John Gordon, page 1 of 2

Gordon’s 1983 YA novel The Edge of the World seems to have enjoyed a bit more success than his previous book, The Waterfall Box, as it had hardback editions in both the UK and US, and a UK paperback in 1985.

It takes place in the middle of the summer holidays in Wisbech in the Fenlands of Cambridgeshire. 13-year-old Tekker Begdale (real name Terence, though only his mother calls him that, and only when she wants to annoy him) and Kit Huntley, a girl of the same age, have seen, not a ghost, but a “ghost like thing”—“a man shape with a horse’s skull”—near the cottage of a local woman with a fearsome reputation, Ma Grist. Later, in the same area with Kit and her older brother Dan, Tekker indulges in one of his pet projects, seeing if he has mental powers. He’s already tried mind-reading with Kit (it didn’t work), now he tries telekinesis, willing the surface of a pond to ripple. To his delight he seems to have managed it, but the next moment the whole world changes: there’s a flash, and the fens become a vast red desert under a purple sky. Then it’s gone. They’re approached by old Mr Welbeck, who claims to have seen it once before, when, as a pilot during the first World War, he crashed his plane in the fens and found himself for a moment in that red desert world. He’d been showing off to his girlfriend, Stella, a woman who, he said, could see a whole other landscape in the fens, full of “Wonderful things”, “shining shapes”, and “a glittering mountain”.

Tekker discovers he can bring that red-and-purple world back with the same mental effort, and he and Kit find the wreck of Mr Welbeck’s Bristol Scout plane there. Later, trying to convince the still-sceptical Dan, they re-enter the world once more, but are attacked by the Horsehead-thing, which leaves Dan comatose. They learn from Mr Welbeck that Dan’s only hope is for Tekker and Kit to go further into this strange other world and find the woman he loved, Stella, who was imprisoned there, in a glass palace, by her jealous sister—the woman known as Ma Grist.

What follows is a tense journey across a constantly challenging landscape—first a vast red desert, then a climb down a massive cliff, then to the towering, labyrinthine palace of glass—where Tekker and Kit are pursued by the Mari Lwyd-like Horseheads. These are, surely, the best part of the book. Basically, they’re Tolkien’s Black Riders, combining as they do undead men and horses, who later take to the skies on lizard-winged flying machines. It’s their equivalent of the Black Breath that has felled Dan. (I wonder if, also, the horned cow-skull creatures from Time Bandits might have had an influence, too.)

There are hints this other landscape may have some relationship with the real world. An actual palace was planned to be built in the fens four hundred years ago, so perhaps the glass one is an echo of what might have been. Meanwhile, the dry desert and towering cliff are the exact opposite of the flat, watery fens. But it also seems these lands were created, or at least shaped, by Ma Grist and Stella: Stella, who saw that “glittering mountain”, now dwells in it, while the jealous Ma Grist has imprisoned her there thanks to the vast desert, cliff, and the Horseheads she commands.

Is this world, then, a parallel realm—perhaps one of many—that just happens to be accessible at this point in the Fens, or was it somehow created by events in the real world then taken up and crafted by Ma Grist and her sister? I suspect Gordon stayed clear of answering such questions because, to him, the important element was to open up reality to be stranger than we think it is. As Tekker says at one point:

“Look at all that land out there. It looks flat and dull but it’s full of things you’d never guess. I feel I could split it wide open like a skin and find something else inside it.”

Or Kit (in what I like to think of as the book’s trailer moment):

“There’s always something just beyond the edge of things, and sometimes you learn the trick of getting there.”

The fraught nature of male-female relationships, particularly in their early stages, are one of the driving elements of Gordon’s YA fiction. Tekker and Kit are incapable of admitting their feelings for each other, but are quick to feel jealousy and turn spiky, accusing one another of breaches of a relationship that can’t, it seems, be acknowledged in any other way. The dry desert, forbidding cliff, and confusing glass labyrinth, then, could be seen as an actualisation of the emotional barriers people place between themselves. They are, after all, what’s between Mr Welbeck and his love Stella, created by the jealousy of Stella’s sister Ma Grist. But Mr Welbeck needs no fantasy land, as he talks of sticking to his house because it’s his “fortress” and “bolt-hole” — but against what? The Horseheads, or human relationships? And there’s a hint, I think, that Stella and Ma Grist may even be one person, with Stella the loving aspect that can only be reached once Ma Grist’s forbidding nature is overcome. It’s all quite emotionally complicated.

