Children's Fantasy, page 1 of 5

In Robert Altman’s 1972 film Images, Susannah York plays a woman whose life is invaded by a series of ghosts/doubles/hallucinations when she spends time alone at a remote house in Ireland. It starts with a mysterious phone call, where an unknown person implies her husband is having an affair—but the voice on the other end of the phone is her own. A man with whom she’d had an affair years ago suddenly appears, but he died three years ago. Going for a walk and looking back from across a lake, she sees herself entering the house. The filmmakers start playing games: the daughter, Susannah, of her husband’s friend is played by Cathryn Harrison, while Susannah York is playing a woman called Cathryn. In one scene, the two—with their identical long blonde hair—sit together to complete a jigsaw puzzle, Cathryn with her left hand on the left, Susannah with her right hand on the right. It all has echoes of Bergman’s Persona (1966), and more than a touch of Polanski’s Repulsion (1965). But does it all mean something, or are the filmmakers just providing a series of shocks, playing with significances? Well, you won’t find the answer to that question here. I’m going to look at another aspect of the film.

In it, York plays a writer, and we occasionally hear, by way of an inner monologue, passages from the children’s fantasy she’s working on. (Early in the film, we see books in her study open at pages showing works by Edmund Dulac and John Bauer.) The credits say that “In Search of Unicorns” is a book for children by Susannah York, though if you were intrigued by the whimsical, incantatory language of the snippets heard in the film, you wouldn’t have been able to go out and buy it, not immediately anyway. In Search of Unicorns didn’t come out till the following year, and by that point it had changed.

In an interview around the time of its publication, York said that Unicorns is “not just aimed at children, but adults too”, but it’s pretty clearly for children. (The book is not long, is large-format, and every page is illustrated in a sometimes naïve style.) The story starts with Hero, the Lord of Umbany (though Umbany’s lords only hold the post for a year at a time), setting out for a walk, intent on avoiding his lordly responsibilities. He meets Una, a “ladychild”, who seems to have just appeared out of nowhere—she doesn’t know where she came from or, at first, her own name. Hero takes her home. A hunter and poet, he’s also a painter, and when Una sees a mural on his wall depicting a unicorn, she’s suddenly struck by a passionate need to see such a creature. Meanwhile Obnokshuss, the Devil of Umbany, has his eye on her—or, more specifically, on her pink new soul. He likes to capture souls, keeping them in cages till they turn from pink to grey to black, whereupon they’re so lost to goodness that he can use them in an army he intends to unleash on the land of Umbany. But there are seven conditions which, if met, will free all his captured souls, and Una’s appearance is one of them. The final one is her finding her much-desired unicorn. He has, then, a double reason to capture her.

The setting is part stone age, part land of fairy tales. A statement near the beginning (“Now Ums, as you probably know, are very small people”) sounds Hobbitish, but in one promotional interview, York says she’d not read Tolkien. (And the rest of the story doesn’t feel anything like The Hobbit, let alone The Lord of the Rings.) In fact, one of the book’s plus points—and what drew me to reading it—is its air of naivety, a fantasy written by someone who seemingly hasn’t read any (but who has, no doubt thanks to acting in Shakespeare, a love of language, and a stock of archaisms to draw on).

It’s a simple tale, its ultimate meaning given by York in an interview:

“I believe all of us are engaged in a search for our own kind of unicorn, big or small, one or more, tangible or intangible… Your unicorn can only be yours when it is given its freedom and it chooses to come back to you.”

(Which can’t help reminding me of The Three Amigos: “In a way, all of us have an El Guapo to face someday. For some, shyness might be their El Guapo. For others, a lack of education might be their El Guapo. For us, El Guapo is a big dangerous guy who wants to kill us.”)

The 1974 edition of In Search of Unicorns was illustrated by Wendy Hall (who said York had very clear ideas on how the characters should look, as many of them were based on her friends and family). It was later revised and re-illustrated by Pat Ludlow in 1984, and I suspect one of the reasons (though I haven’t seen it) for the new illustrations would be that Una spends most of the first half of the book entirely naked (perhaps inspired by that John Bauer image), and that might have been changed as the hippie-ness of child nudity became less acceptable. (I also wonder if one of the revisions might have been to get rid of the line: “Hero was rather partial to ladychildren, especially if they looked small and fragile”.)

The text of even that 1974 edition, though, isn’t the text from the film—which was a bit disappointing, as it was the playfulness of the language that drew me to it, and that seems to have been partially, but not wholly, lost. Here, for instance, is the opening as narrated in Images:

All in a night, spring came, rushing from beyond the ends of the earth and spilling out all over Umberny, its sack full of colours, and buds and birds’ eggs, snails and tadpoles, rainbows and newborn animals. Bees hummed, mammoths gambolled, meadows rang with the plighting of troths, and deep in his ancestral cave Hero Fairbeard Frisky, Lord of all Ums, snored and grunted, stirred and groaned, and got out of bed to look outside. “Fiddle-fuddle, Umb! A thousand spitting curses!”

