Louise Lawrence, page 1 of 2

Louise Lawrence’s 1986 YA Moonwind is something of a thematic sibling to her earlier novels Star Lord and Earth Witch, and though it’s ostensibly SF, it’s better read as a fable or fantasy that uses the backdrop of space and technology to heighten its themes. (Perhaps a better description might be New Age SF, considering its allusions to ancient Atlantis, humans being partly descended from aliens, and the idea that aliens are more like spiritual beings than bug-eyed monsters.)

It starts with a spaceship being forced to land on a barren moon for repairs. For some reason, only junior technician Bethkahn is left onboard to assess the damage (and to discover there’s one thing she can’t repair), while the rest of the crew take a secondary craft to the nearby blue planet. Landing on an island, that craft is destroyed when a volcano erupts, leaving Bethkahn isolated, alone, and unable to take off. The ship’s computer suggests she enter suspended animation, from which it will wake her when the situation changes. And it does, ten thousand years later, but with alarming news: the formerly primitive people of that nearby planet have developed technology, and are now visiting their moon. Bethkahn takes one look at these lumbering, space-suited creatures, and immediately dismisses them as “Cavorting imbecile monsters!” The ship fears that, when the creatures find it, they’ll take it apart to see how it works, and Bethkahn will be stranded in this primitive system forever. The pair watch for developments.

The story then switches to seventeen-year-old Gareth Johns from Aberdare (yes, that blue planet was Earth all along), co-winner of a World Educational Council essay-writing competition, for which he’s won a month-long visit to the US moonbase. His essay, titled “The Lunacy Syndrome” is about how there are dwindling congregations of church-goers on Earth, but “go to the Moon and you come back converted”. The Moon, he thinks, is “where science and religion finally meet”: “God is alive and well and living on the Moon.”

The other prize-winner is Californian Karen Angers, whose essay is on how the Moon has always been characterised, poetically and mythically, as female: Phoebe, Diana, and the White Goddess. Reading it, Gareth is unprepared for what he considers the “loud-mouthed and gawky” young woman who wrote it, who gets things off between them to a bad start by, first of all, referring to him as English—he’s the “first Welshman on the Moon”, after all!—and by constantly calling him Gary. But underlying this clash are differences of class (Gareth’s home town is poor, and he feels little hope about his own future, or that of the world, whereas Karen’s parents are obviously well-off), and of temperament. Gareth has come to the base expecting to “feel the Moon’s almighty desolation and catch the wonder”; sunny Karen seems to have just come to photograph everything, and Gareth feels she’s turned what ought be an awesome and even spiritual experience into a tourist trip.

Bethkahn, meanwhile, realises she has a chance of escape. If she can sneak into the moonbase, she can use their tools to fix her ship’s broken stabiliser and take off. But how to enter the base without being detected? She does have, it turns out, a means of doing so. Because Bethkahn, and the rest of her people, are non-corporeal; they are “spirit”, not flesh. But in order to do the work on the stabiliser she’s going to need to use a physical body, somehow, and the easiest way seems to be “spiritual possession”: she will enter a person’s body, take it over for a while, get the work done and leave. But her first attempt ends in disaster. She tries to enter a lunar buggy to possess the driver, but because the driver, lazily, left the internal airlock door open, all she succeeds in doing is killing him. Her next, more careful, attempt drives her intended possessee mad. She realises she needs, not a body to use, but an ally. And there’s only one person this can be: Gareth, who has discovered one of her ship’s spy modules but has kept quiet about it. He, she realises, might be someone she can trust. (And he already has a hint she exists. Just before the disaster with the moon buggy, he and some others saw a cloud of moon dust, driven by what, despite there being no atmosphere, seemed like a wind—a moonwind—and inside it, he thought he saw a young woman.)

I’m sure the more hard-SF type of reader will already have noticed what appears to be a massive logical hole in this set-up. Bethkahn is non-corporeal, yet she had to open the moon buggy’s door to get in, which is why the driver was killed. It turns out she always has to open a door to get into anywhere. It also turns out she can carry physical objects—the damaged stabiliser is one such object—even though it seems she can’t handle the tools she’d need to use to fix it. (This despite being an engineer on a spaceship that surely at some point needs tools to fix its other components. And why does she need a physical spaceship at all if she’s non-corporeal?) In one scene, Gareth hands her a plastic bag containing the spy module he discovered, and she walks off with it; but when Gareth tries to touch her, his hand goes right through. Bethkahn’s non-corporeality, it seems, is there to first of all create a plot difficulty (how to fix the stabiliser), and secondly to underline the core theme of the book: loneliness.

