Young Adult Fiction, page 5 of 11

Published in 1998, John Gordon’s The Flesh Eater is a couple of decades on from the heyday of 70s and 80s folk-fantasy YA I’ve been reviewing on this blog, but in terms of feel, it absolutely belongs. (Although it’s more horror than fantasy.)

Set in Gordon’s beloved East Anglian fens, the protagonist Harry Hogge is in his late teens (old enough to be driving, young enough that his parents aren’t on at him to get a job — a very narrow margin), son of the proprietors of the town’s largest hotel, the Pheasant and Trumpet. His girlfriend is Miranda Merchant — beautiful, yet with a hint of the mercenary about her — but another girl stumbles into his life, the somewhat clumsy and anxious Emma Judd “with the wild black hair and the skirt with a lopsided hem”.

Researching local history, Emma has become obsessed with the legend of the “Mary-Lou”, a monster said to tear people apart and gnaw their bones. Her Great Aunt Rose has an even more vivid take on it:

“That’s what the Mary-Lou always done to them. Skewered them up somewhere like a butcher, so as he could come back and get them when he wanted a bite o’ fresh meat!”

Emma has discovered that the tale of the “Mary-Lou” originates with the first constable of the local castle, Guy de Marais, who kept a particularly vicious torturer as a servant, and it’s this servant who became known as the Mary-Lou — the marais loup, or Marsh Wolf. But, unknown to her or anyone else, the current occupant of Barbican House — built over the ruins of the old castle — one Guy March, a direct descendent of Guy de Marais, is intent on finding the burial place of the Mary-Lou, and continuing his forebear’s “necromantic practices”.

I first became aware of Gordon thanks to a Ghosts and Scholars article on him, which focused more on his earlier book, The House on the Brink. (Come to think of it, that would have been before The Flesh Eater was published, anyway.) The Flesh Eater certainly fits the Jamesian mould, with its unearthing of an ancient undead evil, also bringing in an element of “Casting the Runes” in the way the Mary-Lou is guided to its next victim.

But like all of the John Gordon books I’ve read so far, The Flesh Eater gives equal time to teenage relationships as it does to the supernatural. As I said in my review of The Waterfall Box, there’s a four-way tangle that appears in a lot of Gordon’s fiction, with the protagonist being drawn to two girls (one beautiful and sexually sophisticated but ultimately self-centred, the other less showy and more genuine), with a rival male (usually more physical) waiting to step in. That situation seemed to be emerging at the start of The Flesh Eater, with the athletic Donovan Brett (Miranda’s former boyfriend) an unwelcome presence in Harry and Miranda’s relationship. But just as I was expecting teen tensions to really ramp up, Donovan becomes the first victim of the resurrected Mary-Lou. And the looming confrontation with Miranda over Harry’s involvement with Emma is another thing that disappears almost too quickly. It’s as if Gordon has, at some level, dealt with this tangle and no longer needs to really gnaw at it as he did in his earlier fiction.

One thing it does mean is that the balance between the teen tangles and the supernatural investigation is much better — pretty much perfect, in fact — than in, say, The Waterfall Box, which had to cram in too much of the supernatural element in the final chapter to be really satisfying. Here, the relationships are handled much more as background to Harry and Emma’s investigations into the Mary-Lou, but tick along nicely.

There are a few other character moments that point to areas the novel could have explored — the difficulty Harry has in admitting he doesn’t believe in God, for instance — but it’s a short book, that just hints at some themes, rather than investigating them fully. (Harry’s public admission of atheism is there largely to bring out his mother’s snobbishness, anyway.)

One — perhaps the most interesting, as it combines the love story with the supernatural — is that Harry and Emma have occasional telepathic flashes where they realise they’re hearing one another’s thoughts. This is set against Guy March’s telepathic connection with a woman we don’t meet until the end, a woman who keeps indoors and “sees” the world through her pack of cards, but (mentally) accompanies March everywhere he goes. Harry immediately knows that the telepathic moments he shares with Emma are down to their relationship being grounded in genuine love, but what does this say about Guy March and his woman, whose identity, we learn at the end, points to a perhaps unhealthy kind of connection?

