Wales

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!

Having recently read Lawrence’s 1978 YA novel Star Lord, how could I resist following it up with 1981’s The Earth Witch, sounding as it does so much like a companion piece? And there are a few similarities between the two. Both, for instance, are set in rural Welsh valleys, and in both the teen characters find themselves dealing with the archetypal/mythic entity of their book’s title, both of which sound like one of the major arcana from an alternative Tarot deck laid down by the post-60s imagination.

In The Earth Witch, the main characters are a trio that recalls Alan Garner’s The Owl Service: we have an English brother and sister, John and Kate Henderson, whose parents have recently bought Tregarron Farm in Wales, and Owen Jones, Welsh working class to the English pair’s middle class, adopted son of Ifor and Gladys, who have worked on the farm and lived in its tenant cottage all their lives. Owen is Ifor and Gladys’s nephew, abandoned by his mother when she had him out of wedlock — “born on the wrong side of the sheets”, as Aunty Glad puts it — after which she left for America, where she’s now married and has all but forgotten her son. Though his aunt and uncle look after him like a mother and father, there’s nevertheless a mother-shaped hole in his life, just from the knowledge that she’s out there but not in his life.

The book opens in February, as the first signs that winter may be on the way out bring a new sense of life to the valley. The three teens learn that a new tenant has moved into the dilapidated cottage of Mynydd Blaena, formerly the home of the eccentric (perhaps outright mad) Megan Davis, who was somehow involved in the death of a local man a little while back, and was then found dead herself in her isolated home. The new woman, Bronwen, claims to be a relative of hers. In fact, to Owen, she claims to be something more:

“I am her… I am her blood. The white roots woke me and I rose from the grave of her bones and her dust. I know all that she knew.”

Owen is the only person to offer Bronwen help with the cottage, though she seems more to resent than welcome it, while at the same time feeling it’s exactly what she’s due. She has her distinctly witchy aspects: control of a crow and a sometimes-vicious black dog, as well as a thorough knowledge of the magical uses of plants. And as winter turns to spring, her personality thaws. She starts to act like the mother Owen never had. She becomes a teacher in the local school, and her relationship with Owen shifts from the motherly to that of a lover. In the fullness of spring, she’s the May Queen at the village celebrations, though some locals still mutter darkly about what happened with Megan Davis and the ill-fated Gareth Llewellyn, and how they expect it all to happen again.

To Owen, Bronwen speaks openly about what she believes herself to be: not just the valley’s May Queen but a Goddess, at once Rhiannon of the Underworld, Blodeuwedd of the Owls, Angharad of the Lake, Cerridwen the Shape Changer, and the embodiment of Nature itself, who “gives life and destroys it, like the earth, like the seasons”. (In many ways, she’s a human version of the unforgiving Mawrrhyn mountain in Star Lord, a force that encapsulates all that nature gives in bounteous spring and summer, and the harsh price it demands in winter.)

She has moments of bitterness directed against the male-dominated modern world:

“Goddess I was once but they are despising me. They are setting up the male God in their own image and casting me down… You [men] are all one to me. All answerable for the crimes you have committed.”

She seems to come round when Owen reminds her she has “no right… to blame a single person for the sins of all”, but the cycle is started and just as she — and nature in the valley — gives of her great bounty in the year’s harvest, so she’ll demand her price. One life for all that she has given. And whose life but the boy she lavishes her greatest attention on?

Kate is the other character to feel something of Bronwen’s archetypal nature:

“Kate could feel her. She was cold in the river voices, hard in the heart of stones and black as hell. She was cruel as the peak of Pen-y-Craig and the look in the crow’s beady eyes. She was bats and moths and crane flies, everything Kate hated and feared…”

Yet:

“She seemed to embody the spring within herself; the song of the river over its stones, the wind through the sedge and the drift of willow leaves. She was the essence of flowers, the soul of the sunlit land, old as the maypole dance and eternally young…”

But in her case it’s what the sight of this powerful woman awakens in her own depths:

“Below the surface of herself Kate could feel something so hideous she could not bear to think of it… an instinct of blood sacrifices and fertility rites, ancient rituals of birth and death…”

“She doesn’t want love,” she tells Jonathan. “She wants worship.”

There’s so much in this novel that ties in with the strand of living-myth-meets-kitchen-sink-drama I love in 1970s YA (here lasting into the 80s). There’s rural Wales as a place on the border between myth and gritty reality, where folk beliefs sit unexamined alongside a fading Christianity, while both are being replaced by a scientific rationality that denies they exist — which simply means that those who encounter these mythic forces must do so without help. Modern and traditional ways rub together to produce a weird, magical, and often tragic friction. Like so many of these books, it’s about that 1970s balance point where the modern, technological, and rational meet the ancient, imaginative, and sacred: something that’s fading away, or perhaps only temporarily sleeping, and prone to rise up in all its dangerous, harsh, timeless and often inhuman power. As Kate says — talking simultaneously about Bronwen, the Goddess, and Nature all at once:

“The earth… That land out there… We’ve forgotten what she means. We’re not connected anymore. We just live on the surface and nothing touches us. We don’t think deeply of the soil and the stones and the hearts of the hills. We’re not part of the land… [We] just use her.”

