, was that of monstrous sons and their fathers/creators. I’ve already mention the reunion of the homunculus and his creator in The Magician, but there’s also the Devil seeking reconciliation with his father/creator God in The History of the Devil, and El Coco/Frankenstein’s monster seeking revenge on his father/creator (he calls him his father, but it’s pointed out a couple of times that, no, he’s his creator) in Frankenstein in Love. In the latter two plays, these attempts at reconciliation (if the last one can even be called that) end in failure, if not tragedy. This is a theme I thought popped up in some of the early Books of Blood stories, too, such as “Skins of the Fathers” and “Rawhead Rex”, and now I think about it can also be found in The Damnation Game (most explicitly in the character Breer, who’s resurrected by Mamoulian, and so in a sense becomes his “monster”, though the Faustian pact-that-isn’t-a-pact between Whitehead and Mamoulian perhaps makes more sense if read as a father/creator-son relationship) and in Gentle’s created double in Imajica.

The end of the Dog Company came, ironically, not through failure but success. As well as Frankenstein in Love (the first of Barker’s plays to be directed by someone else, which was partly done to ensure the Arts Council took the company more seriously), they put on another Barker play at the Edinburgh Fringe, The Secret Life of Cartoons. This was enough of a hit that the troupe recognised they’d need to bring in other people to give it its full due if they were to take it further (which they did), and this meant leaving the days of a six-actor, one-playwright fringe group behind. Barker continued to write plays (for the Cockpit Youth Theatre), but was already working on The Books of Blood and The Damnation Game, with Hellraiser and international bestsellerdom looming fast.

First published in 1987, Emlyn’s Moon is the sequel to The Snow Spider, but one in which the first book’s protagonist, boy-magician Gwyn Griffiths, is now a secondary character. (Which often seems to happen with boy magicians. Once they’ve come into their powers, particularly if that has involved learning a certain amount of wisdom—which discounts you, Harry Potter—they’re too remote and powerful to be protagonists, and only come in towards the end to help the new main characters. For instance, Ged in the Earthsea books, and Will in The Dark is Rising series.)

Emlyn’s Moon is about Nia, middlemost of the seven Lloyd children (Alun Lloyd was Gwyn’s best friend in the first book). Nia feels she’s useless at everything, and is frequently told so by her teacher at school and her brothers (“Nia-can’t-do-nothing! Nia-in-the-middle! Nia’s got a funny tooth, and her nose goes squiggle, squiggle!”). When her family moves from their farm to town, where her father has taken on a butcher’s shop, they pass a former chapel (“the chapel that wasn’t a chapel now, but a home for someone”) whose door and gate have been repainted in bright pink, gold, and blue. Outside it, she sees Emlyn Llewelyn, a slightly older boy from school, but she’s told (by virtually everyone) that the chapel is “a bad place”, and not to go there, because “Something happened there, didn’t it?” Though no one will tell her what.

One day, though, she bumps into Emlyn in town, they get talking, and he invites her up to the home he shares with his father, a somewhat gruff artist currently living without his wife, who left abruptly a while ago with their new baby. Emlyn later tells Nia he doesn’t know where his mother is, only that Gwyn Griffith’s father took her away, and that she said something about living in the moon. As a result of this, there’s a breach between the Llewelyns and Griffiths, even though Emlyn is Gwyn’s cousin. Nia tells Emlyn and his father about a school project she has to do, where everyone in class has to make, write, or paint something about the town they live in. As she thinks she can’t do anything, she’s dreading it. But Emlyn’s father, Idris, questions her and discovers she can sew, so he fetches a large piece of canvas, and tells her to create a collage. She takes it home, but works on it in secret.

The growing friendship between Nia and Emlyn soon hits a snag. She’d promised that he could buy the Lloyd family’s sheepdog, which isn’t enjoying life in town, only to find her father has given it to the Griffithses. Nia feels ashamed and Emlyn feels betrayed, and it ends in a fight between Emlyn and Gwyn (who, having learned from the playground fight in the previous book, still uses a little magic, but ultimately lets his cousin win).

After this, Emlyn grows increasingly isolated, and when Nia learns about the magic world Gwyn is involved in, and sees, one night, pale child-like figures walking on the outskirts of the town, she worries they’re here to take Emlyn away, just as they took Gwyn’s sister Bethan. She decides she needs to solve the mystery of what happened to Emlyn’s mother, and reunite the two.

The Snow Spider seemed, to me, readable as both a magical tale for pre-teens and as a more complex story for older readers, and Emlyn’s Moon takes that even further. Although there’s no evident fantasy element for at least the first half of the book, the story is carried by the light comedy of Nia’s supposed uselessness, and her attempts to procure materials for her collage (including snipping a section off her sister’s music teacher’s net curtains, which is soon discovered). It’s the subtleties of the relationships—Nia and her large family, Nia and Emlyn, Emlyn and his father—and the mystery of what went on at the chapel that carries the story, rather than the first book’s moments of magical wonder. And when the fantasy does come in, it’s more mysterious and subtly threatening than in the first book. There’s no longer the possibility that the white world which took Gwyn’s sister might be an interesting place to visit, it’s much more clearly a place that people are taken to, but don’t come back from, and (unlike with the first book’s Bethan, who disappeared for seemingly no reason) it’s people who are emotionally vulnerable and isolated who are at risk of being taken. There are glimpses of adult mental illness and levels of distress you wouldn’t normally find in a book for, say, a nine-year-old readership, as in this, of Idris Llewelyn:

To Nia’s horror, the painter laughed. It was not a happy sound. On his face Nia saw a loss that was too unbearable to speak of.

And the odd creepy moment, too:

But up on the bridge something moved, pale yellow in the deadening glare of the street lights, but probably white. Small creatures crossing the bridge: children, no bigger than herself, for the stones of the bridge wall came shoulder high.

The fantastic element in Emlyn’s Moon—the presence of the fairy-like, child-like beings who take people away—is really just a heightening of an element already present in the realistic part of the story: the way people become lost to the communal human world through emotional isolation. Nia is lightly isolated by her “uselessness”, and then by her being drawn into friendship with Emlyn (which has been forbidden by her parents, because of that mysterious “something happened up there”), which even leads to her declaring herself a vegetarian (when her father has just started up a new life as a butcher); Emlyn is more deeply isolated by the split between his parents, his feeling that people think he should have gone with his mother, and his not knowing where his mother is; and his father Idris is isolated by his obsession with his art, which leads him to neglect his dwindling family. And the hint that Emlyn’s mother Elinor has gone to “the moon” implies she’s been taken to that white land, with its silvery-lunar landscape, but when she’s found, and the mystery of the “something that happened” in the chapel is revealed, it’s equally mundane. But as hers is the most extreme isolation, tinged with mental illness, she is the one the fairy-folk come for when they do come.

Emlyn’s Moon is also a novel about art, and though Idris Llewelyn’s absorption in his art is an isolating factor, when Nia’s collage is finally revealed (and surely it’s no spoiler to say that when it’s revealed, it’s a marvellous success, and she’s finally accepted as more than “useless”) art becomes a means of connection, and of escaping the trap of isolation.

With its mostly more realistic story that chimes in so well with the fantasy elements, I think I enjoyed Emlyn’s Moon more than The Snow Spider, and it certainly makes me intrigued to see how the series might be resolved in the final book, The Chestnut Soldier.

Like The Snow Spider, Emlyn’s Moon was adapted for TV, this time in five episodes, running from 6 September to 4 October 1990. Again, it was pretty faithful to the book, though whether the final supernatural events made any more sense on the screen than on the page, I don’t know.