The Flesh Eater is, I think, a much more successful take on the same sort of story as The Waterfall Box, and it certainly makes me want to read (or re-read, in a couple of cases) some more of Gordon. Amazingly, for instance, he had another book published the same year, The Midwinter Clock. But then, I’ve got his boy-and-girl-go-into-a-fantasy-world novel The Edge of the World on my shelf, just begging for a re-read…

Jean Morris’s YA novel The Troy Game (1987), set in Dark Ages Britain, starts with Brannock, second son of the King of the Seven Kingdoms, being sent on a mission by the druid-like Elder, Mennor. There are rumours of invaders coming from the east, and Mennor needs a message taken to his Order at Caerdroia. He chooses Brannock because of his ability to use a “bob” to detect not just water and buried metal but hidden paths, as the way to Caerdroia is a secret to those not of the Order. Stopping off at his uncle’s kingdom, Brannock is given his eldest cousin Eilian as a guide, as she has accompanied their own Elder at least to the start of the hidden way. And as they embark on the final section of the journey, Brannock and Eilian begin to realise they are tracing a vast troy, like the ancient, now-fading dance-patterns in their own villages.

The book opens with such impatience to get Brannock on his way (entirely excusable in a YA novel) that the reason for his mission feels almost like an afterthought. Vague rumours of invaders from the east, and Mennor never explaining why he’s not able to take the message himself — it’s evident Morris basically wants to get her pair of protagonists onto the vast troy and tracing its weird path as soon as possible. And the troy is obviously the main point of interest, here, not the invaders from the east. It’s presented as not so much a man-made thing as a concentrated mystical aspect of the land itself. Walking the wrong way doesn’t just get you lost, it produces some dark, nightmare-like experiences; try to shortcut the circular path, and you’ll find yourself ejected and unable to find any part of the troy — entrance, exit, or even where you just were.

Perhaps it’s the effect of having read Mythago Wood and its sequels, but the troy, here, feels very much like one of Holdstock’s mythogenic landscapes — particularly with Holdstock using terms like “the oak-vortex”, and “the ley matrix”, as though the troy were just a more ordered version of the same whorls of weirdness. Inside the troy, what seems like a small forest proves to be immense; an old Roman villa with a slightly ghostly inhabitant can be entered at the same point from two different directions; there are sudden changes of weather, as well as of landscape, all just as in Ryhope Wood. There’s even a hint of the same ancient, pre-human world behind it all:

“This was ancient deep forest; not the mild open kind that could be travelled with little trouble, but the oldest oak forest, where men never went, where the vast trees grew and died and toppled and rotted untouched, as they had done since the beginning of the world.”

For most of the book, The Troy Game feels at the younger limit of YA — its getting quickly to the journey without bothering with much set-up, the vagueness about the invaders from the east and the broadly archetypal characters (kings and queens as parents, wizard-like old men as village elders) — but things take a disturbing and more complex turn towards the end of the book. The invaders from the east, when encountered, aren’t simply barging in Viking-like and taking over, they’re seeking alliances with the aim of fomenting a civil war, but claim to be merely looking for a new home. (In the wonderfully double-edged words of one of them: “we come in peace but in strength”.) The Elders themselves are divided as to what to do, and their leader seems too weak to really accomplish anything. Mennor, then, makes a desperate move, and summons the Wild Hunt, despite knowing it will not simply attack these invaders, but throw the land itself into chaos:

“The Wild Hunt may be invoked, but not controlled; once the Hunt is up, its prey is everything in its path.”

And that’s what happens. Chaos, then ruin. After recovering from the Hunt’s passing, Brannock begins his journey back from Caerdroia, and it’s as though the air of fantasy has gone from the lands he passes through: he’s out of story and into history. The Seven Kingdoms ruled by his father prove to be seven villages; the invaders from the east — blond and tall — are now scattered among the people of the land, married to village women, with young families already, making a go as farmers, not warriors. Why, then, the terror of the Wild Hunt? It’s as though all the Hunt did was stir everything up in one big land-wide cauldron, then leave people so disorientated there was no room for thoughts of war or conquest, merely survival. The invaders are part of the land now, and the land itself has spent something of its mystical power.

Brannock realises his recovery from the chaos of the Wild Hunt didn’t just take weeks or months, but perhaps years. None of his relatives recognise him. After the younger-end-of-YA feel at the start of the novel, there’s a distinct note of something broken and lost — the magic has gone away, and the Dark Ages story-world of kings and queens and elders has been replaced by a more realistic land of farmers and villagers repairing roofs and tilling the land.

None of this is overly examined and, in a way, that makes it less immediately dark than it sounds, but also more mysterious. Still, there’s a haunting feeling to the ending, the sense that the world has irretrievably changed from the magical-mystical to the historical. As a story — particularly read as an adult — it feels a little unsatisfying, but nevertheless there’s a poetic air which is quite appropriate for such a short book.

