Wales, page 1 of 2

Four years have passed since the events of the previous two books in Jenny Nimmo’s Snow Spider trilogy, and The Chestnut Soldier (first published in 1989) feels a bit more grown-up, with boy magician Gwyn nearly thirteen and starting to notice girls in a different way (he thinks Nia Lloyd’s sixteen-year-old sister Catrin the most beautiful girl in Wales, but “Lately he had found it difficult to talk to her”). The narrative is divided between Gwyn and the now eleven-year-old Nia (the main character in Emlyn’s Moon), with Gwyn no longer feeling like the distant and wise boy-magician from the second book: he’s trying not to use his “power” (as he’s come to call it, thinking the word “magic” childish), partly because he keeps getting it wrong and making mistakes, but also because he feels he should be taller by now and is worried magic is stunting his growth.

One day, the Lloyds learn that their mother’s cousin, Evan Llŷr, is coming to stay. It has been ten years since they last saw him, and he’s now a major in the British Army. He has, though, been wounded somehow, and is seeking a place to convalesce. In his thirties, handsome and mysterious, he comes across instantly as something of a romantic figure. Nia thinks him “the prince from every fairy tale; he was fierce and kind—and immensely troubled”, and every woman in the narrative from Nia to Gwyn’s grandmother Nain are under his spell. Particularly so is Catrin, who neglects her boyfriend, an Irish lad called Patrick McGoohan, who likes to ride by on his horse to be admired, but now finds himself ignored.

The mystery of Evan’s “wound” takes a while to come out. It’s not physical. He went into a burning building while posted in Belfast, to rescue some of his men who were trapped inside, but he was the only one to escape alive. These elements—his being a soldier, an association with fire, and a potential friction with the Irish—act as a sort of mythic-magnetic pull between him and a story that has already appeared in the first volume of the series, the legend of Efnisien, who maimed the King of Ireland’s horses when the King came over to marry Efnisien’s sister, and whose angry spirit became trapped in the broken wooden horse that was among Nain’s gifts to the young Gwyn. Now, this wooden horse uses Nia’s younger brother Iolo to get itself free of Gwyn’s control, and the spirit of Efnisien enters, or blends with, Evan.

After this, Evan becomes increasingly dark and cruel. Poltergeist activity begins to surround him, breaking young Iolo’s toy horses and Idris Llewelyn’s carved unicorn, and driving Patrick McGoohan’s horse, Glory, to madness. Books fall off shelves, plates break, storms descend on the town, and the Lloyd home looks like it’s been hit by an earthquake. Catrin is hopelessly drawn to Evan, even when his kiss is rough and not at all to her liking. He becomes a sort of Heathcliff figure, romantic and dangerous in a way that skews into the supernatural.

Gwyn realises he has to do something, and after another few failed attempts which increasingly convince him he was never meant to be a magician at all, travels back in time to speak with his ancestor, Gwydion Gwyn, to work out how to deal with this demonic force. (Gwydion, who anachronistically asks “You’re not blaming your genes, are you?”, assures him that he, too, made plenty of mistakes.)

Like the preceding book in the trilogy, the supernatural element in The Chestnut Soldier enters gradually, at first being indistinguishable from the story of a troubled but handsome man suddenly entering the lives of the Lloyds. But unlike with Emlyn’s Moon, there’s not so much of an alternative story to be going on with while the supernatural builds. (In addition, although there’s just as much light comedy as in the previous book, it doesn’t feel as light, couched as it is amongst much more serious-seeming darkness.) In both books, everything is resolved in a brief but confusing showdown involving magic and mythical figures, but whereas in Emlyn’s Moon this released all the tension in the mundane narrative in a way that made sense, here it’s unclear how—or if—Evan’s real-life troubledness is fixed along with his supernatural possession. Things are resolved, but they don’t really feel resolved—though this could be taken as part of the series’ growing up along with its characters, having them face messier situations and messier resolutions.

I was disappointed to find no return of the faerie-like “White People” from the first two books, particularly as they were the most intriguing element, for me. Here, Gwyn only thinks of them briefly, to note that his sister is surely happy with them, so he feels no need to try and bring her back, and besides, he’s grown up and she is now a perpetual child, so what would the two have to talk about? It seems rather dismissive and cold, particularly as I can’t help thinking that Bethan’s supposed happiness with the fairy folk is the sort of happiness a cult member has with their cult—it may require deprogramming to reveal it’s not happiness at all. (I think The Snow Spider could do with a Boneland-style sequel, where an adult Gwyn has to either rescue his sister properly, or at least face up to the reality of what happened to her.)

