Joan North

I’ve previously written about Joan North’s The Cloud Forest and The Light Maze; The Whirling Shapes came out between those two, and so completes the trio of her gently mystical early-teen novels. (I assume I’ll never find a copy of her first published book, The Emperor of the Moon, which is so rare the only review on Amazon is from North’s own daughter wanting to find a copy!)

Published in 1968 in both the UK and US, The Whirling Shapes begins with 14-year-old Liz Blake going to live with her Aunt Paula, Uncle Charles, and their 16-year-old daughter Miranda, while her mother has to spend time in a sanatorium (it’s not said why in the book, but one reviewer says it’s a TB sanatorium). Aunt Paula is a bit of a North type: a busybody, always rushing out to this class or that event, usually to do with some faddish idea (she herself teaches the “Helen Tregonna method of dancing”), while also imposing her busyness on others: “an overwhelming sort of person”, “it never occurs to her that she could possibly be wrong about anything” . Fortunately, she’s out most of the time, so is too busy to make much of an impact on the story.

Far more to Liz’s liking is Great Aunt (but just called Aunt) Hilda, who lives at the top of the house. A retired anthropologist, her grandfather was the famous explorer Sir William Harbottle, and she’s currently writing her memoirs. Aunt Paula has already introduced Liz to the paintings of a young man called James Mortlake—all of vaguely whirling shapes, which Liz finds rather depressing. At Aunt Hilda’s she meets the man himself, and he turns out to be as morose as his art. (It’s only later revealed, and pretty much as an aside, that his father, a millionaire, shot himself when James was only four years old, after which his father’s business collapsed and his mother took an overdose of pills. Nobody seems to think of this when considering the generally dark tone of James’s art. When later speculating on why this young man paints such miserable pictures, and is somewhat miserable himself, Liz says he can’t help it, it’s just the sort of face he has!)

Strange things begin happening from the first night of Liz’s stay. The house is on the edge of a London heath, and looking out of the window that first night, Liz sees another house that, the next day, isn’t there. Later, the whirlwind-like shapes from James’s paintings begin to appear in reality, and a fog—only visible, at first, from inside the house—starts to surround the household and cut it off from not just the rest of the world, but reality itself. Aunt Paula and Uncle Charles disappear, and pretty soon the others find they can’t get far from the house before the whirling shapes surround them and threaten to make them disappear, too. Finally, though, the little group—Liz, Miranda, Aunt Hilda, James Mortlake, and Miranda’s medical student/poet boyfriend Tom—have no choice but to set out into the fog and find their way back to reality, before the house itself fades away entirely, and them with it.

What caused this incursion of the unreal? James’s paintings are a key part of it, as well as his insomniac wanderings on the heath, but another part is Aunt Hilda’s use of an artefact brought back from an anthropological trip, an egg-shaped thing carved from the wood of “the sacred tree of the Dingas—the Tree of Dreaming True” (the Dingas being “a very exclusive and retiring Central Indian tribe”). She had been holding this object and thinking of the house she grew up in when that very same house started to appear on the heath—the house which Liz then saw. As Aunt Hilda explains, “when I hold it in my hands, my thoughts have great power”. So, James’s depressiveness has been attracting the attention of the whirling shapes, but Aunt Hilda seems to have been the one to finally open the way from their world to ours. (The odd thing is, once things get desperate in the fog-enshrouded house, nobody thinks of using the power of this sacred artefact again. It’s utterly forgotten.)

As for the whirling shapes, they are, it turns out, “spiritual scavengers”, who “feed on dead mechanical desires”. Dementor-like, they surround their victims, chilling them both physically and spiritually, before making them disappear. They aren’t so much villains (though they’re described as the “messengers of greater and darker powers”) as simply one of the perils of the otherworld where Liz and co. find themselves—a dream-like realm of symbolic trials and archetypal landscapes.

