By the same Eva Ibbotson who wrote the delightful Which Witch? for children. I hadn't realised that she also wrote adult novels: when I picked one up in the bookshop, it looked like any other faintly literate romance. I was delighted to find that (a) the sense of humour is still there, matured but unwarped (b) they may be romances, but they're firmly rooted in well-rounded lives (c) the two I've read so far – the other was Madensky Square – have featured music as an essential plot element.
A Song for Summer is the tale of a girl, Ellen, raised by her suffragette aunts who, despite their best efforts, enjoys 'feminine' activities such as gardening and cooking. She emigrates and finds a job looking after problem children in a Swiss school run on 'advanced' principles. (One of her first achievements is to persuade a couple of the girls that they don't have to swim nude: there is nothing wrong with wearing a bathing costume). She meets the mysterious Marek, who is working as a handyman and knows how to gets storks to nest. Meanwhile, the Second World War starts: Marek's mysterious past comes to light: he, and a couple of the pupils, travel to England and end up interned on the Isle of Man as enemy aliens: and the happy ending is not as undiluted as one might have expected. Plenty of surprises, intriguingly flawed characters, and a diva who lives up to the legend.
Wednesday, July 01, 1998
Sunday, June 21, 1998
"Enter these enchanted woods ...": The Enchanted Forest and the Wildwood
Published in Charmed Lives #2, Summer 1998 (edited by Meredith MacArdle)
The first excerpt is from The Hollowing (1993), a sequel - of sorts - to Robert Holdstock's Mythago Wood (1984). The second is from Diana Wynne Jones' Hexwood (also 1993), perhaps the deepest and most mature of her juvenile novels. Hexwood has been dismissed as 'Mythago Wood for children'. However, while the two novels deal with the sentience of the forest, and its role in the genesis of myth, they do it from two different angles.
Mythago Wood is a journey into the subconscious, the well of dreams that underlies and contains all human myth, as much as it is the journal of Steven Huxley's journey into Ryhope Wood. The wood is populated by "mythagos" - embodiments of mythic archetypes which are born from the minds of those who come within range of the forest's influence. Sometimes the mythagos are harmless; more often, they are not. Huxley's father is shot at by a Robin Hood figure, and keeps the arrow in his study to remind him of the wood's power. And time in the wood doesn't run at the same rate as in the outside world. George Huxley's journal contains accounts of month-long journeys, from which he has returned to find that only a few days have passed.
As Steven learns more of his father's adventures in the wildwood, the wood reaches out for him: oak saplings spring up between the edge of the wood and his house, and by the opening of the second book in the sequence, Lavondyss (1988), the house is entirely within the wood, with an oak tree growing through the desk at which both Huxleys wrote.
Mythago Wood is primarily a fantasy, although it has scientific elements. Huxley and his friend (Edward Wynne-Jones: call it synchronicity!) experiment with electrical devices to hasten the formation of mythagos from their minds. In the later books there are indications that more sophisticated instruments are being used both to encourage, and to repel, the mythagos. Holdstock's 'myth images' and myth genesis are firmly rooted in psychology and anthropology. Hexwood, on the other hand, states its science-fictional setting with the very first sentence: 'The letter was in Earth script, unhandily scrawled in blobby blue ballpoint'.
In Hexwood, entering Banners Wood means leaving the mundane world. Strange things happen to Ann, and Mordion, and Hume, within the boundaries of the wood. Ann's 'voices' tell her when she's been in the wood, and for how long: this generally doesn't equate with her perception of passing time, and often she seems to forget whole episodes. Hume, who is introduced as a young child, doesn't age reliably: it's as though, when Ann enters the wood, she steps into another time.
Eventually Ann realises that she has been the subject of a device called the Bannus, which has been playing through scenes - alternate possibilities - to achieve its required outcome. Hence the time distortion, the sense of deja vu, and the trend that Mordion identifies: 'The Bannus tended to send Ann along at important moments'. Ann is present when Mordion first awakes: for most of his magical experiments: and for Hume's first sight of the Arthurian Castle, where fame and fortune can be found, and an ailing king must be healed.
The Bannus manipulates 'theta-space' fields to run its cast - composed of the aristocracy of Homeworld, the present, corrupt Reigners, and the inhabitants of Hexwood Farm Estate - through a variety of scenes which draw heavily on myth and magic. Where Holdstock delves deep into the subconscious to depict prehistoric ritual and magic, Jones uses Arthurian myth, leavened with folklore and fairy-tale symbolism. Holdstock's The Hollowing draws on the legend of Gawain and the Green Knight (and Gawain turns out to be the villain: Nature, in the aspect of the Green Knight, is the hero). Jones transmogrifies the Fisher King, with his unhealable wound, into a nervous and hypochondriac Reigner Two, who has made a nasty bruise an excuse not to marry the malevolent Reigner Three - Morgan La Trey.
The Bannus is, to some extent, a teaching machine. It also transforms its cast into their true selves. In an echo of Mythago Wood, trees spring up along Wood Street as the Bannus transforms Reigner One, stealthily and without any fuss, into a dragon. But is the Bannus to blame? It isn't the only thing manipulating time and myth in /Hexwood/. The Wood itself is working on the people within its sphere - sometimes co-operating with the Bannus, sometimes not. For example, the Wood effectively imprisons the Bannus, along with assorted luminaries from Homeworld, until Mordion resolves the conflict between machine and nature.