And crossing this landscape, facing its dangers together, might not lead to Tekker and Kit speaking more openly of their feelings, but it forces them to work together, often in actual physical contact. “We balance each other,” Tekker says at one point, because they’re having to move with their arms tight around each other to avoid falling, but it’s as close as he comes to admitting the other aspects of their growing relationship.

For me, The Edge of the World doesn’t work as well as Gordon’s more ghostly or subtle supernatural fiction. Tekker’s use of mental powers to enter the other world are dropped once he and Kit are given a flat disc of “bog oak dug up from the fen” which allows them to enter that other world by turning it. Why not just have the disc and do away with the complication of the mental powers? (Or make better use of the mental powers and have Tekker employ them in some way in their quest?) And Gordon’s terse, impressionistic prose style, which is great for capturing immediate sensations and fleeting moments—and so, perfect for adding a ghostly edge to a real-world narrative—doesn’t work, for me, so well with this sort of outright fantasy, which requires a clear establishment of the landscape and situation, at least initially. It’s hard to get an overall feel for some of the situations Kit and Tekker find themselves in, and as a result, dangers arrive suddenly, as do their solutions. It all feels like it’s filmed with nothing but too-close handheld camera-work, which can create a lot of tension, but can also be disorientating and confusing.

But the very oddness of the fantasy aspects at least gives it a sense of authenticity. You never feel Gordon is rehashing something generic, but rather that he has his imaginative eye set on some world he’s discovering within his own head, and relating it exactly as he finds it, even if it doesn’t make perfect sense.

Gordon does seem to produce some books I can’t quite get on with as much as others, and the ones that don’t work for me, such as The Ghost on the Hill, largely don’t because they’re too impressionistic and confusing; they leave me needing to read them a second time but not really wanting to because I didn’t enjoy the first read. The Edge of the World is more of that type than I’d like (because I love the theme of boy-and-girl-go-to-another-world—key examples being Le Guin’s Threshold and Catherine Storr’s Marianne Dreams), but at the same time it’s obvious there’s a genuine artistic intent behind all of his works, which makes the best of them—The House on the Brink, for instance—all the more special.

Published in 1998, John Gordon’s The Flesh Eater is a couple of decades on from the heyday of 70s and 80s folk-fantasy YA I’ve been reviewing on this blog, but in terms of feel, it absolutely belongs. (Although it’s more horror than fantasy.)

Set in Gordon’s beloved East Anglian fens, the protagonist Harry Hogge is in his late teens (old enough to be driving, young enough that his parents aren’t on at him to get a job — a very narrow margin), son of the proprietors of the town’s largest hotel, the Pheasant and Trumpet. His girlfriend is Miranda Merchant — beautiful, yet with a hint of the mercenary about her — but another girl stumbles into his life, the somewhat clumsy and anxious Emma Judd “with the wild black hair and the skirt with a lopsided hem”.

Researching local history, Emma has become obsessed with the legend of the “Mary-Lou”, a monster said to tear people apart and gnaw their bones. Her Great Aunt Rose has an even more vivid take on it:

“That’s what the Mary-Lou always done to them. Skewered them up somewhere like a butcher, so as he could come back and get them when he wanted a bite o’ fresh meat!”

Emma has discovered that the tale of the “Mary-Lou” originates with the first constable of the local castle, Guy de Marais, who kept a particularly vicious torturer as a servant, and it’s this servant who became known as the Mary-Lou — the marais loup, or Marsh Wolf. But, unknown to her or anyone else, the current occupant of Barbican House — built over the ruins of the old castle — one Guy March, a direct descendent of Guy de Marais, is intent on finding the burial place of the Mary-Lou, and continuing his forebear’s “necromantic practices”.

I first became aware of Gordon thanks to a Ghosts and Scholars article on him, which focused more on his earlier book, The House on the Brink. (Come to think of it, that would have been before The Flesh Eater was published, anyway.) The Flesh Eater certainly fits the Jamesian mould, with its unearthing of an ancient undead evil, also bringing in an element of “Casting the Runes” in the way the Mary-Lou is guided to its next victim.