In the book, though it starts more directly and still has a little of that verbal playfulness, it feels as though it’s lost the far-away, wistful fantasy tone somewhat:

“Fiddle, fuddle, bother; if I haven’t woken in the deepest of Umish Glooms, my name’s not Hero Frisky!” To hear the Lord of Umbany, you’d never have thought it was the first day of spring. Out he had rushed of Frisky Hall at dawn—down through Upper Um, over the bridge, and out to the open road. All about him in the hedgerows snails scuttled, and little blue eggs fell plop! into nests; bluebells and pollywots waved from banks and far away in the Forest (where Hero was heading), baby mammoths gambolled and trumpeted.

Perhaps it’s significant that the narrative has picked up a “you”—a sign it’s being self-consciously adjusted for a child audience. (And surely snails don’t “scuttle”.) One of the things, I can’t help thinking, that added to its effect in the film is that Cathryn is telling this story to herself, in her own head, so it’s not being acted out or told to a child. This gives it a wistful, musing tone, somewhat like Oliver Postgate’s narrations to Bagpuss or The Clangers.

As another example, from when Una sees Hero’s mural of a unicorn. The film has:

Una stared at the carved, curving creature, delicate, questing, perfect, with arched neck and a single slender horn.

The book has much of the same language, but sounds like the result of a writer doubting their reader, and losing something in the process of making it all clearer:

A creature—a carved, curving creature, like none of the others—was leaping out of the rock at her, delicate, questing. . . perfect!

Interviewed at the time of its publication, York said “I worked on it intermittently for three years. In the end I re-wrote it three times.” And: “The main problem was simply getting carried away by the sound of the words, and having to cut severely to get the story moving.” As it’s for children, getting the story moving was probably a wise move, but for me, I’d have loved to read more of what I was hearing in the film, which was clearly driven by “the sound of the words”—something that has worked for children’s fantasy since Lewis Carroll’s Alice books.

York read the book on Jackanory in April 1974, and it was later staged as Searching for Dreams in 1990. She went on to write one more book for children, Lark’s Castle, published in 1976: “A stone with magical properties helps a wooden doll and other captive toys outwit a cantankerous witch.” The first edition seems to have a naked man running after an animated doll on the cover…!

Conceived of while writing his previous novel, Barker’s children’s fantasy The Thief of Always came out in 1992, a postprandial belch after the massive banquet that was Imajica. As this was in the days before the Potter-powered YA boom, and Barker was very much considered an adult author, he licensed the book to HarperCollins for a dollar (a silver dollar in one telling, half a sovereign in another); it not only sold well, but has been widely translated, and has several times been touted for a film adaptation, either animated or live action.

It starts with ten year old Harvey Swick bored in his bedroom, wishing away the dull month of February, when the grinning Rictus (with a smile “wide enough to shame a shark”) flies in through the window Peter Pan-style. He offers to take Harvey to the Holiday House, “where the days are always sunny… and the nights are full of wonders”. This House, hidden behind a magical wall of fog, offers its guests the best of each season every day: spring-like mornings, sunny summer afternoons, Halloween each evening, and Christmas every night, complete with the perfect gift (on his first night, Harvey gets the wooden toy ark his father made for him years ago, which was at some point lost). There are two other children there: Wendell, with whom Harvey spends his days making a treehouse, and the more retiring Lulu who, after she shows Harvey her dolls’ house populated with tiny lizards, seems to spend most of her time hanging around the gloomy lake at the back of the House, with its strange, darkness-dwelling fish.

There are a few hints that everything is not so perfect. The man behind all this, Mr Hood, is never seen, though Rictus and his colleagues (the jittery Jive, and the sluggish Marr), and the cook Mrs Griffin, often refer to him, making it clear he not only knows everything that goes on in the House, but “every dream in your head” too. And Mrs Griffin warns Harvey that Hood “doesn’t like inquisitive guests”. Rictus, on first flying through Harvey’s bedroom window, invited him to ask all the questions he wanted, but as soon as he did, accused him of being “too inquisitive for your own good”. “Questions rot the mind!”, he warned—a telling echo of The Prisoner’s “Questions are a burden on others.” Harvey, though, quite naturally wants to know all there is about this evidently magical place.

After Wendell plays a Halloween trick on him, Harvey is determined to get his own back, and with the help of Marr, who can change people’s shape, allows himself to be turned into a bat-winged vampire monster, to swoop down on Wendell and give him a real scare. Rictus and Marr egg him on, to turn it into a real attack; Harvey fights the temptation, but genuinely frightens the boy. The next day, Wendell tries to leave, but finds he can’t get through the wall of fog. Meanwhile, Lulu, who has been hiding away for some time, calls goodbye to Harvey from behind a tree, saying she doesn’t want him to look at her. He realises she has slowly been transforming into one of the fish that haunt that gloomy lake, and has now gone to join them. Is this the fate awaiting all of them—those, that is, who aren’t claimed by the fourth of Rictus’s colleagues, Carna, who seems to be quite capable of killing children who try too hard to leave the House?

