1980s, page 1 of 8

I came to this novel because a brief description I read somewhere reminded me of David Lindsay’s Devil’s Tor. Like it, First Light (1989) is set in the southwest of England (on the Devon/Dorset border), and deals with the uncovering of an ancient tomb somehow linked to the stars. The only other Ackroyd novel I’ve read is his first, Hawksmoor (1985), which I remember as being nightmarish (in the full dream-like sense), with a lot of impressionistic writing as it slips between two times. First Light is different. Its prose is clear, its tone often comic (or at least satirical), and it has a far larger cast of characters. Having read it, the comparison I’d make is not with Devil’s Tor, but another novel from that same decade and also set in the southwest, weaving mysticism with the misty English landscape: John Cowper Powys’s A Glastonbury Romance.

First Light starts with the discovery of a seemingly unspoiled stone-age tumulus, surrounded by a wide stone circle in Pilgrin Valley, near the village of Colcorum. But although the gradual excavation of the tumulus over a period of several months provides a spine to the novel, its main focus is on a range of characters whose lives touch sometimes only slightly on the dig itself. At the same time as the dig is going on, for instance, astronomer Damian Fall (living in a cottage in Pilgrin Valley) is dealing with the realisation that he has long since ceased to feel the “exaltation” that drew him into the profession—he “once thought of the night sky as my home”, but now feels “like a priest who had lost his belief in God”. Meanwhile, a retired TV and music hall comedian, Joey Hanover, has come to the area, driven by the distant memory of a cottage where he spent his earliest years. Joey wants to find this cottage so he can learn who his parents were—a different and parallel sort of excavation of the past. And while the lead archaeologist, Mark Clare, deals with the dig, his wife, a “brooding, melancholy” young woman who wears a permanent brace on her leg, convinces her husband they should try to adopt a child, only to find that, as she’s registered disabled, it’s most likely she’ll be refused.

And there’s a range of characters who don’t have stories so much as a series of interactions, and form the more comic side of the novel. Foremost among these is Evangeline Tupper, whose position in the Department of the Environment has led to her being associated with the dig, despite her having no real feel for archaeology or, really, the environment. Outwardly overly enthusiastic about everything and everyone, she’s immediately viperish the moment anyone’s back is turned. She’s always commenting on how feminine her partner (always introduced as her “assistant”) Hermione is, but laconic Hermione is clearly not interested in being “feminine” at all. (It’s hard to tell if this is a joke the two share, or some barely-concealed sarcasm on Evangeline’s part.) Then there’s Julian Hill, the site’s environmentalist, full of theories about the significance of what they’re going to find at the dig (he has already written an article on how astronomers were “the leaders or at least the magi of late neolithic society”), and when this doesn’t prove immediately true, says his theory is right, it’s just the evidence that’s wrong.

Locals include Farmer Mint and his adult son, only ever called Boy. The Mints are the main local family, and Farmer Mint lives and works in Pilgrin Valley. Almost a caricature of the closemouthed but knowing local, he and his family turn out to have a knowledge of the tumulus and what it contains that they are not about to share. Then we have Brenda, secretary at the local observatory, who takes everything said to her as a suggestive remark; antiques shop owner and amateur actor Augustine Fraicheur, who camply proclaims the village to be utterly decadent compared to the “innocence” of London, and hints at dark goings-on; Lola Trout, an old woman whose dialogue is almost entirely comprised of profanity; and Michael, known as the Woodlander, a homeless man, intensely shy, who has taken it upon himself to be the guardian of the region’s flora and fauna.

While Powys’s tone and style in A Glastonbury Romance embrace every character and story, and pass effortlessly into his characters’ deepest thoughts and feelings, Ackroyd’s style in First Light seems to have two starkly different modes. He has a light, distant, satirical tone when dealing with this more comical characters, such as Evangeline, the Mints, Augustine and Brenda. But three of his characters—Mark, Kathleen, and Damian—are loaded with melancholy, and when we’re with them, it’s a heavy, elegiac tone that takes over. It’s as though the one genuine feeling of any depth Ackroyd is presenting us with is sadness; anything else is light and flighty and ironic. (Oddly, both tones work. The melancholy chapters can be genuinely moving, and the comic chapters can be amusing—I’d never say laugh-out-loud funny, but certainly amusing. It’s just odd to find these two tones, and nothing between, existing together in the same novel.)

There aren’t many moments when the two modes interact. When Brenda attempts her “Oh, you are awful!” style on deeply depressed Damian, it’s like water on an oilskin. The one exception, the character who seems able to exist in both worlds, is Joey Hanover. While he never plumbs the ultimately distressing depths of Damian and Kathleen, he at least has an inner need, presumably driven by some sort of unhappiness, to uncover the mystery of his birth. But, while Damian and Kathleen have no happy ending, Joey at least achieves his, and finds himself a new family in the process. He always has a song and a joke, whatever the situation, and I can’t help wondering if he’s Ackroyd’s example of a “survivor” character: just as ultra-cynical McReady is the perfect survivor for the environment of John Carpenter’s The Thing, so an ex-music hall comedian, armed with a stock of popular songs, is, somehow, the perfect survivor for the strange emotional environment of First Light, with its odd mix of human disconnection and distant yearning.

