1970s, page 1 of 15

Begun while Carter was still living in Japan, and first published in 1972 (after her return to the UK), The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman is Carter’s most outrightly fantastic novel, and deservedly finds a place in Moorcock & Cawthorn’s Fantasy: The 100 Best Books and David Pringle’s Modern Fantasy: The Hundred Best Novels. (It was retitled The War on Dreams in the US.)

It begins in an unnamed city in an unnamed South American country. The narrator is Desiderio (“the desired one”), writing the memoir of his young life, when he was branded a hero for his role in ending the war that Doctor Hoffman launched upon the people of that unnamed city—and upon reality itself. Hoffman’s assaults warp time, space, and reason, causing people to sprout peacock feathers, warehouses to turn into palaces, and apparitions of the dead to appear. As Desiderio writes: “in the early days of the war, life itself had become nothing but a complex labyrinth and everything that could possibly exist, did so… the city was no longer the conscious production of humanity; it had become the arbitrary realm of dream.”

The Minister for Determination (to whom Desiderio is private secretary), constitutionally resistant to unreality (he’s convinced Hoffman has released a virus “which causes a cancer of the mind, so that the cells of the imagination run wild”) attempts to counter this encroachment of dream with a series of futile measures, from the use of radar to the use of torture as a means of forcing the unreal to differentiate itself from the real. Sensing they’re losing the war, the Minister gives Desiderio a secret mission: to find and assassinate the elusive Doctor Hoffman.

Desiderio leaves the city for the town of S, where the proprietor of a travelling peepshow is rumoured to be one of Hoffman’s disciples. Thus begins a series of picaresque adventures that see our young hero living with the native river people (with whom he, having part native parentage, seamlessly blends), working with a circus, travelling with a monstrous libertine known as the Count, stranded with a tribe on the coast of Africa and, finally, dwelling amongst a community of centaurs—before finally arriving at the “Wagnerian castle” of Doctor Hoffman. Throughout, Desiderio is haunted by, and often accompanied by (in a series of disguises he always sees through) Hoffman’s beautiful daughter Albertina, with whom he has, of course, fallen in love.

Just as Heroes and Villains was about the conflict between desire and need, this novel is about the conflict between dream and reason, or desire and reality. At first it seems the Minister (“not a man but a theorem, clear, hard, unified and harmonious”, who “had never in all his life felt the slightest quiver of empirical uncertainty”) represents reality and Doctor Hoffman dream, but when we finally meet Hoffman, he is an equally unimaginative patriarch (“cold, grey, still and fathomless—not a man; the sea”, who “had examined the world by the light of the intellect alone”). Both form a type with other such controlling paternal figures (which includes Doctor Donnelly from Heroes and Villains and Uncle Philip from The Magic Toyshop—what Lorna Sage, in her Writers and their Work volume on Carter, calls “Carter’s puppet-masters”). Contemplating Hoffman, this supposed unleasher of dreams, in all his disappointing rationality, Desiderio writes: “I did not think he knew what desire was.” (And, he muses, perhaps of Carter’s work as a whole: “Were all the potential masters the world held for me to be revealed as nothing but monsters or charlatans or wraiths?”)

If these are the dark fathers, balancing maternal figures seem absent—Desiderio’s mother was a prostitute who left him to be raised by nuns, Albertina’s mother (Hoffman’s wife) is dead (though she was, at least, a poet). Rather, the presiding maternal force is even more implacable and desire-less than those two male figures: mother nature, at her most arbitrary and indifferent. When the entire circus with which Desiderio has been travelling is killed in a freak natural event, he notes that “the landslide could only be a simple assertion of the dominance of nature herself”. On the coast of Africa (later revealed to be a fantastic coast, and an emanation of the monstrous Count’s desire for self-destruction), Desiderio meets a people who represent “Man in his constitutionally vicious, instinctively evil and studiously ferocious form—in a word, in the closest possible harmony with the natural world”. Mother nature, then, is no refuge from dark puppet-master fathers.

