1970s, page 2 of 15

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Some more 1970s YA, though this is more pre-teen than YA. The Conjuror’s Box was first published in 1974, with a Children’s Book Club edition the following year, and a paperback in 1977.

Martin and Lucy Lovell, both under 13, are spending the last days of the Easter holidays with their Great Aunt Bea when they meet Snowy, a somewhat sarcastic talking cat who has been cursed to spend most of his time as the ornamental handle of a small jug. The one who cursed him is known as the Green Lady, who was herself originally an inanimate object, the statuette of a goddess bought by the Lovell’s great-great-great-grandfather, a sea captain who disappeared, was thought drowned, then reappeared many years later looking not a day older, before disappearing once again. Inanimate objects, in this world, aren’t really inanimate at all, as Snowy explains:

“Things are like electric batteries you see… only instead of storing electricity, they store life, imagination, enjoyment… The Things in Captain Lovell’s house were particularly lively, because he had three energetic and imaginative children.”

Snowy’s own story, for instance, involves a dish and a spoon who walked off on their own accord. (And, yes, a jumping cow, and a fiddler. It’s all been passed on, in debased form, as the nursery rhyme “Hey Diddle Diddle”.) The Green Lady, meanwhile, gains her power by being the last remaining idol of a once-powerful goddess, who “held the seasons in her hands, the increase of herds and the opening of harvests.” Now forgotten, she seeks her revenge on humanity — if they won’t give her their power through worship, she’ll take it in her own way:

“If she could surround humans with lifeless, mechanical Things, she would draw off the power of their imaginations like water from a tap.”

The children return home, and learn that their neighbour, a young potter called Sarah Peach, also knows Snowy, and had various magical adventures with him as a child which she only vaguely remembers. Snowy asks her to locate her godfather, currently known as William Schwartz, but more generally known as the Fiddler. He and Snowy, it turns out, are two of the “Old Ones”, one being the Keeper of the Water Gate, the other of the Earth Gate — these Gates being doorways from this world into another. The Green Lady needs to get into that other world to gain two objects of power, a spear and a cauldron (and the fact these are referred to as “the Tokens” shows how thin a lot of the plot-reasoning is — their significance and power is never really explained beyond their sounding familiar from myth and legend, they’re just plot tokens).

In order to gain access to this other world, the Green Lady is seeking the Conjuror’s Box, an old prop from a stage-magician’s act that also happens to have genuine magical power (though only in certain places and at certain times). The box is currently owned by the descendent of that stage-magician, Henry Partridge, a young man whose passion in life is building small working models of steam trains. This, at first, is a worry, because the Green Lady has an affinity with machines, and it’s thought she might easily win influence with Henry, but two things stand in the way of that. One is that he obviously fancies Sarah Peach, the other, as explained by Snowy is:

“Look at the machines he likes — straight out of a time when people loved their machinery and treated their engines like people. The Lady’s idea is to have people treated like machines.”

It’s an enjoyable romp of a book that makes up for any thinness in reasoning or plot (those plot tokens) by sheer rush of new ideas and events. That idea about “Things being like electric batteries” and having a life of their own sounds, at first, like the set up for a novel about the hidden life of inanimate objects, but it’s pretty much dropped almost as soon as it’s out, because there are too many other things bursting to happen: a mysterious toy-maker who tries to steal the box and, when foiled, opens his umbrella and flies off into the sky, after which he’s never met or mentioned again; a rocking horse (called Horse) who, it turns out, can not only move but fly; a pair of large, striped, talking mice who have spent their life studying the precise mathematics of the interaction between the two worlds; a film company that’s clearly a front for the Green Lady, who set up to film in the local village; a journey by hot air balloon; owls who watch the children’s house by night… So many things pop up quickly, making sense enough in the onrush of events, then disappear before you’ve had time to realise how any one of these might make the basis for its own novel, but here’s it’s just a chapter. We hardly get to meet the Green Lady at all, but it doesn’t seem to matter, as the main purpose of The Conjuror’s Box is the conjuring of a world behind the ordinary, full of hidden magic, wonder, and adventure. (A final tying-up of the “Hey Diddle Diddle” connection at the start, though, implies there may have been some planning behind the book: the dish that ran away with the spoon, the cauldron and the spear…)

The Conjuror’s Box shares a certain amount in common with Penelope Lively’s The Whispering Knights: one has a witch, the other a Green Lady, both being dark archaic powers from the past seeking to wreak havoc in the modern age, who ally themselves with machinery (the witch in The Whispering Knights marries a factory-owner). As I’ve said before, it seems to be a theme of British 1970s YA fantasies that their teen/child protagonists are caught between the dark superstitions and supernatural powers of the past and the more oppressive forces of encroaching modernity. (The Changes, and the trilogy of books it came from, being a key example.) The Conjuror’s Box isn’t at all a serious take on the theme, but shows how ubiquitous it was.

I only found two brief reviews of the book. One from The Times Literary Supplement (6 December 1974), by Sarah Hayes, who clearly hated it:

“Ann Lawrence’s first two books for children were stylish off-beat tales with a timeless quality that set them in the Farjeon and Thurber class. The load of old-fashioned junk piled into The Conjuror’s Box cannot quite smother Miss Lawrence’s humour and originality, but it is odd that a writer formerly so dependent on restraint should have shown so little here.”

One person’s “old fashioned junk” is another’s emporium of wonders, and I can’t help feeling Hayes was being a little harsh. The other take is from Valerie Brinkley-Willsher in Twentieth-Century Children’s Writers:

“The Conjuror’s Box is an enjoyable fantasy with a dramatic climax and some thoughts about the nature of time, but neither characters nor plot has the originality of her other fantasies.”

