Young Adult Fiction, page 1 of 11

As the 1970s moved towards the 1980s, and as punk rock replaced prog, it seems the inner city began to replace the countryside as the standard location for YA novels. Where formerly the natural world had been the more closely associated with childhood (endless summer holidays spent mucking around in fields), the inner city, with its more evident social problems, came to seem the more authentic, or at least relevant. Judy Allen’s first two YA books, The Spring on the Mountain and The Stones of the Moon, were firmly set not just in the country, but in the Earth Mysteries-flavoured country of Janet and Colin Bord’s Mysterious Britain—stone circles, ancient tracks, Merlin, Arthur, druids and so on. With her next two YA fantasies, Lord of the Dance (1976) and The Dream Thing (1980), the action moved to the town/city, and the fantasy element was no longer ancient forces in the landscape but dreams and the inner world.

(After writing on her first two YA fantasies a while back, I was hoping to review her next book, Lord of the Dance, but it’s been impossible to find a copy. Eventually, I gave in and read the ebook version that’s currently available, only to find something odd. It was originally published in 1976, but the ebook contained references to things like CDs and horror films on home video. I looked up some reviews for the original release, and even their brief plot summaries made me realise it must have been extensively rewritten at some point, presumably in the 1980s.)

The Dream Thing starts with its teen protagonist Jen sitting down to write a school essay about what matters most to her, and realising what she’s most concerned with is hate. Some gypsies have recently moved into a patch of unused land under a nearby motorway flyover, and she wants nothing more than for them to go away. She herself is half-gypsy—her father was a gypsy, though he was killed in a fight with his cousin before he could marry her mother, and before she herself was born—and now everyone at school is taunting her about “her relatives” having moved in, and asking if she’s going to join them.

She starts to have a frightening dream dominated by some monstrous thing, all sharp metal scales and a big tail spike. Convinced the gypsies (whom she early on confronts, telling them they’re not wanted round here) have put a curse on her—she also feels random sharp pains all the time, is convinced she’s going to die, and thinks she’s being followed—she draws this dream monster, in an attempt to work out what it might be. Having finished the drawing, she realises this dragon-like thing has no eye, so she puts one in, to finish it—and, like the old rabbi putting the final letter on the golem’s forehead, she feels something change, as though it has now come alive. Soon after, one of the gypsy caravans seems to have been attacked, with a large dent and suggestive scratches along its side, as though something big and rough had scraped against it.

Jen learns from her friend Tom (whose fascination with Native Americans, and his understanding of their persecution by European settlers, makes him sympathetic to the gypsies) that the land the travellers are on was bequeathed to the public over a century ago. Researching the exact wording of the bequest in the local library, she finds the land was actually given to the residents for their use, which, strictly speaking, excludes the gypsies; she brings the book to Tom’s and accidentally-on-purpose lets his parents (who are very much anti-gypsy) see it. Soon after, the police turn up in force to tell the gypsies to move on. They can’t immediately—one of them has recently given birth—so they’re given a week. Jen, weirdly open and honest about her dislike of them, takes the opportunity to let the head gypsy know that she was the one who provided the clue that meant they were going to have to move. But when she finds herself still gripped by nightmares of the dream-thing, her mother says the only thing to do is go to the gypsies and ask if they, with their knowledge of such things, can help.

Jen is plainly not what you’d call an entirely sympathetic character. Having decided it’s the gypsies’ fault she’s being bullied at school, she focuses entirely on wanting rid of them. In a way, the reader is left in the position of watching the car crash she’s making of the situation, how she’s letting this hatred of the gypsies take over her life, to the point where it acquires a supernatural life of its own. (And mentioning car crashes, I couldn’t help wondering if the patch of wasteland the gypsies occupy might be near the one where Maitland is stranded in Concrete Island, while Crash’s Robert Vaughan perhaps cruises by on the motorway above. Such hemmed-in remnants of the natural world took on a certain resonance in this time of cultural handover from countryside to city.)

But as an adult reader, I couldn’t help being aware of Jen as a troubled child (a teen, yes, but still a child) under serious pressure. The gypsies didn’t just kick off a spate of isolating bullying at school—which even her supposed friend Tom joins in with—their presence brings up Jen’s buried feelings about her father, whom she never knew, and his violent death. And all this is packed into the dream-thing: not only is it a scaly metal dragon-thing intent on attacking the gypsies, it’s also an armour-plated symbol of Jen’s own spiky self-protectiveness covering her emotional vulnerability. It’s also a thing that persecutes her, through nightmares and a sense that she’s being followed, just as this melange of hatred and fear is persecuting her. She’s a girl in serious need of guidance.