Bethkahn has spent ten thousand years on the moon, and though she has her ship’s computer for company, “It was not enough that the starship cared for her. She needed a person… a voice, a smile, another living being beside herself.” Gareth, meanwhile, has already been warned that one of the main perils of this harsh environment isn’t its lack of atmosphere, but that “Solitude can be dangerous on the Moon”, because “here on the Moon was a loneliness that terrified, a monstrous isolation.” When he comes to know Bethkahn, he immediately grasps the poetic meaning of her nature:

“She’s non-corporeal, see? A ghost… stranded here… wandering. My God, there’s loneliness for you.”

Gareth is equally lonely, in a way. He’s hopeless about his life at home (“a decaying industrial nation, closed-down coal mines and acid rain and small chance of getting employment”), and doesn’t fit in with the mostly cheery Americans on the base. When Karen suggests he come to Santa Barbara where her dad can help get him a job, he bursts out:

“There’s nothing anywhere! No reason! No purpose! … There’s no memory on Earth. Here’s where the meaning began. Here! I want to go on, not back…”

Bethkahn, though, offers him an alternative: leave with her. Only, to do so, he has to become, like her, non-corporeal, which in human terms means dying. Moonwind is, at times, a stark narrative, about not just loneliness, but the way loneliness only increases the difficulties between people. Bethkahn’s inexperience in dealing with physical humans leads to one death and one madness; Gareth, on the other hand, is always getting in trouble with Karen and the other people on the base thanks to his oscillating between a spiky resentment of their generally happy dispositions, and his own rather disruptive sense of humour. In her essay on the moon goddess, Karen wrote that “loneliness makes her cruel”, and that certainly seems the unintentional effect of both Bethkahn’s and Gareth’s isolation.

As with Lawrence’s Star Lord, the alien in Moonwind is a more advanced, more spiritual being, but one with a slight coldness to it. The closer parallel, though, is with Earth Witch, which is also about a troubled Welsh lad getting into a relationship with a woman who’s part human, part mythical entity. In all three, Lawrence takes her stories as close to tragedy as she can with a Young Adult audience, while leaving a little space at the end for something like a positive ending.

Moonwind was adapted for TV, though in mini-format. It was shown as part of ITV’s Book Tower magazine programme, in eight episodes from 8th January 1987 to 19th February (4:50p.m. on Thursdays). The Book Tower was itself only a half-hour (minus adverts) programme featuring book reviews and story readings as well as its drama serial, but even if each episode of the adaptation was only 10 minutes long, that could still make for a short feature-length film in total, which would be interesting to see. The only thing I’ve been able to find, though, is one picture of some of the cast:

Like the first Louise Lawrence book I read (1974’s The Wyndcliffe), I bought Andra (1971) because of the wonderful Antony Maitland cover to its UK first edition. But whereas The Wyndcliffe proved equal to both its cover and my expectations of it as a slice of vintage 70s British YA folk-fantasy, the best thing about Andra remains its cover, and it was mainly interesting to read because it was Lawrence’s first published novel (she wrote four — “very bad”, in her own words — beforehand, apparently).

It’s set 2000 years from now. Our world’s surface is no longer habitable, thanks to a bomb that “swung Earth from her orbit” — the year is now four times as long as ours — “just to end one stupid war and left us with a lump of useless rock”, as the titular heroine puts it. The action takes place in Sub-city One, one of three subterranean redoubts lit and heated entirely by artificial means. (There are a further five cities belonging to the rival nation-state of Uralia, which, ruled as it is by one Gravinski, is clearly a Cold War Russia analog.)

It’s a dull, mechanistic future. Children are separated from their parents at birth and raised by E.D.C.O. (whose initials aren’t explained, as far as I recall, but thinking of it as Education Corporation works), which separates the low IQs from the high, and assigns everyone, on adulthood, with a job and a spouse. People only ever wear the colour assigned to their job, all hair is cut short and, for some reason, everyone is blond-haired and blue-eyed.

Andra, a.k.a. Citizen C/22/33/5, whose age is given as 15 (though this must be our years, not theirs, otherwise she’d be a rebellious teen of 60), is a misfit from the start, classed as low IQ for her resistance to E.D.C.O.’s production-line style of upbringing. Playing hooky one day, she’s caught in an accident that destroys the part of her brain processing eyesight. Normally, she’d be terminated (“The city would not support any person who was not physically faultless”), but one Dr Lascaux takes the opportunity to try an experimental brain graft. The only available brain that will fit is one that belonged to a young man from 1987. The operation proves a success. Andra can see.

