1970s, page 11 of 15

Tia and Rabbit are a little bit different from the other children at the Base, a primitive hunting and farming culture lorded over by the Major and the other Fathers (any man who sires a child is admitted to the upper ranks), who worship the relics of the ancient past, chief among which is a missile in a silo under their “church”. It’s an utterly repressive society, and a life of endless toil and constant fear of punishment for any transgression against the Major’s whims. Tia, though still a child, is taller than most of the other women and men at the base, though she gets breathless more easily; Rabbit, a younger boy, stammers. The two have shared a connection ever since Rabbit fell down a hole in the woods outside the Base’s grounds, and Tia, somehow hearing his cries for help, knew exactly where to find him. Ever since, she’s been branded a witch by the superstitious-minded people of the Base.

And, it turns out, she sort of is. She and Rabbit share dreams in which they talk to Ashira and Varas, a man and woman living in a far different community called Morrow. The Morrowans are telepathic, and survived the ecological “Destruction” of the past (which began with the “Death of the Seas”, during which 93% of all living creatures died of suffocation) thanks to the foresight of Simon Asher Morrow, who created a subterranean complex into which he and his chosen few could retreat while the Earth recovered. Tia and Rabbit can communicate with Ashira and Varas because they too are telepathic, and when Rabbit’s nascent mind-powers result in him killing one of the more abusive Fathers in Tia’s defence, the two children flee the Base and, guided by Ashira and Varas but pursued by the Major and a handful of hunters, make their way down a hundred miles of river to meet the Morrowans on the coast of what was, many years ago, San Francisco.

(The writing really comes alive, I think, when the children encounter things on this journey they at first can’t understand — a ruined and overgrown city, for instance, or the sea, whose strange, distant noise and smell puzzle them at first.)

Helen Mary Hoover’s Children of Morrow was first published in 1973, and has much the same scenario as John Wyndham’s The Chrysalids, though the emphasis is less on that book’s struggle to keep its child protagonists’ telepathic powers secret, and more on the post-discovery chase and rescue. Unlike Wyndham, though, Hoover returned to the world she’d created with Treasures of Morrow (1976), a book that starts right where Children of Morrow ends, meaning the two can be read quite satisfyingly as a single story.

In Treasures of Morrow we get to see Tia and Rabbit’s journey to Morrow and their assimilation into a culture completely alien to them because of its technological advancement and its capacity for kindness. After this, Tia, Rabbit, Ashira, Varas and some other Morrowans go on an expedition back to the Base, and Tia and Rabbit get to look at the grim, unforgiving and brutal culture in which they were raised with fresh eyes:

“Did I ever look like that?” Tia wondered as she stared at them. At this distance, in their still pose, the women’s faces were blurs, one indistinguishable from the other. All had the same wild, tangled hair. All wore the same sacklike brown leather dress. Their feet and arms were bare and muddy. But it wasn’t their bedraggledness that bothered her so much as their hangdog air of subjugation. She had not been so aware of it before, and seeing it now, and remembering, disturbed her.

Although there’s less plot and less urgency to Treasures of Morrow (there’s still a tense, action-filled ending, but it feels a little less desperate than the first book’s, thanks to the comforting presence of the technologically-advanced and cool-thinking Morrowans), to me the second book feels a bit more emotionally satisfying. Revisiting their abusive childhood world, Tia and Rabbit get to see it for the sad, demeaning tragedy it is. They can even feel pity for their abusers, seeing many of them as doing the best they could in pitiless circumstances, or simply acting out of unthinking ignorance. Ultimately, they have to turn their back on the Base, but seeing it again, now they know a better alternative, allows them to properly leave it in the past.

Although it might sound like Morrow and the Base are being presented as moral opposites, Hoover makes it clear that Morrow isn’t entirely a utopia. It was founded by one of the very industrialists whose greed caused the ecological Destruction in the first place, and who did so out of the desire for personal survival rather than an ideological investment in humanity’s future. And a potted history of Morrow in the aftermath of that mass extinction makes it clear how close it came to falling apart, with a slow deterioration of its power structures, and the enforced inbreeding of its limited population. A contamination of its main protein supply led to a chance evolutionary leap, killing some, but resulting in a few children being born with telepathic powers, after which a strict programme (still adhered to) of controlled breeding led to their present state of all being telepaths. There’s still a hint, in Treasures of Morrow, that Morrow is in danger of cultural sterility, due to there being no other equivalent civilisations to interact with:

“I mean, we’re smarter than any of the old civilisations. But there’s no one else to care what we are—or do. For example, my sister, Elizabeth, says the neutron star in the Crab Nebula is winking out. Once that news would have excited astronomers all over the world. Now it excited about six people.”