Mark, on the other hand, has the most hard-won story. At first craving some vision that will unveil the secrets of Pilgrin Valley’s ancient past, he’s later more desperately driven by the need to find some meaning in it all—not just the dig, but the tragedy that hits his life. Damian’s assistant Alec provides him with a clue, when talking about time and the patterns it makes: “I suppose that we could only see the pattern if we were outside it. And in that case we would have ceased to exist…” But Mark nevertheless manages to find some meaning in it all with the notion that we contain within ourselves the stuff of dead stars, linking each of us to the distant heavens, just as the dead within the tomb seem to be linked to distant Aldebaran. (The novel is all about striving to find meaningful, preferably human, connections: to other people, to the past, to the stars. It’s just that the failures to do so feel more profoundly felt than the few successes.)

It’s not as big or all-embracing a novel as A Glastonbury Romance, and I think there are hints that Ackroyd would never write such a book as Powys’s. While Powys brings in so many different characters, viewpoints, experiences and outlooks, and seems genuinely capable of grasping the whole of life in all its many facets, First Light is limited to those two tones, the satirical and the melancholy, and shows some repetition in its band of characters. Evangeline, as I’ve said, is overly enthusiastic but catty the moment anyone’s back is turned; so is the dig’s “finds” supervisor, Martha Wells, and so is Augustine Fraicheur. Either Ackroyd is trying to tell us something about how he believes people are, or he’s found a limit to his comic range.

Nevertheless, it’s an interesting novel, perhaps as much for its flaws as its many little moments of insight. It’s certainly not trying to say something as grand as either Devil’s Tor or A Glastonbury Romance, but is, I think, paddling in the shallows of the same great body of water those two plunge into: the matter of mystical Britain, and the broader, deeper stuff of human life.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And the odd creepy moment, too:

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

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

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

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

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

Published in 1986, Jenny Nimmo’s The Snow Spider is the first in a trilogy of pre-teen fantasies about a boy who discovers he’s a magician, and the glimpses he gets of another world of Welsh myth and magic. But if that makes it sound like a light, early Harry Potter-style adventure, I think it’s got a bit more depth than that.

For his ninth birthday, Gwyn’s Nain (grandmother) gives him a set of strange gifts: a tin whistle, a twisted metal brooch, a yellow scarf, a piece of seaweed and a broken wooden horse. Among these, the only thing he recognises is the scarf, which was worn by his sister Bethan on the night she disappeared—the night of his birthday four years ago, when he convinced her to go out in a storm to find his favourite ewe. Gwyn’s father blames the boy for Bethan’s disappearance, resulting in an “unbearable emptiness” between them. But Nain’s gifts, odd as they are, have a purpose: she wants to see if Gwyn, who she says is descended from the legendary Gwydion fab Dôn, is a magician. He has to offer these objects, one by one, to the wind, and in return, if he is a magician, he’ll get his heart’s desire.

Gwyn takes the brooch onto the mountainside and the wind snatches it from his hand. It’s snowing, and on the way back he thinks a particularly large and beautiful-looking snowflake has landed on his shoulder, but when he touches it, it proves to be a glittering white spider. That night, the spider spins webs in Gwyn’s room in which he can see another world, entirely white, as though made of ice and snow.

Gwyn, then, knows he is a magician. But his Nain has warned him what this means:

“You’ll be alone, mind. You cannot tell. A magician can have his heart’s desire if he truly wishes it, but he will always be alone.”

Being a nine-year-old boy, though, he of course tells his best friend Alun. Alun doesn’t believe him, and is a little annoyed at what he thinks is his friend trying to bring attention to himself (not to mention the fact Gwyn gets him out of bed to tell him he’s just given the seaweed to the wind and saw a ship sailing through the sky). Gwyn makes Alun promise not to tell anyone, but of course, being a nine-year-old boy, he does, and soon everyone at school thinks Gwyn is mad. Bullied by some of the boys in his class, he’s finally forced to use his magic for a practical purpose: to bash one of the bullies on the nose from a safe distance. In a more wish-fulfilling type of story, that might be the end of the bullying. Instead, the other boys pile on Gwyn and beat him up, after which the parents of the boy whose nose was bashed come round to complain to Gwyn’s parents. Being a magician, it seems, isn’t a lot of fun.

It’s at this point, though, that another character enters Gwyn’s story, a new girl at school, who helps him home after his beating. Eirlys (meaning “snowdrop”) is an orphan who has recently moved in with a local couple. But there’s something familiar about her, both to Gwyn and his father, who takes an instant liking to the girl. Although Bethan was dark-haired and ought to be older by now, and Eirlys is pale and white-haired and of Gwyn’s age, both Gwyn and his father start to suspect this is Bethan, back from wherever she went. (Gwyn’s mother, on the hand, gets distressed when it’s suggested Eirlys sleep in Bethan’s room—she’s evidently not ready to accept what is happening.)