But like all of the John Gordon books I’ve read so far, The Flesh Eater gives equal time to teenage relationships as it does to the supernatural. As I said in my review of The Waterfall Box, there’s a four-way tangle that appears in a lot of Gordon’s fiction, with the protagonist being drawn to two girls (one beautiful and sexually sophisticated but ultimately self-centred, the other less showy and more genuine), with a rival male (usually more physical) waiting to step in. That situation seemed to be emerging at the start of The Flesh Eater, with the athletic Donovan Brett (Miranda’s former boyfriend) an unwelcome presence in Harry and Miranda’s relationship. But just as I was expecting teen tensions to really ramp up, Donovan becomes the first victim of the resurrected Mary-Lou. And the looming confrontation with Miranda over Harry’s involvement with Emma is another thing that disappears almost too quickly. It’s as if Gordon has, at some level, dealt with this tangle and no longer needs to really gnaw at it as he did in his earlier fiction.

One thing it does mean is that the balance between the teen tangles and the supernatural investigation is much better — pretty much perfect, in fact — than in, say, The Waterfall Box, which had to cram in too much of the supernatural element in the final chapter to be really satisfying. Here, the relationships are handled much more as background to Harry and Emma’s investigations into the Mary-Lou, but tick along nicely.

There are a few other character moments that point to areas the novel could have explored — the difficulty Harry has in admitting he doesn’t believe in God, for instance — but it’s a short book, that just hints at some themes, rather than investigating them fully. (Harry’s public admission of atheism is there largely to bring out his mother’s snobbishness, anyway.)

One — perhaps the most interesting, as it combines the love story with the supernatural — is that Harry and Emma have occasional telepathic flashes where they realise they’re hearing one another’s thoughts. This is set against Guy March’s telepathic connection with a woman we don’t meet until the end, a woman who keeps indoors and “sees” the world through her pack of cards, but (mentally) accompanies March everywhere he goes. Harry immediately knows that the telepathic moments he shares with Emma are down to their relationship being grounded in genuine love, but what does this say about Guy March and his woman, whose identity, we learn at the end, points to a perhaps unhealthy kind of connection?

The Flesh Eater is, I think, a much more successful take on the same sort of story as The Waterfall Box, and it certainly makes me want to read (or re-read, in a couple of cases) some more of Gordon. Amazingly, for instance, he had another book published the same year, The Midwinter Clock. But then, I’ve got his boy-and-girl-go-into-a-fantasy-world novel The Edge of the World on my shelf, just begging for a re-read…

The Waterfall Box was John Gordon’s fourth YA novel, published in 1978. The box of the title is a small (“no higher than a teacup”) box of heavy, dark wood, ornately carved and bearing the words “IN TIME OF NEED” on the outside. It belonged, a few centuries back, to Silas Waterfall, known as Potter Waterfall for his founding of the Waterfall Pottery and his invention of his own unique green glaze. The box has been passed down — not to Waterfall’s descendants, as he had none, but to those of his housekeeper — until, in the present generation, it and the item it held (a small, sealed flask containing an unknown liquid) have been inherited by sisters Alice and Martha, one of whom has the box, the other the flask. There’s a family injunction never to sell these items, but whereas Martha married into money (her husband Richard now runs the Waterfall Pottery), Alice isn’t so well-off, and when she’s approached by antiques dealer Harman (“buying up the past to sell to the present”) offering her a substantial sum for the box — enough for her, her husband, and teenage son Bran to escape “this narrow house, squeezed by its neighbours in a crawling ant-run of a street” — she at first refuses, but, when Harman’s gone, changes her mind. She and her husband go out to celebrate the decision, and are killed in an accident.

Bran inherits the box, and is moved in with his aunt Martha, uncle Richard and his teenage cousin Sandy, who falls into an instant flirtation with him. (Even though Sandy’s parents are well-off, she’s impressed by the fact that, because he has the money from the sale of his parents’ small house, Bran is “rich”.) But it’s not long before Harman is back, claiming the sale of the box was agreed (even though he couldn’t know Alice changed her mind and decided to sell it after he’d gone). And by this time Bran has learned there’s more to the box than its being a mere antique. As well as a potter, Silas Waterfall was an alchemist, and it’s possible the liquid in the flask is the Alkahest (the “universal solvent” required as part of the process of turning lead into gold), while the pottery base of the box might be the Philosopher’s Stone.