It would be interesting to read a third book on how Morrow deals with this situation — something Tia and Rabbit, raised in a different culture, might have a vital perspective on. It also seemed, in Treasures of Morrow, that one of the Morrowans, Senior Geneticist Elaine, was being set up to act as a Morrowan villain, with her coldly scientific attitude towards the people of the Base, and her disapproval of Tia and Rabbit. She accompanies the expedition to the Base, but pretty much fades from the narrative, except to make the occasional offensive comment, but I felt she had the potential to underline the sort of extreme Morrow might go to, if it ever lost touch with its humanity.

There’s also the question of Tia and Rabbit’s origins. In Children of Morrow, we learn they’re the result of an unauthorised experiment in artificial insemination by a Morrowan who happened on the Base, though even the Morrowans who discover the diary describing this incident agree it sounds unlikely. It sounds as though the Morrowans have a dark side to their nature they’re perhaps not confronting. So, plenty of potential for a third book, but as it is, the two we have feel complete, so far as telling of Tia and Rabbit’s escape from an unpleasant childhood goes.

I bought the first book because of the UK edition’s Michael Heslop cover. Treasures of Morrow doesn’t seem to have been published in the UK in paperback, so perhaps the first wasn’t as successful over here as the publishers were hoping. They’re both now available for Kindle.

The narrator of Anna Mackmin’s debut novel is a 12-year-old girl growing up at Swallow’s Farmhouse, a hippie commune in early-70s Norfolk, where she lives with her mother (Beth, an agoraphobic potter), Anthony (her father, a poet), Star (her younger sister, who at the start of the novel has been electively mute for some time, and has the habit of pulling out her hair), along with a small handful of fellow seekers after an alternative lifestyle, plus a dog, a goat, a cat called Great Uncle Elizabeth (a detail surely crying out for an explanation), and several chickens.

I call her the narrator, though at first glance the book appears to be written in the second person. But its use of “you” isn’t a literary device to involve you, the reader, a little bit more in the action, it’s the narrator’s way of telling her story to herself, addressing herself directly (as you do), which soon comes to feel more natural than the “I” of most first person narratives. It’s that little bit more intimate, as though this is a genuinely private interior monologue. (The narrator does have a name, but as this is only revealed about 300 pages into a 328 page book, it feels wrong to give it away in a review. It gains a certain comic punch by being delayed. In this Guardian interview with Mackmin, the narrator is referred to as “Nearly Thirteen”, which is a name used for her in the book, but only by one of her fellow commune-dwellers, and as he uses it with a distinctly lecherous slant, it really seems wrong to call her by it.)

The book has a couple of other stylistic quirks. Speech gets no “he said, she said”, but has the speaker’s name after what they’ve said. As in:

“These are my kids.” Mummy…
“They come through you, they are not of you.” Laura.

Which again quickly feels natural, though it did leave me hunting ahead, with the longer passages of speech, to find who was speaking before I read what they said. Also, double quotes are used for speech in the present, single quotes for remembered speech, which was quite a good device once I’d spotted it, as it allowed things people had said in the past to be interpolated as a commentary on what was happening in the present.

But back to the farm. Swallow’s is, despite being an idealistic experiment in alternative living, somewhat less than a utopia. House meetings quickly descend into petty squabbles, and usually end with someone bursting into tears (something the narrator occasionally makes herself do, just to get a meeting over with). It soon becomes apparent there’s not such an obvious dividing line between the quest for a more natural way of living (they don’t eat processed foods at Swallow’s Farmhouse, they “don’t believe in telly”, and they don’t believe in shoes, either) in which people can find themselves and live free of the shackles of conventionality, and the use of vague and un-thought-through ideals as an excuse for simply being self-centred. The perfect illustration of this is the way the adults deal with food — food being important in the novel, whose narrative is peppered with little recipes. Presented with a multi-course meal — with all the dishes laid out at once, as bringing them out in ordered stages would infringe people’s right to choose for themselves how they eat — the adults scoff the sweet stuff, grabbing as much for themselves as they can. And it’s the kids — the narrator and her sister — who do the cooking.