Some more Scottish YA folk-fantasy… First published in the UK in 1970 as The Bodach, and in the US in the same year as The Walking Stones, this was then re-released in paperback in the UK under the more Earth-mysteries-friendly US title in 1976.

“Bodach” is Gaelic for “old man”, and the Bodach of the title lives in a Scottish glen, a storyteller and possessor of the Second Sight. Living close by are the Campbell family — shepherd Ian, his wife Kitty, and their ten-year-old son Donald — and one evening when the Bodach is visiting, the old man foretells that, the next day, three men will come to the valley, one with a forest on his back, one with lightning in his hand, and the third bringing death. Sure enough, the next day, three men — all called Rory — turn up. One has a sack of seeds for planting a forest, the other has the plans for a new hydro-electric dam to be built in the glen, and the third has the responsibility of turning on the dam and flooding the glen (thus bringing death to it). They offer the Campbells and the Bodach modern, new houses in the nearby town (with “electric light, hot and cold running water, an electric stove, a refrigerator and washing-machine — everything, in fact, that a modern house should have”), and while the Campbells accept (Ian is to get a new job, too, working as a forester under the first Rory), the Bodach says, politely but firmly: “you will never flood this glen until I give you leave to do so.”

Work progresses for two years. The day the dam is due to be turned on (by Royalty, no less), the Bodach stands as one of the crowd — but suddenly, he’s there in the glen. Knowing they can’t turn on the dam till he’s safe, men are sent to get him, but every time he’s about to be caught, he reappears somewhere else. Things continue like this till the end of the day, and the dam hasn’t been turned on. That evening, the Bodach tells the now twelve-year-old Donald why he’s using this skill of creating a “Co-Walker”, a double, in this way. There’s a circle of thirteen standing stones in the glen, and:

“Once every hundred years, they say, these stones move from their places. They walk to the river and dip their heads in it, then they go back to their places and stand fast there for another hundred years.”

The Bodach wants to see this wonderful event. But before he can, the two of them encounter a creature from the Otherworld, the Bean nighe, the Washer at the Ford, whose appearance foretells death. The old man saves the boy from becoming its victim, but only at his own expense. Now knowing he’s going to die, and so maybe not to get to see the stones walk, he asks Donald to see them, and passes on his gift of the Second Sight to the boy (which he’d always meant to do anyway). The Bodach falls ill and is taken to hospital, so Donald must use his new abilities (creating his own “Co-Walker”) to keep the dam from opening, then gets to see (I hope this isn’t a plot spoiler, as it’s in the title of the book) the stones move.

There are already connections between this book and two other Scottish YA novels I’ve covered on this blog. The Washer at the Ford appeared in Winifred Finlay’s Beadbonny Ash — though there she didn’t portend death — and The Grey Dancer was also about a glen being flooded due to the creation of a hydro-electric dam (and there was also a cyclical supernatural occurrence, too). The Walking Stones is a lighter book than either, aimed at a slightly younger audience. The threat level is low, and none of the characters is really villainous (one of the Rories is clearly tempted to flood the valley even with the Bodach in it, but is persuaded otherwise). Usually I find books aimed at pre-teens to be too light for my tastes, but The Walking Stones has a bit of an edge (with the death of the old man), plus a genuine scene of wonder and weirdness when Donald gets to see the walking of the stones. It’s an evocative and mystical moment, very nicely written, with strands of wreathing mists gathering about the stones, then becoming the long white hair and flowing beards of old men.

For Donald, the protagonist, it’s basically a tale of initiation, as he’s granted the power of Second Sight. Any modern book of this type (or even The Dark is Rising, from a few years later) would use the idea to be the first in a long series, with Donald going on to fight all sorts of Otherworld perils, but here, there’s no sense that’s going to happen. Donald, we can be sure, is going to live just as quiet a life as the Bodach did, telling tales of wonder and mystery, and providing a little Second Sight and Otherworldly wisdom to his local community. (Will it be a strange and lonely life? We’re not told, though Donald does rather sensibly express some doubts as to whether he wants the gift of the Second Sight.)

Like so many similar books of the era, there’s a sense of old ways — along with both their faerie dangers, and their supernatural sense of wonder — being erased by the encroachment of modern technology — with its greater ease of life, but paucity of wonders. Compared to the Bodach, we’re told, “there was no one on the television who knew stories as strange as the ones he told, or who could tell them half so well”. But Donald is handed the baton, and becomes just such a storyteller for the next generation, ensuring the old ways, wisdom, and stories aren’t quite going to die out just yet.