Desire and dream come across as perhaps the only humanising elements in a world otherwise caught between the polarities of cold intellect and a starkly uncaring nature. But even then, desire in The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman is no romantic fantasy. In Carter’s hands, it’s full of casual brutality, tragedy and the darker extremes of perversity. Desiderio’s story takes him through a series of episodes, in each of which he enters a period of narrative stasis, where he lingers among a group of people and experiences their way of life. When he’s with the river-people, we get a disquisition on their beliefs and customs (outwardly placid, they prove to include cannibalism and paedophilia); we learn the histories and nature of the various people who make up the circus, some poignant (as with Madame la Barbe, whose beardedness raised her from being an ordinary girl to being “immensely handsome, widely travelled”, but, nevertheless, “the loneliest woman in the world”) others grotesque (the all-male troupe known as the Acrobats of Desire, who are capable of exchanging body parts with one another, and who gang-rape Desiderio). As far as trigger warnings go, this novel should come with a submachine gun logo on the cover.

Perhaps the most notable episode is that of the Count, a figure I can’t help feeling is based on de Sade (and Carter would go on to write a study of de Sade a few years after The Infernal Desire Machines). So incredibly self-centred he never seems to speak to anyone but himself, the Count is “a connoisseur of catastrophe”, “a blasphemous libertine, a blood-thirsty debauchee”, who claims to have “devoted my life to the humiliation and exaltation of the flesh”. Perhaps it’s characteristic of all the male “father” figures in the novel that Desiderio at one point thinks the Count might be the Minister, then later that he might be Doctor Hoffman…

The Infernal Desire Machines has been called a Surrealist novel, but I think that though Hoffman’s efforts are creating a surrealist reality, the novel doesn’t have Surrealist fiction’s lack of narrative coherence. Carter isn’t just letting “psychic automatism” (as the Surrealists have it) take over; rather, her narrative is a balance between the strange images of Surrealism and a conscious engagement with the more nebulous forces of the human condition: desire, dream, imagination, cold reason. Unlike pure Surrealism, it comes with thought applied.

Set as it is in South America, it naturally feels as though it might be called Magical Realism, but I think it’s one of those novels that absorbs so many genre labels—Gothic, Fantastica, Picaresque—without entirely belonging to any of them. (It’s tempting to read the “War on Reason” as sourced in the same media-frenzied, accelerated 1960s as Ballard addressed in The Atrocity Exhibition. But Carter isn’t presenting a dystopia, here. Hers is a world in constant conflict, though the feeling is not of warning about how things might become, it’s about how, for her, the world simply is.)

Carter is generous with her references, and has obviously absorbed a lot of imaginative literature and cinema—far more than would have been admitted in your standard English literary novel of the day: The Cabinet of Dr Caligari and Rotwang’s laboratory in Metropolis get a mention, as does Gulliver’s Travels and Freud. And there’s a distinct air of Kafka, de Sade, ETA Hoffmann and Borges too. There’s a certain Moorcock-ishness to the Law-versus-Chaos conflict between Reason and Dream/Desire, though it’s probably not down to influence. To my surprise, Lovecraft gets a direct quote (“the oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear”). And I’d even throw in the 007 films, as Hoffman’s castle, with its high-tech inner chambers, represents nothing so much as a Bond villain’s lair.