If Swallow’s Farmhouse is a topsy-turvy place for adults, its even more so for the children, who are pretty much expected to be adults, “old souls” in young bodies, though they’re excluded from some things, such as poetry readings, and are often fobbed off with excuses like “adults are complex and have complex needs and you will understand fully when you’re an adult”. These are the sort of people who believe you aren’t supposed to trust anyone over thirty, but it’s also clear they haven’t much patience for those who are younger than themselves, either. This is an environment with a childish idealisation of the innocent state of youth that doesn’t want to bother with the sometimes difficult innocence of children:

“What it boils down to is this: kids need to get a move on and grow up lickety spit and adults need to screech to a halt… Young is the thing.”

“My daughters are more like sisters,” Beth, the mother, says at one point, but the actual pair of sisters are the only ones really taking care of each other. It’s their relationship that’s at the core of the novel, though its power comes through largely in how little is said about it. The girls are always communicating with little looks and glances; they have their shared, private rituals; when Star remains mute, the narrator knows what she wants to say and says it for her; and some of the most poignant moments are when one has something the other hasn’t — a friendship, for instance — and there’s an obvious conflict between wanting them to have it and feeling separated from them by not being able to share in it.

On the one hand, Devoured is a comic novel, satirical of these supposedly idealistic adults’ utter failure to see their own hypocrisy, but it’s powered by genuine, deep emotion, and a real sense of danger. The lightest moments come when the narrator and Star are joined, briefly, by two boys from a nearby commune. A letter has arrived saying that an inspector will be coming to check on the children’s education, so the two communes team up to put on a show as “the Rainbow School”. It’s as disastrous as everything else the adults do, but the interaction between the children is wonderful, particularly as the narrator and thirteen-year old Orion fence their way towards a spiky friendship, neither wanting to admit how little they know about the real world, while trying to gain what insight they can from the gaps their communes’ slightly different ideals have left. (Orion’s parents, for instance, do believe in telly, leading to some light comedy when the narrator has no idea what Blue Peter, or who Valerie Singleton, is. They also, much to the narrator’s delight, believe in shoes.)

And that sense of danger. It centres on Bryan, the commune-dweller who calls the narrator “Nearly Thirteen”. The narrator, thinking she knows all about the adult world because nobody’s told her otherwise, doesn’t realise the danger she’s in when she flirts, experimentally, with him, or even what the danger properly is. And he, unsure of the rules in this more open, do-it-as-you-feel-it world, is obviously not sure, at first, of the damage he’s willing to do. But you know from the book’s title, and how the adults — particularly Bryan — gobble up anything sweet, what’s going to happen there.

The narrator’s determination to be herself in often difficult circumstances reminds me somewhat of Morwenna in Jo Walton’s Among Others — though that book is entirely about the immediate aftermath of escaping a damaging upbringing — which I reviewed a while back. Ultimately, Devoured is the tale of a survivor, and an excellent read.

After A Castle of Bone, Penelope Farmer’s next novel was Year King (1977), and, in keeping with its protagonist’s age (eighteen), is more an adult than a YA novel, certainly compared to the not-yet-teens of that earlier book. Nevertheless, it’s about a stage of growing up: the struggle to leave home and break free of family ideas about who you are, and so to properly find yourself on the road to adulthood.

At the centre of the novel are Lan and Lew, twins of quite different characters:

“Lew playing rugger and excelling at work, Lan developing a reputation for being mildly way out… playing the guitar a little, having professedly anarchic friends, his hair over his shoulders…”

Lew is away at Cambridge, Lan is struggling with history studies at a local university while living in the basement at home. Although this gives him a certain amount of autonomy (the basement has its own front door, and its own kitchen), he’s nevertheless finding his mother’s presence too much. A lifetime of casually belittling judgements have left him ultra-sensitive to her moods (which Lew, who could play their mother like a harp, pretty much protected him from, before), and one day he takes her car and drives to a cottage the family own in Somerset, and starts spending as much time there as he can.

Although it takes him a while to adjust, Lan comes to love the rural community more and more:

“I am an alien, Lan thought. And then: but I love it. I must be stark raving mad. I love it all.”