As this is the last of North’s books I’m reviewing, it’s worth looking at the similarities between them. North evidently likes a feisty, no-nonsense but open-minded heroine, though often one more inclined to speak her mind than think about the effect of her words. This heroine is sympathetic towards others, though, and it’s one of the strengths of North’s books that although she presents us with casts of characters with widely different temperaments, they’re generally quite accepting of one another, and there’s rarely any real tension between them. Her feisty main female characters, for instance, are often paired with a slightly sorry-for-themselves older boy, but get on well. (And even busybody Aunt Paula isn’t presented as a villain, merely one of those annoying types of people you have to put up with when you’re a child.)

There are often understated aspects of loss and even tragedy lurking in the background of North’s books. The younger main characters are always parentless, even if only temporarily (as in this book), but there are also the genuine tragedies: here, the twin suicides of James’s parents, in The Cloud Forest the death of Raymond Annerlie’s brother’s family in a car accident, and in The Light Maze the sudden disappearance of Sally’s husband. These never impose themselves too much on the narratives, but it’s notable there’s always something of the sort present.

The fantasy element in her books is the presence of another realm that quite clearly represents the imagination or the inner world, but which is nevertheless a very real place, with genuine dangers. This realm is formless and changeable rather than being a solid otherworld like Narnia, and the presences within it are representative of psychological or spiritual dangers, but (as in the serpent and eagle guardian figures Liz meets in this book) also of positive forces. The general feeling is that humans, though connected to this realm, shouldn’t be interacting with it in such a direct way, and it’s only misguided or greedy people (as with the occult-tinged groups of The Cloud Forest and The Light Maze) or those with unhealthy unconscious preoccupations (James Mortlake’s gloomy art in this book) that threaten to bring that realm directly into contact with human beings, making it much more perilous. The message is that this realm, and the imagination or unconscious generally, should be treated with seriousness, respect, and disinterest rather than power-hunger or desire.

Throughout, though, North’s writing is light and gently humorous. (I particularly liked her description of Uncle Charles as looking “like a gently enquiring camel”, though there’s not a lot of that Wodehousian use of language.) Her plots take their time (perhaps too much for a modern readership—I certainly wondered why Liz and co., trapped in a fog-beset and slowly disappearing house, didn’t do something about it far earlier), and though they’re about genuine dangers, they’re never oppressive or overly dark.

In general, North’s books seem to belong to that end-of-the-sixties period of spiritual seeking, where they veer mostly towards a Buddhistic detachment from worldly passions and a moderation in all things, along with an easy tolerance of the many sorts of people to be found in the world (though, at the same time, a lightly satirical eye cast on those that North disapproves of: the faddish, the busybodies, and those who want power). But her books aren’t really part of the trend that most interests me in YA fiction as it headed into the 70s, with that greater sense of socially-conscious realism, starker drama, and darker fantasy from the likes of Alan Garner, William Mayne, Louise Lawrence, and so on. Perhaps the closest equivalent is Penelope Farmer’s Castle of Bone—though North is no way near as outright weird as that book.

Published in 1965, The Cloud Forest wasn’t North’s first book — that was the now impossible-to-find-anywhere Emperor of the Moon, from nine years before — but it’s the start of her short run of three gently mystical fantasies for pre-teens (the others being The Whirling Shapes and The Light Maze). The “Cloud Forest” of the title is a purely white otherworld one of the two protagonists, twelve year old Andrew Badger, slips into on occasion, and which he comes to learn exists inside the white gemstone of the Annerlie Ring, which he’s guided to find one night. Andrew is an orphan, currently living with his Aunt Badger, the matron of a girl’s school. She’s a somewhat Dickensian guardian, who discourages the boy from making friends with any of the pupils of the school he lives in, thwarts his attempts to have a night-light to stave off nightmares, and generally does her best to show him as little care as she can (“Most illness is pure self-indulgence. If you want to be well, you are well,” she says, in response to his being bed-bound with flu).

Andrew does find a friend, though, in the unconventional Ronnie Peters, an only child who “had always been so heavily wrapped up and protected from the cruel world (which she longed passionately to get at)” that she’s developed a no-nonsense approach to simply doing whatever she wants. As the book opens, she’s decided to bury a treasure map somewhere in the school grounds (even though she doesn’t have any actual treasure — the map itself will become the treasure to another map she’s then going to draw up), and so is present when Andrew finds the Annerlie Ring.