Me being me, I even suspected David Lindsay’s A Voyage to Arcturus might have been part of the mince fed into this particular sausage-machine, not just for their shared picaresque form which leads to a disillusioning/mind-opening revelation (which goes back at least to Apuleius’ The Golden Ass), but some specific details. For instance, shortly after meeting the monstrous Count, Desiderio says “His quality of being was more dense than that of any man I have ever met”, which instantly reminded me of Lindsay’s Spadevil, another larger-than-life figure met on the road whom the protagonist takes up with, and whose “body seemed to be composed of some substance heavier and denser than solid matter”. Later, Carter gives us a vision of nature at its most chaotically creative, mixing animal and plant forms: “nature had absolved her creations from an adherence to the formal divisions so biology and botany were quite overthrown and the only animals we saw… seemed more an ambulant vegetable than anything else.” Lindsay’s Matterplay (coming at a similar point in his novel) has a walking tree spontaneously forming from mid-air, before noting “Pure plants and pure animals by degrees disappeared, and their place was filled by singular creatures which seemed to partake of both characters.” Later still, Desiderio meets a hermaphrodite in Hoffman’s castle, with “a voice like a sexual ’cello”; Lindsay’s third-sex Leehallfae has an equally musical voice, “oddly suggestive of a mystical forest-horn, heard from a great distance.”

Throughout, Desiderio is led on by Hoffman’s Fah Lo Suee-like daughter—but is she like Muspel fire drawing Maskull on, or like Crystalman in one of his many deceptive forms? Their relationship is less fraught than that of Marianne and Jewel in Heroes and Villains—unless you read the messiness of that pairing as being externalised in all the horrors and brutality that surround them on their journey—but ultimately it ends as all such highly-strung desire must end: Desiderio tells us early on that Albertina is dead, and that he killed her, even as he loved her.

There is so much going on in The Infernal Desire Machines, it would be impossible to say it was trying to say one thing. It’s not saying desire is good or bad, or that reason is good or bad, rather it’s exaggerating both, and the conflict between them, and laying them out in all their messy, tangled complexity, with lashings of casual brutality, surreal imagery, and a lot of good writing. (My favourite line in the book is early on in the dream-beleaguered city, where Desiderio falls into “a sleep which had now become as aesthetically exhausting as Wagner”.)

From what I’ve read, there’s a lot more going on in The Infernal Desire Machines than I would be aware of: references to continental philosophy (are the principles of Hoffman’s philosophy to be taken as philosophy, or a satire upon such attempts to intellectualise the unintellectualisable?). At one point Albertina says: “the most monstrous aberrations are bound to flourish in soil once it has been disinfected of the imagination”, which seems the complimentary opposite of Goya’s “The sleep of reason breeds monsters.” Which is true? If both are, and the ideal is balance, then The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman is not a book about finding a balance. Although, as Albertina says, “Love is the synthesis of dream and actuality”, The Infernal Desire Machines itself pursues both to the point of breakage, leaving poor Desiderio old and alone, living with the memories of the desires of the past, plus a hot drink at bedtime. Perhaps “the time of actualised desire”, as he calls the invasion of the real by dream, was simply his youth.

Lorna Sage notes that The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman was “ignored, or treated with incomprehension and contempt, by most mainstream critics”, perhaps because the taint of the fantastic—particularly in a novel that so evidently takes a glee in its own imaginative fecundity—wasn’t generally considered acceptable at the time by the British literary establishment.

Although I am ultimately impressed, I wasn’t always engaged by the book. When the narrative slowed to examine, at length, the lives of the river-people or the brutal centaurs, I was puzzled as to what it was doing. Maybe another read might make it fit together, but for now I have to think of such moments as sparks of imagination given free reign, jewels thrown into this bag of strange riches. It’s part of this novel’s character that it contains such a cornucopia of ideas, scenes, characters, and even longueurs.

(And the jewel image reminds me of Fritz Leiber on Clark Ashton Smith, who said Smith’s tales were “Innsmouth Jewellery; like strange ornaments, the metal elaborately inlaid and fired, studded with unknown semi-precious stones, from an unknown and timeless culture.” And Leiber, oddly, is another fantasist I found contained in Carter’s capacious novel, in the image of a night-time visitor to Desiderio’s rooms—Albertina, again, in yet another guise—a being with transparent flesh, so she appears as a “miraculous bouquet of bones”. Like the ghouls of Leiber’s Llankhmar. Had Carter read Leiber, too? Or was it just that her imagination was so wild, in this novel, it lapped on all these far shores of the fantastic?)