Her mother does make some attempts at help, but I can’t help feeling they’re woefully inadequate (though perhaps up to 1970s standards). Learning that Jen is being bullied at school, her mother says “they tease you because you rise to it”, as though it were basically her fault. In a midnight talk after one of Jen’s nightmares, after which Jen admits to feeling she’s going to die, her mother does at least talk about Jen’s father’s death, but goes on to say that Jen is too young to think about death and should just not do it. (Despite the fact that Jen’s father clearly died too young.) There’s a distinct sense of the adults giving one piece of cool advice, with an air of, “Well, I’ve told you how to deal with it, the rest is up to you.” (Jen’s best friend Tom, meanwhile, tells her “You share the Führer’s views on gypsies.” True—if exaggerated—but also perhaps a little unhelpful.) It’s the how of dealing with it that Jen clearly doesn’t have, and nobody guides her towards it.

Dream-fantasy like this, with a clear psychological grounding, can easily turn into straightforward allegory: Jen’s hatred of the gypsies gains a monstrous autonomy in the dream-thing dragon-scorpion whatever-it-is. Her hatred is monstrous, and the monster is her hatred. But that symbol, of the armour-plated spiky monster, has a lot more resonance than that—as I said above, it’s as much about Jen’s self-protection and self-persecution as it is her hatred. But I can’t help feeling that The Dream Thing resolves by treating it entirely as Jen’s hatred, and nothing else. The head gypsy tells her “Your dream… is born of your venom. It has nothing to do with us…” Which is perhaps a truth Jen needs to be told, but it’s also not the whole truth. The symbol of the dream-thing itself is far more eloquent than any of the reductive explanations, but there’s an air, at the end, of tying it to this too-simple explanation, and so leaving its many resonances unexplored. We’re left with a simple message: hate is bad, and it can take you over. But the roots of that hatred in fear and loss and isolation aren’t addressed.

(To give another example. Jen lives with her mother in a small flat, and the building is surrounded by a black metal fence with semi-ornamental spikes. The fence is only a short distance from the building itself, so what it’s protecting is a basically useless strip of land, and anyway, the fence can just be walked around, so its protecting nothing. It is, instead, an embodiment of the feelings people have about their homes, the need that they have a certain space around them, and an air of protection. In the limited space of a city, this has to be formalised into an ornamental fence and a tiny strip of land, but the psychological value is still there. The metal of the railings, and the spikes of the ornaments, clearly tie in with the metallic spikiness of the dream-thing, and bring out the feelings of self-protection rather than hatred in the dream-thing—though, such self-protection can also spill into hatred: the gypsies offer no threat, but so many people want them “not in my back yard”.)

I can’t help feeling that if the fantasy element had been given freer reign instead of being tied down to one interpretation, the ending might have been richer and more satisfying—a true resolution rather than a lesson only apparently learned. If, for instance, Jen had seen her own dream-thing in the metal/flesh, she might have seen herself in it, both her vulnerability and her spikiness. (A situation handled far better, and also with a dragon-sized thing of hate, disgust, and vulnerability, in William Mayne’s A Game of Dark.) But she doesn’t face it like that, it’s explained away. The fantasy loses its resonance, and becomes an allegory.

The Dream Thing’s ending does have a certain bleakness of realism. The gypsies are forced to move on. Jen’s friend Tom is no longer speaking to her, but she has a female friend in reserve, so it’s not the end of the world. It’s all part of the messiness of growing up.

It’s an interesting book, praised in its day for the realism of its characters, and certainly unafraid to take its main character through some uncomfortable emotions. It was reissued in 1990 (and, from a quick comparison of the text thanks to an Archive.org scan, it seems the same as the 1978 version, rather than being rewritten as with Lord of the Dance).

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.

First published in 1987, Emlyn’s Moon is the sequel to The Snow Spider, but one in which the first book’s protagonist, boy-magician Gwyn Griffiths, is now a secondary character. (Which often seems to happen with boy magicians. Once they’ve come into their powers, particularly if that has involved learning a certain amount of wisdom—which discounts you, Harry Potter—they’re too remote and powerful to be protagonists, and only come in towards the end to help the new main characters. For instance, Ged in the Earthsea books, and Will in The Dark is Rising series.)

Emlyn’s Moon is about Nia, middlemost of the seven Lloyd children (Alun Lloyd was Gwyn’s best friend in the first book). Nia feels she’s useless at everything, and is frequently told so by her teacher at school and her brothers (“Nia-can’t-do-nothing! Nia-in-the-middle! Nia’s got a funny tooth, and her nose goes squiggle, squiggle!”). When her family moves from their farm to town, where her father has taken on a butcher’s shop, they pass a former chapel (“the chapel that wasn’t a chapel now, but a home for someone”) whose door and gate have been repainted in bright pink, gold, and blue. Outside it, she sees Emlyn Llewelyn, a slightly older boy from school, but she’s told (by virtually everyone) that the chapel is “a bad place”, and not to go there, because “Something happened there, didn’t it?” Though no one will tell her what.

