Young Adult Fiction, page 4 of 11

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.

This is Fair’s second novel for pre-teens/young adults, published in 1976. It has a number of similarities with her previous book, The Ivory Anvil, in that it combines a light touch of fantasy with a gentle tale about children exploring a landscape. Here, there’s a bit more of a threat to the landscape—though, again, a light one—and like the previous book there’s a mystery from the past to be solved.

The landscape in this case is the area surrounding a canal in rural Derbyshire. The Atkins family have just moved into Bickley Mill, a disused water mill in need of renovation. (Their father, a teacher, tells them it’s going to take two years to get it into the state he wants it in, including completely replacing the plumbing and installing an interior staircase, as at present the only way to get to the bedrooms is via outside steps. 1970s dad that he is, he intends to do all this work himself, with a little help from his kids.) In their spare time, the kids, twins Rachael and Rowan, explore the canal, and get to know Mr Benson, whose job it is to care for it. Like the mill, the canal is basically disused, and Benson is battling to keep it going, as he knows certain local forces—farmers and factory-owners—would rather it was closed for good. People dump rubbish in it, and others engage in outright vandalism. Unlike similar books such as The Grey Dancer and The Walking Stones, the threat to the canal isn’t a threat to a whole rural way of life, then. Rather, it’s an interesting piece of the past, one that adds charm to the landscape, and provides a habitat for local wildlife, including kingfishers, ducks, moorhens, swans, frogs, water voles, pike, carp, tench, roach and woodpeckers. Part of the appeal of the The Penny Tin Whistler is being allowed to dwell in this country environment with the kids as they explore it. (There’s even a map, spread out over three pages at the start of the book. It seems to have been cut off, though, and there was presumably meant to be more of it. I suspect the author, who was an artist and I’m guessing is the one who drew it, wanted it to be a fold-out. I certainly wanted it to be a fold-out.)

The fantasy aspect is, as with Sioned in The Ivory Anvil, a sort of enhanced sensitivity to people and to the past. Twins Rachael and Rowan have a telepathic bond: they’re always aware of where one another is, and though they can share thoughts, they’ve agreed not to be too intrusive. It also turns out, though, that they can pick up lingering memories from the past. It’s nicely done, as when Rachael finds an out-of-the-way nook under the ivy and finds herself thinking:

Me. Dressed in green,
Cat’s cradle,
Hairy string,
Knotted, beneath the ivy.

Only, she knows the “Me” isn’t herself. She’s picking up someone else’s memories. Rowan, meanwhile, gets impressions in his dreams. After some investigation, they discover that a pair of young twins like themselves used to live at the Mill, but were separated when they were evacuated during the War, after which their grandfather, who lived at the Mill and was their only family, died, meaning they never returned. (One slight niggle: why were they evacuated from such a rural spot?) Rachael and Rowan realise that these twins, being younger than themselves, and whom they know never returned, might never have been able to find one another after that separation, and perhaps that’s why they’re picking up these memories. (The title of the novel comes from what Rachael and Rowan call one of these twins for a while, as Rachael senses her, at one point, playing a penny tin whistle.)

As with The Ivory Anvil, the investigation is dotted throughout the daily life of the twins as they go to school, help with the house, and explore the canal. But the quiet pace of the story never feels boring. The only complaint I have about the book, plot-wise, is it leaves its resolution so late that some points aren’t fully resolved. One of these is that, in order to fully access his dreams and learn where the lost boy-twin might be, Rowan has to mentally detach from the telepathic bond he’s shared with his sister since birth. This is a scary moment for him, and he wakes the next morning to find himself without it for the first time—in part, though, appreciating the sense of individuality and privacy that comes with it. But is it permanent? I’m supposing it is, but I felt there had to be at least one revisit, one exchange between the pair about the loss of their deeper connection, or something like that, just to resolve the issue. (The other main plot point that doesn’t get resolved is that, although the lost twins are located, we never get to see them, or know they’ve got together again. Perhaps that might have proved too emotionally weighty a scene compared to the rest of the book, but still, I felt it was needed.)

I found two reviews from the time, one positive, one negative. Juliet Page in the Times Literary Supplement wrote:

“Sylvia Fair knows well how children think, talk and act, and her twins, with their grouches and enthusiasms, are the genuine article. Though steeped in atmosphere, this adventure is set firmly in the everyday world of plumbing, homework, and conservation… As Sylvia Fair admirably demonstrates, it is possible to be both down-to-earth and enchanting. Her novel is to be thoroughly applauded; it is one of those delightful children’s books that reanimates one’s own memories of magical times spent in secret places.”

But Stuart Hannabuss in The Times, dismissing the book as “a generic package” in comparison with her previous novel, goes on to say:

“The Penny Tin Whistler with its children in telepathic contact with spirit children of the past and with its workable theme of saving a canal, evokes a mood like Lucy Boston’s Chimneys of Green Knowe, but does little to bind the themes together or to pin down the people. Children grow used to themes cropping up again and again, but have every right to expect that a story should do its own work.”

(I wonder if he expected child readers to all be as well-read as himself.)

To me, The Penny Tin Whistler seemed a perfect follow-on from Fair’s previous novel, and I’d have been happy to read more in the same vein, but her next books were for much younger readers. At least she got a good cover, this time, though.

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!