He decides to give up his studies and gets work on a local farm. His long hair (the local men refer to him as “her”, though mostly joshingly) sets him apart from the community, but he starts to find himself accepted — with exceptions. One in particular being a middle-aged man, Arthur, for whom Lan feels “a strange, ancient antagonism”.

There are subtle mythic forces at play. One is to do with the land itself. Lan looks at its hills and dales, and though they’re overwritten by the “male lines” of hedgerows, feels, “underlying all of it, meet, receptive, yet in its own way just as strong, refusing to be eclipsed, the soft, lush, swelling shape of the countryside itself; like a woman laid widely…” And when he meets a young American woman of his own age, Novanna, staying with her aunt at a nearby farm, he takes the difficult first steps in building a relationship with her, though he has none of his brother’s ease with women.

Lan’s troubled relationship with his twin is another thing. His resentment of a lifetime of being compared to his (always more capable) twin has left him unsure of where the boundaries between the two of them lie. Now, suddenly, he finds himself at times literally slipping into his twin brother’s body:

“The outside, the crust, was wholly Lew, controlling Lew’s nerves and Lew’s responses; yet right at the centre lay this inappropriate kernel, this little hard obstinate nut which was Lan’s mind, Lan’s thinking.”

The valley isn’t a refuge from his family — no distance could be, because he carries its influence too much within him. Nor is his relationship with Novanna, which also has its troubles. Lew visits on his scooter, and instantly and easily chats Novanna up, and is the first to take her to bed. Lan’s mother asks him back, wants to know what’s happening with him and his studies, asks who’s going to pay the bills at the cottage, insists on having the use of her car. (There’s a younger sister, too, Bronnie, who comes to visit — an island of un-trouble amidst the rest.)

Year King has an air of other books I’ve reviewed from the same era. The way Lan slips into Lew’s consciousness without any warning recalls, for me, the way Donald in William Mayne’s A Game of Dark slips between worlds mid-sentence; the fact that Lan is experiencing what it’s like to exist in the body of a more sportily capable, masculine male makes me think of William Rayner’s Stag Boy; but there’s also Alan Garner’s The Owl Service, and Year King’s suggestions of ancient mythical patterns being played out in modern times.

Lan and Lew, for instance, are named after twins from Welsh mythology (Dylan and Lewis, or Lleu Llaw Gyffes — who has his part in the Blodeuwedd story Garner uses). More important, though, is Lan’s relationship with the land — his becoming, in a way, the “Year King”, as described in Frazer’s The Golden Bough, “the incarnation of a dying and reviving god, a solar deity who underwent a mystic marriage to a goddess of the Earth.” (from The Golden Bough Wikipedia page.)

As the year waxes into summer, Lan wins Novanna, and his place in the valley, from both his rivals (Lew, and Arthur, who I take to be, perhaps, the existing valley “Year King”, as he’s a local authority on farming matters), and everything seems to be going well as he works on the land. Then, as the summer changes back to winter, his fortunes wane. His sense of who he is — his resistance to that flickering into Lew’s body — was strong in the summer, but now he flips into Lew’s body more and more as the year approaches its end. When his brother comes down for an end-of-year visit, Lan is convinced the two must fight some sort of duel for psychological survival in a family whose boundaries aren’t at all healthily defined. As Novanna says:

“You’re all hooked up, you know, all of you, still. I’ve never known anything like your family. Like junkies, all of you.”

The mythic references in Year King are more understated than in Garner’s book, though it’s true they nevertheless represent a very real danger Lan could fall into, particularly at the end, in his final confrontation with Lew, that takes place “literally in the bowels of mother earth (and symbolically in utero)” (as a contemporary Kirkus Reviews review has it).

It’s far less tense and intense than The Owl Service, more lyrical and slower-paced — something fitting the 1970s ideal of taking a rural retreat in order to find yourself. (It feels, to me, very much in line with the folk-rock 70s that Rob Young covers in Electric Eden.) But also it’s timeless, in its tale of a young man’s struggle to find himself against the pressure of subtle, but nevertheless psychologically constricting familial patterns. Farmer is excellent at representing those subtle tensions without ever having to blow them up into major dramatic scenes (it could, after all, be the very lack of confrontations between the characters that cause them so much trouble). And the fantasy element — Lan slipping into Lew’s identity — is handled with just as much subtlety. It’s never central to the book, but is nevertheless essential.