But she does so with the added memories of someone from the 20th century, who knows what such things as the sun, trees, fields and animals are. And she feels the hunger to see these things again. (To make matters worse, her hair also turns black and her eyes go brown, to the disgust of the more conservative dwellers of Sub-city One.) Having decided she’s nowhere near as stupid as E.D.C.O. says she is, Dr Lascaux recommends she be assigned to help the three-hundred-year-old Professor Kiroyo in the archives. Yet even this unusual, and perfectly suited, opportunity — Kiroyo is researching how people used to live before the surface became uninhabitable — grates with Andra’s intensely individualistic personality. She starts to display clearly 1960s-inspired signs of unacceptable free-spiritedness, such as growing her hair long and writing pop lyrics, putting her at the centre of a burgeoning youth movement which brings her into conflict with the the city’s autocratic director Shenlyn.

Andra is mostly a pretty straightforward free-spirit-versus-stultifying-society narrative. Everything about Sub-city One is an imaginative teen’s exaggerated idea of what being a dull, conforming adult is all about:

“…in this whole horrible subterranean place there is nothing, not one thing, I would class as beautiful. The language we speak is empty and void of any real meaning. Beauty no longer exists… This is not living… This is merely existing, being kept alive to keep our species alive and feed the demands of Shenlyn and the computers… With every breath I take I long to see the sun.”

It’s saved from being a straight-out dystopia when it turns out that Kiroyo is studying how people used to live so colonists can be sent to the newly-discovered, old-Earth-like Planet 801 in a fleet of rockets — so all the young people singing songs of rebellion and freedom are going to get their wish, freedom from the city and a chance to make their own way of life. But things, of course, don’t go quite so smoothly, thanks to those evil Uralians, and the novel ends on a rather abrupt down-turn.

Perhaps this reflects Lawrence’s own situation at the time. She was in an unhappy marriage (though soon to get out of it) and the dedication, “To my husband, for his tolerance during Andra’s creation”, can’t help, with that knowledge, sound distinctly cold.

There’s plenty of what would play out in Lawrence’s subsequent books, here in raw form. Andra’s brain graft — an alien and destabilising influence that opens her up to a new way of seeing things, bringing with it a host of sometimes dangerous difficulties — recalls the microscopic alien race that infects Jane Bates in The Power of Stars, the ghost that befriends Anna Hennessey in The Wyndcliffe, or the fascination Owen Jones feels for the nature-goddess-like Bronwen in The Earth Witch. There’s also the conflict between the worlds of potentially destructive technology and the raw power of nature, as laid out most clearly in her later book Star Lord.

Andra was adapted for Australian TV in 1976, apparently with such a low budget that shop window dummies were used as extras, and the scenery was mostly large coloured blocks. The novel was republished in 1991 in the US, with Publishers Weekly complaining of “the sometimes puzzling British slang” (I’d love to know what they were referring to) and that Lawrence “seems unsure of her message”, while Kirkus Reviews mentioned “Hackneyed writing, lack of science, and general implausibility”, but ultimately found it worked, “by establishing Andra as the one striving, scornful, yearning person in a world of drones”.

I have to admit I found the writing sometimes unpolished — occasionally a character would just start speaking in a scene when they weren’t previously present, and the point of view in the early chapters slips from one character to another mid-paragraph. I’d say it’s probably best read as part of an interest in Lawrence’s work, as the opening move in a soon-to-improve writing career, rather than as an introduction to it. Those of her later novels that I’ve read are all more interesting, and prove that she was up to taking on some strong themes. (Her post-nuclear Children of the Dust sounds rather Threads-like.)

I’ll still be keeping my hardback copy primarily for the Antony Maitland cover, though.

I thought I had read all the Louise Lawrence books that initially grabbed my fancy, but when I happened upon the premise of this, her second novel, I had to read it because it sounded so bizarre: a girl is bitten by a rabbit and gains the destructive “power of the stars”. I was sure, from my recent reading of Lawrence’s Wyndcliffe, Star Lord, and The Earth Witch, it couldn’t be as radioactive-spider ridiculous as it sounded. It turns out to fit very much with the kind of late 1960s/early 1970s YA novel I’ve covered on Mewsings before — things like Alan Garner’s The Owl Service and Penelope Lively’s The Wild Hunt of Hagworthy — so that, in the end, I found The Power of Stars (1972) interesting for its preoccupations, even though I didn’t think it quite worked as a novel.