By this point, the novel is following two strands. In the one, we have the development of Bran’s relationship with Sandy, in the other we have Harman’s desire to own the Waterfall Box. We never learn much about Harman, why he wants the box or how much he knows, only that he seems to know more than he rightly should. He approaches other people in the village, including Sandy’s best friend Stella, recruiting them to gain information about where the box and its now-reunited flask are kept. Harman has the patient-impatient air of a man who knows he’s close to getting what he wants, something he’s wanted for a long time, and believes he’s entirely capable of getting, by whatever means necessary. And there’s more than a spooky air about this shadowy figure, as we learn he’s able to call on a supernatural strength at times.

But it’s clear the relationship strand is Gordon’s focus. Bran is attracted to Sandy, and Sandy is flirtatious with Bran, but the situation is more complex than boy-meets-girl. Prior to reading The Waterfall Box, I read Gordon’s first book of short stories, The Spitfire Grave and Other Stories, and noted there how a four-person teen relationship dynamic showed up in several stories, most notably “Better the Devil You Know” (about a girl deciding how much gruff masculinity she wants in a boyfriend, and gets a close encounter with something perhaps-supernaturally both beast-ish and man-ish to help her decide). There, you have an intelligent, sensitive, slightly loner-ish main boy; a tough, at first belligerent, but ultimately principled rival boy; an attractive, though superficial, better-off girl who flirts with both boys, even playing them off each other; and a quieter girl, the other girl’s “best friend” in an uneven relationship, giving way to her but clearly more sensitive and worthy of the main boy’s love. That quartet is here, too, with Bran as main boy and Sandy as flirtatious girl, then Sandy’s “best friend” (as in “She’s my best friend and I hate her”) Stella as the quieter girl, and her amateur boxer of a boyfriend Griff (who Stella knows is really attracted to Sandy) as the belligerent rival. It’s obviously a tangle Gordon himself felt the need to revisit and rework, a mess of male identity (being tough versus being quiet and sensitive) and sexual attraction (the more flirtatious and outgoing girl who too-quickly changes loyalties, or the more serious girl who puts herself in the background), all superheated by teenage hormones, and with an added dose of class tensions (the more flirtatious girl is more well-off, the quieter girl is poor) just to keep things difficult. (Or, now I think about it, is it to keep things simple?)

The TLS review of The Waterfall Box (1st December 1978, by Gillian Cross) criticised the incompatibility of these two narrative strands:

“In practice, however, the two elements of the book act against each other. The fate of the alchemist’s enigmatic legacy is almost totally subordinate to the interaction of the characters. The violent implications of the mystery undercut the more prosaic teenage romance. It is hard, for example, to be patient with the long accounts of Bran’s reactions to Sandy’s sexual teasing when his grief for his parents—who are killed a quarter of the way through the book—merits only half a page of description. The final effect is one of insubstantiality, of a sketch for a powerful book with neither the incidents nor the characters to flesh it out.”

But I think the point is that Bran can’t resolve the situation with Harman and the box till he resolves the inner tangle of his relationships, and so sorts out his own values and priorities. Just as Harman’s offer to buy the box means easy money, in a crude way Sandy is easier in terms of sexual relationships, but ultimately both are shallow and perhaps (though we’re never given an explicit reason to feel Harman is evil, only that he has the air of it) immoral. It’s only by coming together in the right combination that Bran and the others can see Harman off, once his more supernatural aspects come to the fore.

Still, I do agree it’s not an entirely successful novel — but more because the supernatural aspects are worked out a little too quickly, with a lot of rushing about and characters intuiting things about Harman at the last minute, as a means of defeating him. I think that aspect of the novel needed more laying out of a few clues as to how Harman could be defeated, and perhaps about his motives, too, just to make the victory feel a bit more morally satisfying.

The Waterfall Box, as far as I can tell, seems only to have been published in hardback in the UK, with no subsequent paperback edition. This makes it quite difficult to find (and a little more expensive than I’d normally pay for a book of this vintage). Still, I think it’s an interesting part of Gordon’s work, clearly developing some of his concerns (and a better novel, on a first read at least, than The Ghost on the Hill, which I read last year but didn’t write about because it was too confusing on a first read — but which did get a paperback edition). Valancourt Books have recently reissued Gordon’s most well-known (among readers of weird fiction, anyway) novel, The House on the Brink, and I wonder if they’re going to work through his others, in which case The Waterfall Box might get a paperback edition at last. Who knows?