A year or so after the Cronenberg film of Crash came out, I went into a branch of Waterstones and bought Ballard’s latest paperback, Cocaine Nights. The man behind the counter asked, with a somewhat puzzled air, what I’d made of Crash, which led me to feel I was going to have to justify this suddenly re-controversialised novel. Unused to unexpected conversations as I am, and certainly on difficult subjects, I had no idea what to say. Now, a little less than thirty years later, I thought (in l’esprit d’un très long escalier) I’d give it a go.

Crash the novel has its origins in “Crash!” the story that formed part of Ballard’s collection of condensed novels, The Atrocity Exhibition (1970). Written in 1968, “Crash!” takes the form of the sort of scientific report that Vaughan, the obsessive character from the novel, would have either written himself, or would have had a supply of xeroxed copies of, to hand out to prospective co-obsessives. It led to an April 1970 exhibition of crashed cars that Ballard arranged at the New Arts Lab, a gallery and former pharmaceutical warehouse in London whose proper name, as if this wasn’t all Ballardian/Cronenbergian enough, was the Institute for Research in Art and Technology. After that, in 1971, BBC2 broadcast a short film also called “Crash!” (at 8:30p.m. on Friday 12 February—just before the watershed), featuring Ballard driving around the sort of roads that would form the backdrop for his novel, perusing cars both new and wrecked, accompanied/haunted by a young woman played by Gabrielle Drake. (Who was best known at the time as the purple-wigged Lt. Gay Ellis in Gerry Anderson’s UFO. She was also the sister of ill-fated folk singer Nick Drake, and may have bonded a little with Ballard as she, too, was born out east—in Lahore—and lived in Burma before coming back to England as a child. She evidently made an impression, as Ballard apparently mentioned her by name in an early draft of the novel, as one of the celebrities the obsessive Vaughan was pursuing. Her name lingered in the published version as one of Vaughan’s clique.)

The novel Crash was first published in 1973, though the first draft had apparently been completed towards the end of 1970. It would become the first novel of his “urban disaster triptych”, followed by Concrete Island (1974) and High-Rise (1975), and is, perhaps, his most famous novel nowadays (depending on whether Empire of the Sun is still being read)—and certainly his most infamous.

Its first-person narrator is one James Ballard (to avoid confusion, I’m going to call him James; Ballard will refer to the author). He works at a studio in Shepperton producing TV ads; his wife Catherine works for Pan Am’s foreign tours division. The couple spend their time pursuing a series of affairs, which they talk about openly: “Before my accident,” James says, “our sexual relationship was almost totally abstracted, maintained by a series of imaginary games and perversities.” They live in an apartment near Heathrow (which Ballard refers to as London Airport, as it had been known till 1966), nestled amongst a network of conjoining carriageways, flyovers, turnoffs and roundabouts. One day, James loses control of his car and collides head-on with a married couple in another vehicle, killing the man and injuring the woman, Dr Helen Remington.

Convalescing in nearby Ashton Hospital, James encounters Dr Robert Vaughan, whom he at first assumes is a medical consultant. In fact, Vaughan is—or was—“one of the first of the new-style TV scientists”, currently pursuing with fetishistic intensity an obsessive interest in car accidents. This is no detached scientific study: Vaughan (“this hoodlum scientist”, as the novel calls him), judging by the network of scars on his face and body, has been through a fair number of collisions himself—incidents he seems to actively encourage—and has utterly invested all his energies, intellectual, creative and sexual, in the notion of the car crash as some sort of ultimate meaningful experience, with the road-death of a celebrity (his current target being Elizabeth Taylor) being, for him, the ultimate of ultimates.

