1970s, page 1 of 15

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.

The last book in Jane Gaskell’s Atlan Saga was published in 1977, either prompted by or coinciding with a reissue of the previous novels that same year. Part of what led to my reading this last book in this series (which, for me, has been increasingly discouraging, and often powered wholly by my difficulty in abandoning something I’ve started), was the thought that, after a gap of a few years, Gaskell might have returned to Atlan with a fresh approach—something that was backed up by knowing this book was narrated not by Cija, but her daughter, Seka. And, early on, Seka (after reading her mother’s capacious but seemingly unloseable diary) in effect reviews the previous novels, calling Cija “a natural observer of life unless forced to be a protagonist, and a coward too”—so, passive, which I’d agree with, though I don’t think of her as cowardly—and concluding that “my cautious, sensible mother was an extremely silly lady”. I was hopeful, then, that Seka might be different.

Aside from the change in narrator (who, I have to say, writes exactly like Cija, so not much change there), there were a few notable differences. Gaskell allows herself more sexually explicit language, though most of it occurs in the first few pages, as though she soon tired of the novelty. Also, she has at last discovered names: we get Soursere, Quar, Ilxtrith, and Quantumex. But not all the time. One key character is referred to as “Beautiful” before being renamed “the Saint”.

But soon enough, it was clear not much had changed. For a start, Seka is a child and tied to her mother—so when Cija gets kidnapped, as she inevitably does (several times), Seka gets kidnapped with her. What’s more, Seka lost her voice in a previous book, so can’t play much of an active role in terms of asking questions, telling people things, etc. She doesn’t even show much initiative in terms of making herself known without the use of her voice. By the time Cija and Seka found themselves part of the Dragon General Zerd’s army train, heading north for another conquest, I began to feel that I might as well be re-reading the first novel. I have to admit I started skim-reading pretty early on, and only finished this novel because I looked up some reviews and criticism and found a few people saying this was the best book of the series (it may be, I had ceased to be able to tell) and that it had a visionary ending.

It did have a more fantastic ending, with Cija, Seka & co. being taken, at last, to Ancient Atlan, which seems to resemble, much more, the faerie-like strangeness of Gaskell’s first novel, the genuinely unique Strange Evil. But we’re only there for a short space, not long enough for things to develop, and for a lot of it the Atlantean Juzd is telling Cija what the deeper spiritual meaning of all her adventures has been. At this point, I tried breaking out of skim-reading mode, but whenever I did, I just couldn’t bring myself to read more than a few sentences. I’d ceased to care about any of the characters, let alone the supposed meaning of their adventures, and was just reading to see how things ended.

But, every so often, Gaskell would throw in an idea you just couldn’t find anywhere else. For instance, as the characters are passing through a funeral chamber, they see a snake, and one of the mourners says that this is the dead man’s “self-regard”, which we all have, in serpent form, wrapped around the base of our spine. It was a moment where the strangeness of this world Gaskell had created seemed to come alive, but it was never mentioned again, and the possibility of a world being created in which such a belief fitted was lost.

Throughout the series, there’s never been an overall sense of direction. Each novel is just a loose bag of episodes, each episode a loose bag of events. There are moments of interest, occasional striking ideas, but just too much drudgery overall, and certainly no sense of a mythic underlying structure, or a coherently created world.

Another thing that has driven my reading of the series has been looking at how it was received in its day, as prior to this instalment the series was coming out in the days before otherworld fantasy was a commercial genre, or even much of an uncommercial one. The initial books were, then, reviewed in the mainstream press (particularly as Gaskell was also writing non-fantasy books at the same time). But with Some Summer Lands, that’s no longer the case. Fantasy was—had just become—a commercial genre, and so perhaps was now considered beneath the dignity of mainstream reviewers. I’ve only been able to find one newspaper review. Michael Unger, writing in the Liverpool Daily Post (3 September 1977), said:

“Miss Gaskell’s writings have been compared with Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, so that, plus the fact that she was once a child prodigy with her first book written when she was 14, led me to believe that she must be a formidable writer. Sadly, therefore, I have to report that the book was hugely disappointing. The only connection between Miss Gaskell and Tolkien is that both invented their own fantasy world. Miss Gaskell’s was introduced to us in her Atlantis trilogy, and her latest offering is again set in this imaginary continent. But it is really escapist writing of a style similar to many a science fiction writer.”

Ultimately, the view I most chime with seems to be John Grant’s, from the St James Guide to Fantasy Writers (1996). After calling Some Summer Lands “this fascinatingly bad book”, he goes on to say “Yet there are also sections in which Gaskell seems at last to have become interested in her Atlantean epic” — which makes me realise how one of the things I’ve felt throughout is to wonder why Gaskell was writing this, when she didn’t seem interested in it, except at brief moments.

Oddly, I feel as though I could still read something by Gaskell—her vampire novel, Shiny Narrow Grin, sounds interesting. But, having been aware of the series since my epic-fantasy-reading days began in the 80s, I have to admit it’s just so unlike I expected it to be. I was at least hoping to encounter something with the originality of pre-genre fantasy, combined with the growing air of imaginative and individual freedoms created by the 1960s social revolutions; but the result has been, if anything, more the dreariness of the kitchen sink 60s than the wild imagination of the psychedelic 60s, and dreariness is not what I come to fantasy for.

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.