Young Adult Fiction, page 2 of 10

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:

Some more 1970s YA, though this is more pre-teen than YA. The Conjuror’s Box was first published in 1974, with a Children’s Book Club edition the following year, and a paperback in 1977.

Martin and Lucy Lovell, both under 13, are spending the last days of the Easter holidays with their Great Aunt Bea when they meet Snowy, a somewhat sarcastic talking cat who has been cursed to spend most of his time as the ornamental handle of a small jug. The one who cursed him is known as the Green Lady, who was herself originally an inanimate object, the statuette of a goddess bought by the Lovell’s great-great-great-grandfather, a sea captain who disappeared, was thought drowned, then reappeared many years later looking not a day older, before disappearing once again. Inanimate objects, in this world, aren’t really inanimate at all, as Snowy explains:

“Things are like electric batteries you see… only instead of storing electricity, they store life, imagination, enjoyment… The Things in Captain Lovell’s house were particularly lively, because he had three energetic and imaginative children.”

Snowy’s own story, for instance, involves a dish and a spoon who walked off on their own accord. (And, yes, a jumping cow, and a fiddler. It’s all been passed on, in debased form, as the nursery rhyme “Hey Diddle Diddle”.) The Green Lady, meanwhile, gains her power by being the last remaining idol of a once-powerful goddess, who “held the seasons in her hands, the increase of herds and the opening of harvests.” Now forgotten, she seeks her revenge on humanity — if they won’t give her their power through worship, she’ll take it in her own way:

“If she could surround humans with lifeless, mechanical Things, she would draw off the power of their imaginations like water from a tap.”

The children return home, and learn that their neighbour, a young potter called Sarah Peach, also knows Snowy, and had various magical adventures with him as a child which she only vaguely remembers. Snowy asks her to locate her godfather, currently known as William Schwartz, but more generally known as the Fiddler. He and Snowy, it turns out, are two of the “Old Ones”, one being the Keeper of the Water Gate, the other of the Earth Gate — these Gates being doorways from this world into another. The Green Lady needs to get into that other world to gain two objects of power, a spear and a cauldron (and the fact these are referred to as “the Tokens” shows how thin a lot of the plot-reasoning is — their significance and power is never really explained beyond their sounding familiar from myth and legend, they’re just plot tokens).

In order to gain access to this other world, the Green Lady is seeking the Conjuror’s Box, an old prop from a stage-magician’s act that also happens to have genuine magical power (though only in certain places and at certain times). The box is currently owned by the descendent of that stage-magician, Henry Partridge, a young man whose passion in life is building small working models of steam trains. This, at first, is a worry, because the Green Lady has an affinity with machines, and it’s thought she might easily win influence with Henry, but two things stand in the way of that. One is that he obviously fancies Sarah Peach, the other, as explained by Snowy is:

“Look at the machines he likes — straight out of a time when people loved their machinery and treated their engines like people. The Lady’s idea is to have people treated like machines.”

It’s an enjoyable romp of a book that makes up for any thinness in reasoning or plot (those plot tokens) by sheer rush of new ideas and events. That idea about “Things being like electric batteries” and having a life of their own sounds, at first, like the set up for a novel about the hidden life of inanimate objects, but it’s pretty much dropped almost as soon as it’s out, because there are too many other things bursting to happen: a mysterious toy-maker who tries to steal the box and, when foiled, opens his umbrella and flies off into the sky, after which he’s never met or mentioned again; a rocking horse (called Horse) who, it turns out, can not only move but fly; a pair of large, striped, talking mice who have spent their life studying the precise mathematics of the interaction between the two worlds; a film company that’s clearly a front for the Green Lady, who set up to film in the local village; a journey by hot air balloon; owls who watch the children’s house by night… So many things pop up quickly, making sense enough in the onrush of events, then disappear before you’ve had time to realise how any one of these might make the basis for its own novel, but here’s it’s just a chapter. We hardly get to meet the Green Lady at all, but it doesn’t seem to matter, as the main purpose of The Conjuror’s Box is the conjuring of a world behind the ordinary, full of hidden magic, wonder, and adventure. (A final tying-up of the “Hey Diddle Diddle” connection at the start, though, implies there may have been some planning behind the book: the dish that ran away with the spoon, the cauldron and the spear…)

The Conjuror’s Box shares a certain amount in common with Penelope Lively’s The Whispering Knights: one has a witch, the other a Green Lady, both being dark archaic powers from the past seeking to wreak havoc in the modern age, who ally themselves with machinery (the witch in The Whispering Knights marries a factory-owner). As I’ve said before, it seems to be a theme of British 1970s YA fantasies that their teen/child protagonists are caught between the dark superstitions and supernatural powers of the past and the more oppressive forces of encroaching modernity. (The Changes, and the trilogy of books it came from, being a key example.) The Conjuror’s Box isn’t at all a serious take on the theme, but shows how ubiquitous it was.

I only found two brief reviews of the book. One from The Times Literary Supplement (6 December 1974), by Sarah Hayes, who clearly hated it:

“Ann Lawrence’s first two books for children were stylish off-beat tales with a timeless quality that set them in the Farjeon and Thurber class. The load of old-fashioned junk piled into The Conjuror’s Box cannot quite smother Miss Lawrence’s humour and originality, but it is odd that a writer formerly so dependent on restraint should have shown so little here.”

One person’s “old fashioned junk” is another’s emporium of wonders, and I can’t help feeling Hayes was being a little harsh. The other take is from Valerie Brinkley-Willsher in Twentieth-Century Children’s Writers:

“The Conjuror’s Box is an enjoyable fantasy with a dramatic climax and some thoughts about the nature of time, but neither characters nor plot has the originality of her other fantasies.”

Ann Lawrence (1942–1987) seems to have mostly gravitated towards historical fantasy fiction for children. One of her later books from 1980, Hawk of May, about Sir Gawain, sounds interesting, but seems not to have made it beyond its initial hardback, perhaps because another book called Hawk of May, also about Sir Gawain, which came out the same year, by US author Gillian Bradshaw, seems to have been more successful.

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.