The theme is just as relevant today, but I can’t imagine it being put in similar terms, framed as a sacred thing. Now, the landscape is a thing to manage, to care for, like a sick patient, not the wounded Goddess she may in fact be. The difference being that a sick patient may die, but a wounded Goddess is likely to hit back…

After the full-on fantasy of his first two books, The Weirdstone of Brisingamen and The Moon of Gomrath (a trilogy to be completed later this year), Alan Garner’s subsequent two novels saw a reining in of fantastical elements, as well as a much sparser approach to writing, with description so cut back, at times we’re left with nothing but unattributed dialogue. Elidor (1965) still features a trip to another world, enchanted artefacts, and a unicorn, but in The Owl Service (1967), the fantastical is more about a force shaping earthly events into an age-old mythical pattern than explicit magic (though there are few poltergeist-like phenomena to let us know just what sort of a power we’re dealing with).

You might be forgiven for thinking, from its title, The Owl Service perhaps influenced a certain aspect of the Harry Potter novels. I certainly imagined, before I read it, that it would feature scenes of owls swooping into rooms delivering important messages about magical things to breathless teens — but the “service” of the title in fact refers to a dinner service, a set of plates patterned with a design which at first glance appears to be flowers, but which can also be seen as owls. (This is an actual dinner service Garner’s mother-in-law discovered, and which is reproduced in the book.)

A set of plates? It might sound a disappointing basis for a fantasy novel, but Garner’s book is all about the meeting of the mundane and the mystical/mythical, the way an ancient story can overwrite everyday reality, forcing it towards potentially tragic ends.

The link between owls and flowers is the story of Blodeuwedd, a woman created out of flowers at the behest of Lleu Llaw Gyffes. Although created for him, Blodeuwedd turns out to have a mind (and heart) of her own, and falls in love with Gronw Pebr instead. Gronw kills Lleu; Lleu is resurrected and kills Gronw; then Blodeuwedd is turned into an owl for her part in her husband’s murder. This is the pattern of events that, building up in a static-like charge around one particular house in an isolated Welsh valley, seeks to impose its tragedy on a trio of youngsters once every generation. The “Owl Service” of the title, the plates with the flowers/owls design, was one particular generation’s attempt to trap or divert the energy of the myth away from an actual murder. It failed, and the events of the novel are heavy with the never-to-be-spoken-of tragedy of the previous generation. And of course the very keeping of that secret only serves to make it more likely to play out again, as, in The Owl Service, we get to see how a contemporary (mid-1960s) trio of teens, two English and middle-class comfortably-off, one Welsh and poor, deal with it.

The writing style, with its cut-back descriptions and dialogue free of any sort of adjectival prompting, means you, as the reader, have a little bit more work to do than in the average novel. This quickly proves to The Owl Service‘s advantage, though, as that little bit extra work creates a great deal more emotional investment. (I could hear the voices of the characters far better than in most novels.) Garner trusts his readers to be as sensitive and intelligent as he is about the micro-politics and emotional tussles of a small household held back by a little bit too much English reserve and oppressive class-consciousness. It also means that, when something strange happens, you often end up doing a double-take — did what I think happened really just happen? — which is of course what the characters are thinking, too.

Although it’s quite a short novel, it builds its power gradually, leaving it right to the end to resolve — something I loved in Elidor, and which worked only a little bit less effectively here. The sense of the tragedies of the past — both the ancient, mythical past, and that of the previous generation — weighing in on the innocents of the present, at the very moment they lose their innocence, and the horror of their inability to see just how they’re being twisted into playing parts in an ancient tragedy, creates a tight drama using only a few characters that nevertheless feels as though it’s reaching epic depths.

Garner is, along with Robert Holdstock, one of the few writers I know to really capture the dark, barbarous, wild side of the mythical imagination, to write about the way myths and stories really can affect us to the core, modern-minded though we are. Both writers also have a strong sense of the landscape they’re writing in, how it surrounds, traps, inspires, enchants, and shapes the characters within it. Despite the sparse descriptions, something in The Owl Service made me feel that this was very much a landscape I knew, which is something that’s always made me connect with a book (or film — it’s partly why I love 70s Brit horror and Doctor Who) that much more.

Of Garner’s later work, I’ve only read Thursbitch, an adult novel which is even more cut-back in its descriptions, and even more intense in its tying together events past and present, people and the landscape they move through. I can’t work out why I haven’t read more of his work. I certainly intend to.