Vaughan has a small coterie of followers, including the permanently concussed stunt driver Seagrave, Seagrave’s equally sozzled wife Vera, and Gabrielle, a young woman left permanently disabled by a major road accident. James and Helen soon join this group, as they get drawn in by Vaughan’s domineering obsession.

Vaughan is absolutely a Ballard type, what David Pringle, in his 1979 study Earth is the Alien Planet, has described as “these regal madmen” who make up the third in a Ballardian trinity of Lamia, Jester, and King. I tend to think of the archetype of this figure as Hathaway in Ballard’s short story “The Subliminal Man”, a combined philosopher-scientist and terrorist, with all the mad, nervous energy of Dennis Hopper at the end of Apocalypse Now!, combined with the dark certainty and purpose of Marlon Brando’s Kurtz. (In a way, all of Ballard’s novels could be read as variations on Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, being about a character who over-adapts to a new or changed environment.)

Here, though, Vaughan starts to show a somewhat different side. Hathaway in “The Subliminal Man” is eloquent about his obsession (the dominating effect of subliminal advertising on modern city-dwellers), but Vaughan, as far as I recall, never justifies or explains his fixation on the car crash. He convinces not with words, but the magnetism of his own obsession. In fact, as the novel progresses, Vaughan speaks less and less, until soon he communicates entirely through his presence and the actions he takes. Combined with his increasingly dishevelled appearance (his stained clothes, multiple minor injuries, and the fact that he basically lives in his beat-up car), he starts to feel less like a “hoodlum scientist” and more like some half-starved feral child forced to come up with his own highly individual response to what can only have been a traumatic entry into adolescence. Described as “a strange mixture of personal hauntedness, complete confinement in his own panicky universe, and yet at the same time open to all kinds of experiences from the outer world”, he feels, in fact, rather like the young Jim of Empire of the Sun, but with a (troubled, and fatally warped) adult sexuality. And swapping occupied 1940s Shanghai for the roads, car parks, and hospitals around 1970s Heathrow has made no difference: both, in the eyes of these Ballardian characters, are post-traumatic landscapes, heading towards some transcendent apocalypse indistinguishable from death. (Jim in Empire of the Sun is ultimately freed from the Japanese POW camps by the dropping of the atom bomb; this novel’s hinted “autogeddon” blurs woozily between a world-wide motorway pile-up and some sort of LSD-fuelled ascension into the skies.)

(There’s an element of Ballard’s best friend, the real-life TV scientist Christopher Evans, in Vaughan, as Ballard writes in Miracles of Life: “In appearance he resembled Vaughan, the auto-destructive hero of my novel Crash, though he himself was nothing like that deranged figure.” At one point, Ballard’s exhibition of crashed cars was going to be more of a performance, which Evans was going to narrate—somewhat as Vaughan does in the novel. As well as being a prophet of the microcomputer revolution—in the late 1970s he predicted our lives would be transformed by wristwatch communicators—Evans was also the scientific advisor for The Tomorrow People.)

To me, Crash makes best sense when viewed as an essential next step in the overall movement of Ballard’s oeuvre at the time, a deepening exploration of the theme of modern-life-as-post-traumatic-daze, initially put forward in The Atrocity Exhibition. Ballard at that time pointed out that his fiction was often about isolated individuals, and the car is a particularly potent symbol of modern isolation. People shield themselves in the steel and fibre-glass shells of their vehicles, insulating themselves from the thousands of others they pass on roads and motorways as they head about their daily lives. (Early on, James uses his car’s safety features as a form of distancing from the secretary he’s been having an affair with: “the safety belt I had deliberately fastened to save her the embarrassment of embracing me”.) Within such isolating units, specifically designed to encase and protect, the only way for people to interact as warm, living beings is through collisions violent enough to crack these all-enclosing carapaces. The alternative is to invite someone into your car, but in Crash, at least, driving together is only done in search of sex or car crashes, or some combination of both.