Ann Lawrence (1942–1987) seems to have mostly gravitated towards historical fantasy fiction for children. One of her later books from 1980, Hawk of May, about Sir Gawain, sounds interesting, but seems not to have made it beyond its initial hardback, perhaps because another book called Hawk of May, also about Sir Gawain, which came out the same year, by US author Gillian Bradshaw, seems to have been more successful.

This is Fair’s second novel for pre-teens/young adults, published in 1976. It has a number of similarities with her previous book, The Ivory Anvil, in that it combines a light touch of fantasy with a gentle tale about children exploring a landscape. Here, there’s a bit more of a threat to the landscape—though, again, a light one—and like the previous book there’s a mystery from the past to be solved.

The landscape in this case is the area surrounding a canal in rural Derbyshire. The Atkins family have just moved into Bickley Mill, a disused water mill in need of renovation. (Their father, a teacher, tells them it’s going to take two years to get it into the state he wants it in, including completely replacing the plumbing and installing an interior staircase, as at present the only way to get to the bedrooms is via outside steps. 1970s dad that he is, he intends to do all this work himself, with a little help from his kids.) In their spare time, the kids, twins Rachael and Rowan, explore the canal, and get to know Mr Benson, whose job it is to care for it. Like the mill, the canal is basically disused, and Benson is battling to keep it going, as he knows certain local forces—farmers and factory-owners—would rather it was closed for good. People dump rubbish in it, and others engage in outright vandalism. Unlike similar books such as The Grey Dancer and The Walking Stones, the threat to the canal isn’t a threat to a whole rural way of life, then. Rather, it’s an interesting piece of the past, one that adds charm to the landscape, and provides a habitat for local wildlife, including kingfishers, ducks, moorhens, swans, frogs, water voles, pike, carp, tench, roach and woodpeckers. Part of the appeal of the The Penny Tin Whistler is being allowed to dwell in this country environment with the kids as they explore it. (There’s even a map, spread out over three pages at the start of the book. It seems to have been cut off, though, and there was presumably meant to be more of it. I suspect the author, who was an artist and I’m guessing is the one who drew it, wanted it to be a fold-out. I certainly wanted it to be a fold-out.)

The fantasy aspect is, as with Sioned in The Ivory Anvil, a sort of enhanced sensitivity to people and to the past. Twins Rachael and Rowan have a telepathic bond: they’re always aware of where one another is, and though they can share thoughts, they’ve agreed not to be too intrusive. It also turns out, though, that they can pick up lingering memories from the past. It’s nicely done, as when Rachael finds an out-of-the-way nook under the ivy and finds herself thinking:

Me. Dressed in green,
Cat’s cradle,
Hairy string,
Knotted, beneath the ivy.

Only, she knows the “Me” isn’t herself. She’s picking up someone else’s memories. Rowan, meanwhile, gets impressions in his dreams. After some investigation, they discover that a pair of young twins like themselves used to live at the Mill, but were separated when they were evacuated during the War, after which their grandfather, who lived at the Mill and was their only family, died, meaning they never returned. (One slight niggle: why were they evacuated from such a rural spot?) Rachael and Rowan realise that these twins, being younger than themselves, and whom they know never returned, might never have been able to find one another after that separation, and perhaps that’s why they’re picking up these memories. (The title of the novel comes from what Rachael and Rowan call one of these twins for a while, as Rachael senses her, at one point, playing a penny tin whistle.)

As with The Ivory Anvil, the investigation is dotted throughout the daily life of the twins as they go to school, help with the house, and explore the canal. But the quiet pace of the story never feels boring. The only complaint I have about the book, plot-wise, is it leaves its resolution so late that some points aren’t fully resolved. One of these is that, in order to fully access his dreams and learn where the lost boy-twin might be, Rowan has to mentally detach from the telepathic bond he’s shared with his sister since birth. This is a scary moment for him, and he wakes the next morning to find himself without it for the first time—in part, though, appreciating the sense of individuality and privacy that comes with it. But is it permanent? I’m supposing it is, but I felt there had to be at least one revisit, one exchange between the pair about the loss of their deeper connection, or something like that, just to resolve the issue. (The other main plot point that doesn’t get resolved is that, although the lost twins are located, we never get to see them, or know they’ve got together again. Perhaps that might have proved too emotionally weighty a scene compared to the rest of the book, but still, I felt it was needed.)

I found two reviews from the time, one positive, one negative. Juliet Page in the Times Literary Supplement wrote:

“Sylvia Fair knows well how children think, talk and act, and her twins, with their grouches and enthusiasms, are the genuine article. Though steeped in atmosphere, this adventure is set firmly in the everyday world of plumbing, homework, and conservation… As Sylvia Fair admirably demonstrates, it is possible to be both down-to-earth and enchanting. Her novel is to be thoroughly applauded; it is one of those delightful children’s books that reanimates one’s own memories of magical times spent in secret places.”

But Stuart Hannabuss in The Times, dismissing the book as “a generic package” in comparison with her previous novel, goes on to say:

“The Penny Tin Whistler with its children in telepathic contact with spirit children of the past and with its workable theme of saving a canal, evokes a mood like Lucy Boston’s Chimneys of Green Knowe, but does little to bind the themes together or to pin down the people. Children grow used to themes cropping up again and again, but have every right to expect that a story should do its own work.”

(I wonder if he expected child readers to all be as well-read as himself.)

To me, The Penny Tin Whistler seemed a perfect follow-on from Fair’s previous novel, and I’d have been happy to read more in the same vein, but her next books were for much younger readers. At least she got a good cover, this time, though.