One day, though, she bumps into Emlyn in town, they get talking, and he invites her up to the home he shares with his father, a somewhat gruff artist currently living without his wife, who left abruptly a while ago with their new baby. Emlyn later tells Nia he doesn’t know where his mother is, only that Gwyn Griffith’s father took her away, and that she said something about living in the moon. As a result of this, there’s a breach between the Llewelyns and Griffiths, even though Emlyn is Gwyn’s cousin. Nia tells Emlyn and his father about a school project she has to do, where everyone in class has to make, write, or paint something about the town they live in. As she thinks she can’t do anything, she’s dreading it. But Emlyn’s father, Idris, questions her and discovers she can sew, so he fetches a large piece of canvas, and tells her to create a collage. She takes it home, but works on it in secret.

The growing friendship between Nia and Emlyn soon hits a snag. She’d promised that he could buy the Lloyd family’s sheepdog, which isn’t enjoying life in town, only to find her father has given it to the Griffithses. Nia feels ashamed and Emlyn feels betrayed, and it ends in a fight between Emlyn and Gwyn (who, having learned from the playground fight in the previous book, still uses a little magic, but ultimately lets his cousin win).

After this, Emlyn grows increasingly isolated, and when Nia learns about the magic world Gwyn is involved in, and sees, one night, pale child-like figures walking on the outskirts of the town, she worries they’re here to take Emlyn away, just as they took Gwyn’s sister Bethan. She decides she needs to solve the mystery of what happened to Emlyn’s mother, and reunite the two.

The Snow Spider seemed, to me, readable as both a magical tale for pre-teens and as a more complex story for older readers, and Emlyn’s Moon takes that even further. Although there’s no evident fantasy element for at least the first half of the book, the story is carried by the light comedy of Nia’s supposed uselessness, and her attempts to procure materials for her collage (including snipping a section off her sister’s music teacher’s net curtains, which is soon discovered). It’s the subtleties of the relationships—Nia and her large family, Nia and Emlyn, Emlyn and his father—and the mystery of what went on at the chapel that carries the story, rather than the first book’s moments of magical wonder. And when the fantasy does come in, it’s more mysterious and subtly threatening than in the first book. There’s no longer the possibility that the white world which took Gwyn’s sister might be an interesting place to visit, it’s much more clearly a place that people are taken to, but don’t come back from, and (unlike with the first book’s Bethan, who disappeared for seemingly no reason) it’s people who are emotionally vulnerable and isolated who are at risk of being taken. There are glimpses of adult mental illness and levels of distress you wouldn’t normally find in a book for, say, a nine-year-old readership, as in this, of Idris Llewelyn:

To Nia’s horror, the painter laughed. It was not a happy sound. On his face Nia saw a loss that was too unbearable to speak of.

And the odd creepy moment, too:

But up on the bridge something moved, pale yellow in the deadening glare of the street lights, but probably white. Small creatures crossing the bridge: children, no bigger than herself, for the stones of the bridge wall came shoulder high.

The fantastic element in Emlyn’s Moon—the presence of the fairy-like, child-like beings who take people away—is really just a heightening of an element already present in the realistic part of the story: the way people become lost to the communal human world through emotional isolation. Nia is lightly isolated by her “uselessness”, and then by her being drawn into friendship with Emlyn (which has been forbidden by her parents, because of that mysterious “something happened up there”), which even leads to her declaring herself a vegetarian (when her father has just started up a new life as a butcher); Emlyn is more deeply isolated by the split between his parents, his feeling that people think he should have gone with his mother, and his not knowing where his mother is; and his father Idris is isolated by his obsession with his art, which leads him to neglect his dwindling family. And the hint that Emlyn’s mother Elinor has gone to “the moon” implies she’s been taken to that white land, with its silvery-lunar landscape, but when she’s found, and the mystery of the “something that happened” in the chapel is revealed, it’s equally mundane. But as hers is the most extreme isolation, tinged with mental illness, she is the one the fairy-folk come for when they do come.

Emlyn’s Moon is also a novel about art, and though Idris Llewelyn’s absorption in his art is an isolating factor, when Nia’s collage is finally revealed (and surely it’s no spoiler to say that when it’s revealed, it’s a marvellous success, and she’s finally accepted as more than “useless”) art becomes a means of connection, and of escaping the trap of isolation.

With its mostly more realistic story that chimes in so well with the fantasy elements, I think I enjoyed Emlyn’s Moon more than The Snow Spider, and it certainly makes me intrigued to see how the series might be resolved in the final book, The Chestnut Soldier.

Like The Snow Spider, Emlyn’s Moon was adapted for TV, this time in five episodes, running from 6 September to 4 October 1990. Again, it was pretty faithful to the book, though whether the final supernatural events made any more sense on the screen than on the page, I don’t know.