The current members of the Annerlie family live nearby at Annerlie Hall: Raymond Annerlie, virtually comatose since the death of his brother, brother’s wife and baby when their car went into a river, and Sir Rachet Annerlie, a neuro-psychologist who runs the expensive Annerlie Clinic. Researching their history, Ronnie finds mention of the mystical ring, which gives “creative authority to the imagination, if the imagining be sufficiently disinterested and freed from all attachment to results,” and “in its presence even the counterfeit may become real.” (When the normally timid Andrew pretends to be brave, for instance, he finds he actually is brave.) Even so, the ring’s power is “but the Symbol and Shadow of a greater truth.”

It turns out that Sir Rachet Annerlie desperately wants the ring. He’s interested in “the creating of True Power and the Knowledge of How to Use it”, and believes that, with the ring, “I can go to the heart of reality.” To this end, he hosts a series of self-improvement classes of a kind with vague but supposedly empowering beliefs. Andrew is dragged along to one by his aunt, and:

“He was urged to take an Active, Positive Attitude to Life, not to shrink from Having Opinions and expressing them as forcibly as he could, to beware of idleness and an empty mind; not to indulge in doubts and self-questionings and, above all, to realise the great power of DESIRE.”

Their outward message is: “You can all have what you want, if you want it deeply enough, and if you will it with all your heart.” But in fact the classes are simply a way of recruiting people whose will is weak enough that they can be hypnotised into providing a power source for Sir Rachet’s rather more Black Magical practices, focused on the recovery and ownership of the Annerlie Ring.

Aside from the fun adventure and light comedy, the thing I find most interesting about North’s books is her religious attitude. As in the other book of hers I reviewed (The Light Maze), she presents us with a mystical realm where various truths are made plain — here, that we have a True Self that may be lost to the domination of others, and that although imagination may have a magical power, it requires a certain disinterestedness in worldly gains to use it — meanwhile satirising a group of supposedly mystical-minded people who in fact have a power-centred or gains-oriented approach to the supernatural. The fact that Ronnie and Andrew’s main adult helper in The Cloud Forest is the Reverend Arbuthnot says something, perhaps, about where North’s own beliefs lie, but hers is not an entirely traditional Christianity: Arbuthnot, who accepts the children’s stories about the powers of the Annerlie Ring, admits it might be best not to inform the Bishop about such things. His own attitude to Sir Rachet’s classes implies that his — like North’s, I assume — is a somewhat Buddhistic or Eastern-tinged version of Christianity, that nevertheless manages to sound all the more English for it:

“All this constant wishing and desiring—this refusal to let the mind be at rest! It’s in the stillness and quietness that the true creative things happen.”

Mind you, as I’ve said before in this blog, fantasies are often about power, and in so many of them the answer is not learning to use power but deciding to renounce it (as with, most notably, that rather more famous Ring of Power, from Tolkien).

North’s adventures inevitably feel a bit light in contrast with the sort of teen-aimed YA fiction I like, which came only five or so years later, in the works of Alan Garner, John Gordon, William Rayner, Penelope Lively, and others, but the Jungian/Buddhist/lightly Christian form of mysticism that informs her fantasies feels very much both of its time (a 1960s moving towards New Age beliefs), and a matter of conviction on the author’s part.

Twenty-year-old Kit Elton comes to the countryside to stay with her godmother, Sally Nancarrow, on the back of a broken engagement. Sally’s husband, Tom, disappeared two years ago — one moment he was in his study, writing a book “about the odd ways people’s minds could work”, the next he was simply gone. Kit is given Tom’s study as a bedroom, and on her first evening there, after examining a strange paperweight “carved in the shape of two fishes — or were they tadpoles? — curved, head to tail”, falls into a dream:

“She seemed to be walking through an avenue of tall, tapering bushes which twisted and turned in the wind. It had been raining and the sun shone on them so that they glistened and danced with a dazzle of light and swayed in the air like blown candleflames… and now indeed they seemed more like flames than bushes…”

Later, among Tom Nancarrow’s papers, she finds a mysterious reference to this very “Light Maze” she’d dreamt about, and learns of a local legend, the Lightstone, of which it’s said:

“If you hold in your hand the Lightstone and hear in the silence the true note which is yourself then you will be able to the enter the Maze.”