The setting is the borderland mountain region between England and Wales, and the cast is that old Owl Service/Earth Witch formula, the bickering trio of teens (two boys, one girl) with added class tension (two are working class, one is middle class). The girl is Jane Bates, 15 years old and the poorest of the three, who lives with her Granny as her mother abandoned her before moving abroad and breaking all contact (as with Owen in The Earth Witch). Walking home from school with the local lad she’s known all her life, Jimmy Keir, and an English boy, Alan Grant, whose divorced, soon-to-be-remarried mother has recently moved to the area, all three, separated in the dark of the village countryside, are distracted by a strange, powerful brightness in the stars. They hear a weird scream, but it’s only a rabbit, caught, somewhere in the dark, in a trap. The following evening, the three are again walking home when they find the poor thing, still alive, though out of the trap. (They find the trap, which seems to have been hit by lightning — it’s just a lump of molten metal.) Jane picks up the rabbit, intending to take it to a vet, and it bites her, deep in the wrist. Uncharacteristically for a rabbit, it hangs on, as though to make sure she’s thoroughly bitten. Jimmy flings the rabbit off her, and they take her to Alan’s stepfather-to-be, Dr Nick Mackenzie, who, once Jane has been taken to A&E, seeks out the rabbit, thinking he might find something unusual about it because of its behaviour. He and Alan bump into local oddity Marcia Cotterel, known to the area’s kids as the Batwoman, because she’s a scientist studying bats (also, they think she’s a bit crazy). Her dog, it turns out, was also bitten by a rabbit — perhaps the same one — and she’s also trying to find it, to see if it was infected by some odd new disease.

Things tick along for a while, with the trio of kids bickering lightly but constantly, in the way of bored teens, when two odd things start to occur with Jane. First, she seems to have gained a new fear of machines — though only at night, when the stars are out. Second, if Jane is particularly worked up, those machines suddenly fuse, or melt, or even blow up, as though hit by a blast of intense energy. Afterwards, Jane will usually be found alone in the dark, staring up at the stars, drinking in their light.

It turns out Jane has been infected by a sort of alien life-form, an intelligence that exists as tiny, neuron-like protozoa, simple on their own but somehow forming, together, a sort of intelligence. And it’s an intelligence that feeds off starlight and hates machines, perhaps because (Dr Nick suggests) they might have once become too reliant on machines in their own, more advanced, society that self-destructed, and now they’re trying to save us from the same fate, using Jane as a focus. (They also use her to drink up the experience of embodied life, something they’ve evidently been missing since becoming space-bound protozoa. That, and music.)

This hatred of machines, combined with bouts of the irrational need to destroy them, reminds me of The Changes. The BBC series came out in 1975, but Peter Dickinson’s trilogy of novels the series was adapted from were all out by 1970, and I can’t help wondering if Lawrence wasn’t proposing an alternative explanation for those books’ outbreak of irrational anti-machine violence. (Star-bound protozoa with a beef against the mechanical is a little bit better — though only just — as explanations go, than Dickinson’s Merlin-on-drugs.) But the idea of a rabbit bite infecting Jane with an alien life-form is less about scientific plausibility, I’d say, than a sort of imaginative pressure on the author to bring together the two archetypal forces that come out again in her later novel Star Lord: the science-fictional force from the stars, and the ancient forces of nature, only here they’re united, rather than being inimical as they are in Star Lord.

This is Lawrence’s second novel — her second published novel, anyway — and I thought it perhaps showed in a couple of structural weaknesses. The lengths she goes to in order to ensure her trio of teens are out at night (under starlight) in a machine (Alan’s car), far from home, near the climax of the novel, felt a bit too much like an author over-thinking things (they run out of petrol, then a tyre blows). And the chapter where Dr Nick and Miss Cotterel theorise on the nature of the neuron-like protozoa that have taken up residence in Jane’s brain relies a bit too much on some far-fetched guesses being taken by two scientists as the only likely explanation.

But it’s a short novel, and I enjoyed it for how much it fits in with the other books of the time. The constant tensions between the characters have that post-Kitchen Sink era air of gritty social realism, as do their goodnatured but cranky attempts not to give in to class resentments (Alan always has money, Jimmy never does); the writing style has that poetic terseness writers on the literary side of late 60s/early 70s YA seem to slip into (Garner eventually taking it to the extreme, but it’s also there in John Gordon and William Mayne); and there’s another theme of early 70s YA, broken families and the added emotional burden this places on adolescents who not only have to deal with puberty, but some sort of supernatural/science-fictional menace as well. (And Jane’s “power of the stars” feels very much like that horror trope that became increasingly prevalent in the 70s, of what I might call Teenage Telekinetic Breakout Disorder, or Carrie’s Syndrome.)

It’s perhaps more interesting when read as part of Lawrence’s own body of work and her development as a writer (I now want to read her first novel, the more purely SF Andra), or as one more part of early 70s rural fantasy (folk fantasy, as it might be called), so I wouldn’t recommend The Power of Stars as a first read if you’re interested in Lawrence, but it’s by no means a bad book. I’m still not entirely sure about the rabbit, though…