Like Alan Garner’s The Owl Service (which Nimmo hadn’t read, at least before writing the first book in the series), myth, here, is a thing that threatens to take over modern generations, replaying its tragedies and re-inflicting its suffering. But unlike in The Owl Service, Gwyn’s approach is to fight myth with myth: just as Evan becomes infected with the mythic presence of Efnisian, Gwyn allows himself to become, in part, his ancestor Gwydion Gwyn. (Which leads to some comic moments, as this Welsh ancient’s presence in Gwyn leads to him suddenly finding all sorts of aspects of modern life hard to deal with. Only, as this happens in the final chapters, with the darkness around Evan building, it’s hard to really feel the comedy.)

The series ends with Gwyn saying “I’m grateful for the adventure but I don’t believe I’ll need magic for a while.” Which leaves things somewhat unresolved—he’s still evidently living in a world where myth leaks through into reality, so how does he know he’s not going to need it?

For me, this may be the least successful of three books. The Snow Spider worked as an introduction to the difficulties and wonders of this world of myth and magic; Emlyn’s Moon was the most satisfying as a novel, with its nicely-balanced magical and mundane storylines; The Chestnut Soldier seems almost consciously messier, reflecting the main characters’ entry into adolescence and an awareness of greater moral ambiguity, but ultimately ending in a mood where the characters just felt they’d outgrown magic, as though it were their choice to make, in a world that seems dangerously fraught with myths and faerie.

Like its predecessors, The Chestnut Soldier was adapted for television, being broadcast in four parts in 1991 (produced by HTV Cymru/Wales), running from Wednesday 20th November to 11th December, and retaining all the same actors for the main roles. Interestingly, in McGown and Docherty’s encyclopaedic look at children’s TV drama, The Hill and Beyond, they say: “The Chestnut Soldier loses the subtlety of its predecessors, opting instead for a more teen angst approach”—but as I’ve said, this feels true of the book, too. I can’t help wondering how this third instalment would have been dealt with had the 2020 BBC adaptation got this far. On the one hand, that series clearly implied that there was going to be more of a showdown with the faerie-like people who’d taken Gwyn’s sister, and their by no means friendly intentions; on the other, how would a 2020s adaptation have dealt with the romantic relationship between sixteen-year-old Catrin and thirty-something Evan? It’s accepted without comment in the book (even from Catrin’s mother), but I can’t imagine how it would have been treated in the style of the more careful 2020 version of The Snow Spider.

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.

I came across this novel while looking up reviews for another book. It sounded just like the sort of 1970s YA rural fantasy (though the fantasy is very light) with an otherwise realistic air that I’ve been reviewing on this blog for a while. The Ivory Anvil (published 1974 in hardback, 1977 in paperback) was Sylvia Fair’s first novel, and was runner-up in the 1974 Guardian Children’s Fiction Award. It also got a reading on Jackanory in February 1979.

The setting is rural Wales, often a presence in these 1970s YA books, such as The Owl Service and The Earth Witch, but in this case there’s an added authenticity as Fair was born in Wales, and based the main character on herself as a girl.

Sioned Jones is the daughter of a pharmacist in Nantyglyn, the sort of village, nestled in the Welsh mountains, where everyone knows everyone. Artistic but somewhat shy, Sioned has recently befriended the far more outgoing and good-with-words Anna Lind, whose family moved to a nearby farm from somewhere in England. Anna’s father is a sculptor, which fascinates the artistic Sioned. One day, her mother sends her on an errand to buy a new basin from Dinah China’s shop. Dinah (real name Meredith) is known throughout the village for her fractious relationship with her older sister Eva, though the two have lived in the same house all their long lives. Leaving the shop, Sioned is called back inside by the other sister, Eva, who wants to show her something: the treasures their uncle brought back from China. Among them is an ivory cube, a three-dimensional puzzle made up of three hundred and forty three (seven cubed) pieces. “When you see real beautiful things like these,” Eva says, “other things don’t matter. You can sense the power that beautiful things have?” And the ivory cube certainly has that effect on Sioned:

“Of all the treasure strewn about the room this one small glowing piece of ivory held her open-mouthed and blank-eyed, compelling her gaze until everything else around it blurred. As though it were suddenly in command of her soul, forcing her eyes to stare, reaching out towards her in an effort to grasp her mind, giving out signals she knew not how to receive. What does it want of me? she thought desperately.”