With Sally’s fourteen-year-old daughter, Harriet, and a local boy, Barney Medlicott, Kit learns more about both the Lightstone and the Light Maze, and comes to realise it’s into this otherworldly realm that Tom has disappeared. But her investigations pique the interest of Esmerelda Melling, a local member of the Club of True Seekers (“some of our members have very wide knowledge of occult matters”), whose hunger for “wonder, joy, bliss” leads her to try to use the Lightstone for her own purposes — not evil, merely selfish, but nevertheless with the effect of disturbing the balance between the Light Maze and our world, leading to more people disappearing.

The Light Maze was published in the US in 1971 and the UK in 1972. On the book’s back jacket flap it says that North’s books — of which this was her last published — “bring into an ordinary and often comical picture of everyday life an awareness of other worlds, other modes of being”. The comedy, here, is very light. North is gently satiric of some of her characters, such as the social busybody Mrs Medlicott, or the self-consciously exotic Esmerelda Melling, or the boisterously adolescent Harriet, but there’s nothing that feels overtly comic. The darker side is handled lightly too: all of the main characters, for instance, have experienced loss — Kit has broken up with her fiancé, Sally’s husband and Harriet’s father has disappeared with no explanation, Barney Medlicott is an orphan, and Francis Leland, a playwright who lives in a flat above the Nancarrow’s household’s stable, has lost both his wife and his ability to write — but once established, none of these instances of loss weighs too heavily on the story. They can almost be forgotten, as though North were allowing the reader to take it or leave it.

To me, though, it felt as though, after this intriguing set up, the characters’ depths weren’t really explored, which is an issue in a book which is, essentially, about entering one’s inner depths. The Lightstone and Light Maze, it becomes clear, are part of an allegory of self-realisation or self-exploration. Achieving the centre of the Maze leads to some sort of inner fulfilment, but to do so, one must face “the Guardian of the Threshold”:

“There is a theory that if we try to turn our attention inwards, to explore our own depths, to find out who and what we are, we are liable to be confronted by a sort of shadow-self — all the parts of ourselves we have pushed out of our consciousness and refused to know.”

Or, as the oracular Barney has it:

“The brightest light brings the deepest shadow.”

Several of the book’s characters venture into the Light Maze and encounter a “sort of dark mass of corruption” within it, but if this is their own darkness, called into relief by the brighter light of the maze, it’s undifferentiated from character to character. Every character’s darkness is the same, and I didn’t get the sense that each character was confronting something personal, except that they would feel a certain familiarity alongside the fear and repugnance. Like the rest of the book’s fantasy elements, this darkness is just a little bit too abstract, and it needs North’s characters to (as they do on a couple of occasions) sit down and lay out what it all means, rather than allowing the fantasy to speak for itself.

It’s perhaps unfair to make this criticism of a YA book, but I can’t help comparing it to other, similar books of the same era. Le Guin’s Threshold, Garner’s Red Shift, or Mayne’s A Game of Dark, for instance, deal with far more powerful and personal forces of darkness. It’s that sense of a very real-seeming, often gritty and class-conscious reality coming up against meaningful fantasy that I like in the era’s YA, and The Light Maze doesn’t quite have it, though it does feel as though it’s on the edge of the same territory. The Light Maze, I’d say, could stand alongside Susan Cooper’s Blytonesque Over Sea, Under Stone, but not its sequel, the much more realistic (in terms of characters and setting) The Dark is Rising. One of the main things The Light Maze is about, though, is the avoidance of extremes — how the search for higher states, as with Esmeralda’s “wonder, joy, bliss”, inevitably calls up a corresponding darkness — so, North’s lightness of touch may well have been an intentional part of what she was trying to say.

I first heard about Joan North from Matthew David Surridge’s post at Black Gate, which is well worth a read.