The basic idea, of being in a place that seems like paradise but is in fact not just a trap, but a downhill slope to losing one’s humanity, is as old as the Lotos Eaters episode in The Odyssey—and is quite often paired, as here, with something of the Circe episode, too, as for instance when Pinocchio starts turning into a donkey on Pleasure Island, or Chihiro’s parents transform into pigs in Miyazaki’s Spirited Away. It has always felt a familiar plot-line, but when I come to list examples, I usually can’t find as many as I’d expect. There’s elements of it in Ramsey Campbell’s Incarnate, and it’s the plot of Neil Gaiman’s Coraline, but I always feel there’s some major examples out there I’m not thinking of. (And it would be quite instructive to compare Gaiman and Barker, though I’d consistently come out on the Barker side as a deeper and more artistically authentic creator.)

The uber-example, for me, though, is David Lindsay’s A Voyage to Arcturus, and there are a few resonances between Lindsay’s Crystalman and Barker’s Mr Hood. Both, for example, are explicitly called thieves (Krag calls Crystalman “a common thief”, while Hood is the most obvious subject of the novel’s title), and both are seen at least once as enormous faces (Crystalman under one of his many aliases, Faceny, who is “all face”, Hood in the House’s attic), with an implication that this is because, like Hood, there is “a terrible emptiness inside” them, and the face is, ultimately, all there is. And Hood accuses Harvey of having “brought pain into my paradise”, just as the one fly in Crystalman’s ointment is the presence of pain, as embodied by Krag—the one reminder that pleasure is only a part of human experience, not the whole of it, and so anything that excludes pain must be a lie. Barker has expressed his admiration for A Voyage to Arcturus (calling it “a masterpiece… an extraordinary work, if deeply, deeply flawed”), and I was pleased to hear a perhaps unintentional Lindsay quote from him in an interview, where he says “The most important part of me [is] the part which dreams with his eyes open”—echoing the “I dream with open eyes” line from Arcturus.

The Thief of Always wasn’t Barker’s first foray into children’s literature. He’d actually made a couple of unpublished attempts before The Books of Blood (something called The Candle in the Cloud in 1971, and The Adventures of Mr Maximillian Bacchus and His Travelling Circus with some friends a few years later), and he’d written some plays for a youth theatre. Two of his inspirations were Peter Pan (which Barker has called “the book of my childhood”), and CS Lewis, but I was pleased to find that, unlike Lewis or, say, Roald Dahl, Barker doesn’t pick on one of his kids to be a moral lesson for the others, as with Edmund in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, or the many sticky ends met with in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. Wendell, who is evidently a little more greedy, gullible and cowardly than Harvey—though all within acceptable child limits—seems the perfect set-up for this, but Harvey and he turn out to be genuine friends, and there was no feeling from Barker of an adult tut-tutting when Wendell couldn’t quite see things through in the ultimate confrontation with Hood.

The Barkerian touch, here, is that Harvey wins in the end thanks not to his moral goodness, but because he’s found a little of Hood’s darkness within himself, and learns how to turn it on this “Vampire Lord” and his deceptive House. There are echoes of other Barker works here too, such as the overall feeling of a Faustian pact; the quartet of Rictus, Jive, Marr and Carna feeling a little like the four Cenobites (both are sets of unnaturally altered humans with supernatural powers, both are three men and a woman, and both feature one member with a ridiculously fixed grin); Rictus, in addition, has the salesman-like patter of Shadwell from Weaveworld; and Mr Hood is first met in a dusty attic, giving it the feel of the lurking supernatural presence of the resurrected Frank in Hellraiser. Barker himself has said that The Thief of Always has some of the same themes as Imajica: “The concerns about the darkness, the secret self; the ideas about some ultimate enemy who is in fact quite close to one’s self.” There’s no sense at all that, in writing for children, Barker is being less Barker.

(He was often, at this time, saying in interviews from Weaveworld on that he’d moved on from horror to fantasy, but there’s a lot of darkness in The Thief of Always, and I have to say it’s in the darker fantastic that his power as an imaginative writer lies.)

The risk with a children’s fantasy about the dangers of escapism is that it might turn into a critique of the genre it’s written in, but Barker, very much a pro-imagination writer—and also, as already said, not of the finger-wagging type—here presents a much more holistic view: “if we embrace Neverland too strongly, we are forever sucking our thumbs, but if we die without knowing Neverland, we’ve lost our power to dream…”, as he’s said in an interview. Harvey is an imaginative lad, and ultimately his imagination is part of the solution, not the problem. Being lured in by the apparent pleasures of the Holiday House is more like a refusal to grow up than a retreat into one’s inner world, and the best children’s literature is usually about learning to open up to the wider adult world. And Barker, a self-confessed “inclusionist” in all his writing, sees imagination, and darkness, as part of the wider, adult world, too.

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.