Sioned returns to Dinah China’s the next day, to show her a drawing she made of the shop, and is bowled over when Dinah hands her the ivory cube, saying “A little problem for you to solve… I think you’re the one to do it.” Somewhat overawed to be in the care of this surely priceless object, Sioned can think of nothing to do but keep it in her pocket, even when she and her friend Anna go on a bike ride into the mountains. It’s only afterwards that she gets the chance to sit down and examine it — to find one piece, shaped roughly like an anvil, and “no bigger than a baby’s tooth”, is missing. Horrified that she’s lost something of immense value, Sioned vows to search everywhere till she’s found it.

But, heading out with Anna again to look for it — even though it could be anywhere on the “huge, rocky, heather-filled sheep-speckled mountain” — Sioned instead finds herself drawn downwards: “Like a migrating bird she followed some guiding instinct which was pulling, tugging her down the valley so that she flew as though on wings…”

Like two similar books I’ve covered recently — The Grey Dancer and The Walking Stones, both set in Scotland — a valley near to Nantyglyn has been dammed up and turned into a reservoir, though where the damming in those books was seen as a threat to the rural way of life and a potentially exploitative disruption of the environment, Sioned (and, presumably, the rest of the village) see the dam as nothing but a positive. For her, the reservoirs “added so much charm and character to ordinary, everyday valleys.” And the possibility of a new, more modern dam is even a thing to be welcomed:

“The building of a new dam would mean new routines, new people, opportunities for exciting things to happen.”

At this point, after low rainfall, the reservoir is almost empty, and the fabled Drowned House can be seen in the reservoir bed — or its remains, anyway. And it’s here Sioned finds herself being drawn. She’s already been dreaming of a young woman in old-fashioned dress, standing in a triangular room, and now she finds the outline of that room in the levelled brickwork on the reservoir bed. Inspired, she starts digging in the mud, and finds it: the anvil-shaped ivory piece. Returning to Anna’s house, she, Anna, and Anna’s older brother Robert set about the intricate task of disassembling the puzzle so they can replace the missing piece, none of them realising till after it’s done that such a piece couldn’t have come loose on its own. It wasn’t Sioned who lost it. It had, she learns when she returns it to the Meredith sisters, been lost since they were children, and their cousin Lizzie had died trying to retrieve it when the valley was flooded back in 1894.

Aside from the many similarities in setting and its light air of fantasy, there’s a lot that’s different between The Ivory Anvil and, say, The Owl Service, The Earth Witch, or even something less intense like The Wild Hunt of Hagworthy. Usually in a book like this, the main character would be the newcomer to the rural setting. Here, even though Anna would be perfect for that role, it’s Sioned who’s the main character. And this allows her love of Wales, its landscapes, people, and language to provide a warm backdrop throughout the book. (Sioned doesn’t speak Welsh — everyone, she says, stopped speaking Welsh when the dam was built — but she wishes she could, and vows to learn.) Also, in any other 1970s rural fantasy of this type, there would be some sort of class tension, but here, there’s none. Aside from the lost puzzle, in fact, the only tensions are within Sioned herself: her shyness, and her sometimes finding Anna doesn’t appreciate Wales as much as she wants her to (though Anna comes round without any need for a confrontation). Perhaps the only real conflict in the book is between Dinah and her sister Eva, rooted deep in the past.

Overall, it’s an evocatively-written, gentle and sensitive tale, with a touch of the fantastic and an idyllic air of dwelling in the landscape of rural Wales. The book got some positive reviews on its release, as in this from the Birmingham Daily Post:

“Her heroine is intelligent, artistic and passionately fond of her Welsh heritage, and struggles to sort out herself and the mystery of an intricate Chinese puzzle which is somehow linked to the past. The people and emotions are refreshingly real.”

And this, from Sarah Hayes in the Times Literary Supplement:

“…a story which begins slowly but gathers momentum as the pull of the past becomes stronger, and as friendship develops between two very different girls. Wales plays an important supporting role, and the compelling natural descriptions are essential to the story itself.”

Fair was born Sylvia Price in Rhayader, Radnorshire, in 1933. She studied at the Bath Academy of Art and went on to teach art for a while. She married Keith Fair (who would go on to become head of art at Grosseteste College in Lincoln), and had five children. Her next book after The Ivory Anvil was The Penny Tin Whistler (1976), which was followed by two books for younger children, The Bedspread (1982 in the US, 1983 in the UK) and Barney’s Beanstalk (1989). She returned to YA in 1997 with Big Talk. By the 1980s she’d remarried, to poet Bill Turner.

The Penny Tin Whistler is already on my to-read shelf. It’s about telepathic twins!