There’s a feeling, in the novel, of modern life being so divorced from authentic experience that it’s only in the extremes—the car crash—that the characters reawaken to what it means to be alive. James’s head-on collision becomes “the only real experience I had been through for years”, which to me recalls Bessel van der Kolk on the suddenly reduced range of meaningful experience suffered in PTSD:

“Somehow the very event that caused them so much pain had also become their sole source of meaning. They felt fully alive only when they were revisiting their traumatic past.”

Another van der Kolk quote—“traumatized people have a tendency to superimpose their trauma on everything around them and have trouble deciphering whatever is going on around them”—feels like it comes through in Ballard’s novel in the moments immediately after James’s crash: “the narrow angle between the bonnet and fenders seemed to my exhausted mind to be repeated in everything around me”, as though the world had shattered into a million fragments of reflective glass.

Vaughan, James, Helen and the others have all had their range of meaningful experience reduced to the ultra-narrow window of the car crash and nothing but the car crash, into which they funnel the entirety of their emotional and physical energies. Squeezed as they are by such a tiny aperture, everything becomes an undistinguished super-heated jumble (“hostility and affection, emotions which had become interchangeable”) instantly drained of all meaning (encounters between human beings—sexual or violent—become “conceptualised acts abstracted from all feeling”).

In Earth is the Alien Planet, David Pringle identifies two of Ballard’s key themes as imprisonment and flight, and, in a way, the car is the perfect combination of the two. Cars are (like Hawkwind’s “Orgone Accumulator”) social isolators, moveable protective boxes, but their speed and smooth movement gives them a hopeful hint of dream-like flight. And towards the end of the novel, James has visions of the many automobiles around London Airport yearning to take to the skies from the flyovers and feeder roads, as though the novel were about to move into some Unlimited Dream Company-style transformation of magical flight.

For me, the essence of Crash isn’t in its story, but its prose, which is absolutely where its roots in Ballard’s Atrocity Exhibition-era fiction show. Encounters between characters are described with a remorseless medical precision, with sex scenes reading more like instructions for assembling some particularly challenging piece of flat-pack furniture, and Ballard’s well-bred dialogue is never used to better (affectless) effect, as it leaches the emotion from all human exchanges. Nevertheless, there are moments of pure Ballardian poetry, as in this transcendent description of a traffic jam:

“The enormous energy of the twentieth century, enough to drive the planet into a new orbit around a happier star, was being expended to maintain this immense motionless pause.”

It’s for this reason I find it so difficult to process David Cronenberg’s film version of Crash, which came out in 1996. There are only hints of the filmic equivalent (obsessive close-ups of car parts) of Ballard’s prose. And as soon as you put Ballard’s dialogue into the mouths of good actors, they can’t help but add more emotion than it should have. (Which is perhaps why James Spader and Deborah Kara Unger, as James Ballard and his wife Catherine, speak so quietly, as though to deaden as much of their humanity as they can. It doesn’t quite work, for me. The adaptation needs crash test dummies, not actors.) The characters who do work, in the film, are the ones who were most defined in the novel by their physical presence: Vaughan, and the disabled Gabrielle (whose mix of human flesh and straps, supports and buckles pushes her the most into Cronenbergian “new flesh” territory).

I’m sure the film works better when viewed purely as part of Cronenberg’s oeuvre, though I see it too much as an adjunct to Ballard’s to do that. (Perhaps a run-up of other Cronenberg films might help.) I have no idea how people who are into neither Ballard nor Cronenberg processed the film, though that may be demonstrated by the controversy around its release back in 1996. (Neither the novel nor the film are as extreme as earlier works from these two creators.)

I don’t know if Crash is the first novel to read if you’re thinking of getting into Ballard’s writings, but perhaps that’s just because I approached it by way of the early environmental disaster novels and short stories. Who knows, an in-at-the-deep-end approach (to this drained concrete swimming pool) might produce different results.

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.