But what is happening? It’s a long time before Gwyn asks Eirlys directly if she is his sister, and when he does, she says:

“I’m not Bethan… I might have been Bethan once, but now I’m Eirlys. I’ll never be Bethan again. I’ve been out there… Further than the mountain! Further than the sky!”

And she intends to return to that white otherworld that is now her home, a world populated entirely by children, “Only they’re not really children, they’re quite old, and very wise.” The fact that they’re small (little people) and that they and their world are entirely white (like Machen’s “white people”) all implies that Bethan wasn’t snatched away to some Narnia-like magical otherland or even the land of the dead, but to faerie. And that changes everything about The Snow Spider, from being a story about a boy magician, to being a story about a boy entangled in the difficult and deceptive Perilous Realm.

Things get even more complicated when Gwyn’s mother, discovering the snow spider and thinking it’s just a spider, throws it down the sink. Desperate to get it back, Gwyn takes up the only one of Nain’s presents he’s not used, the broken horse. But this is the one his Nain warned him not to use:

“I’m afraid of that horse,” she said thoughtfully. “I tried to burn it once, but I couldn’t. It was still there when the fire died, black and grinning at me.”

The horse’s broken-off ears and tail tie it to the legendary story of Efnisien, who, offended that the King of Ireland had come to marry his sister Branwen without asking his permission, cuts off the king’s horses’ ears, tails, lips and eyelids. It’s one of those savage images from myth that capture an almost ineffable degree of anger and pain, and which would be more at home in the adult work of Robert Holdstock than a book for children.

Giving the horse to the wind unleashes a dark, wild power in the valley, which rages as a storm, breaks into Nain’s house, wrecks the place and kills her pet bird, then kills Gwyn’s family’s cat. And, in a replay of Bethan’s disappearance, Alun gets lost in the storm, and Alun’s parents blame Gwyn for it.

Even if Gwyn’s heart’s desire wasn’t the return of his sister, it was at least the hope for “something that would change the way things were, to fill the emptiness in the house below” (the coldness between himself and his father), but it seems that involvement in the world of magic has only led to, as his Nain warned, loneliness: bullying at school, the loss of his friend Alun, and the revelation that his returned sister is only here temporarily. There are other moments that underscore Gwyn’s isolation even beyond his involvement in magic, such as:

“He tried to respond to his mother’s probing chatter without giving too much away for he felt he had to protect her. He did not want her to know that his friends thought him mad.”

But, as if that final unleashing of rage and destruction into the valley was what was really needed all along—as if that power wasn’t just from ancient Welsh myth, but represented all the unspoken anger and betrayal surrounding Gwyn, his father, Alun, and Bethan—things change. Gwyn recaptures the angry power back into the broken horse, Alun returns, and everything is, somehow, resolved. But Eirlys says she’s returning to the white land, and even, faerie-like, tries to persuade, then drag, Gwyn with her.

All this might sound as though The Snow Spider were about nothing but isolation, peril and darkness, but Nimmo presents it in such a way that it can easily be read as a straightforward tale of a boy magician encountering the thrills and exciting dangers of the world of magic. The faerie-like perils, and the deeper emotional currents beneath it all are treated lightly, as though leaving them there for the reader to notice, if that’s the sort of tale they’re ready for. I’m certainly interested to see where Nimmo takes the next two books, and what light it throws on the people of the white land, and their true nature.

The Snow Spider has been adapted for TV twice, once in 1988 for ITV (when it was followed by adaptations of the other two books in the trilogy), and once more in 2020 by the BBC. The 1988 adaptation is quite faithful, while the 2020 adaptation, though it feels a bit more polished, makes a number of minor changes. (For instance, in the novel, when Gwyn’s father sees Eirlys, he’s keen to offer her a lift home after her visit, and later says he’ll drive her back whenever she wants to visit. In the 2020 adaptation, it’s Gwyn’s mother who gives her a lift home—the Beeb evidently didn’t want to encourage girls to get into cars with men they don’t really know. Another change is that it’s not Gwyn’s mother who throws the snow spider away: its clearly magical, so she never gets to even see it. Instead, it’s Eirlys who temporarily banishes it, underlining her moral ambiguity as a character.) The only change I really didn’t like is the fact that the snow spider makes cute squeaking noises.

The 2020 adaptation has a title sequence and music oddly reminiscent of A Game of Thrones (pounding drums while the camera hovers over close-up rotating objects), which makes the ash-blonde Eirlys start to seem like a young Daenerys. The ending, clearly setting this up to be followed by further adaptations, makes it clear Eirlys and the other “White People” aren’t to be trusted, but presumably the pandemic put paid to any further adaptations, which is a pity.