The Bannus is resentful of the fact that, over the centuries of its imprisonment, its theta-space has merged with that of the Wood: the fact that the wood is called Banners Wood is an early indication of this. The Bannus can't control or communicate with the wood at all: it can only learn by trial and error what is allowed. In this, Banners Wood is like Holdstock's Ryhope Wood: it can't be manipulated. But it is a less malevolent wood. Mordion, in his role as magician, has learnt to work with the Wood: in return, the Wood gives him 'special treatment', because he can help it achieve its own desires. When the Bannus gives Morgan La Trey the formula for a poison to destroy Mordion (and does it really want him dead?) the Wood transforms him into a dragon instead of letting him die. It's only in this form, after all, that he can defeat Reigner One.
It is Mordion, in the end, who works out what Banners Wood wants: its own permanent theta-space, 'so that it can be the great Forest all the time, without having to rely on humans'. Ryhope Wood functions by raising 'demons of the mind' against what it perceives as human invasion: Banners Wood is a gentler place, which needs humans to attain its full potential. Once it has persuaded Mordion to give it what it wants, there are mythagos all around: Robin Hood, twig-people, a dragon and a unicorn, all glimpsed through the trees as legends are supposed to be.
Banners Wood and Ryhope Wood are two different places. While Hexwood probably has a higher body count than any other of Jones' novels, there isn't the sheer nastiness and violence of primeval myth that is so dominant in Holdstock's proto-mythologising.
Ryhope Wood is called 'the wildwood': it's a place of violent death, of Ice Age winters and slow starvation. This is the wood of nightmares, where wolves prey on small children and every path curves back on itself.
By contrast, Banners Wood is the fairytale enchanted forest: there are wolves, and a terrible winter, but they are not unconquerable. Besides, the Bannus - like the magical cauldron of Celtic myth - provides whatever is asked of it. Mordion is struck by the beauty and peace of the wood: for him, it is a healing experience rather than the agonising catharsis of Huxley's journey into the wildwood.
Most importantly, perhaps, the way out of Banners Wood is relatively simple to find. Hume and Mordion go hungry in the terrible winter - but only until Mordion realises that he can buy food in the shops on Wood Street. Ryhope Wood holds onto those who come within its bounds: Tallis has to undergo a terrifying series of transformations before she can regain the edge of the wood, and the human world, and other characters never come out at all.
The Bannus gives people a chance to explore their own natures, and learn to accept responsibility for their own actions and the less pleasant aspects of their personalities. In this, Hexwood works well as a rite-of-passage novel: although all of the main characters are past adolescence, they still have much to learn about themselves. In Ann's case, at least, this is achieved by a temporary return to childhood. (Paradoxically, it is as an adolescent that her feelings for Mordion change from a girlish crush to love.) Only then is she able to assume her role in the adult world.
Ryhope Wood forces those who enter to examine their primal natures - and if they don't succeed, they will be lost for ever. In contrast to the romance and happy ending of Hexwood, all three of Holdstock's 'Mythago' novels fail to achieve resolution. (Mythago Wood and The Hollowing end with a man waiting, in the wildwood, for a woman to return. Lavondyss ends with a time loop: it's all going to happen again, just as unhappily …) There are recurrent themes of losing a child, and of the conflict between father and son - both more 'adult' psychological crises than the rites of passage in Hexwood.
The two novels both depict the forest as a sentient thing, a device for translating subconscious hopes and fears into real symbols. (In Hexwood, it's actually the Bannus that does most of this, through a conscious manipulation of character and plot not unlike the writer's.) Both Hexwood and the 'Mythago' sequence examine essential phases of human life, by embodying archetypes to lead and challenge the protagonists. In a sense, Hexwood is 'Mythago Wood for children': the conflicts and changes it examines are those which every child must confront before achieving maturity. Equally, Mythago Wood is Hexwood for adults: a darker and nastier place, with less youthful optimism, but still the Enchanted Forest.
'[The wood is] primary woodland. Untouched, essentially unmanaged, for eight thousand or so years… something more than just trees and bracken, dog-fern and bramble. It had become an entity, not conscious, not watching, but somehow sentient and to an astonishing degree timeless.'
'The Wood is, like all woods in this country… part of the great Forest that once covered this land. At the merest nudge, it… becomes the great Forest again. [Anyone] will tell you how... he has been lost in the smallest spinney. He can hear traffic on the road, but the road is not there, while there are sounds behind him of a great beast crawling through the undergrowth. This is the great Forest… it is voiceless, yet it has a will at least as strong as yours.'
The first excerpt is from The Hollowing (1993), a sequel - of sorts - to Robert Holdstock's Mythago Wood (1984). The second is from Diana Wynne Jones' Hexwood (also 1993), perhaps the deepest and most mature of her juvenile novels. Hexwood has been dismissed as 'Mythago Wood for children'. However, while the two novels deal with the sentience of the forest, and its role in the genesis of myth, they do it from two different angles.
Mythago Wood is a journey into the subconscious, the well of dreams that underlies and contains all human myth, as much as it is the journal of Steven Huxley's journey into Ryhope Wood. The wood is populated by "mythagos" - embodiments of mythic archetypes which are born from the minds of those who come within range of the forest's influence. Sometimes the mythagos are harmless; more often, they are not. Huxley's father is shot at by a Robin Hood figure, and keeps the arrow in his study to remind him of the wood's power. And time in the wood doesn't run at the same rate as in the outside world. George Huxley's journal contains accounts of month-long journeys, from which he has returned to find that only a few days have passed.
As Steven learns more of his father's adventures in the wildwood, the wood reaches out for him: oak saplings spring up between the edge of the wood and his house, and by the opening of the second book in the sequence, Lavondyss (1988), the house is entirely within the wood, with an oak tree growing through the desk at which both Huxleys wrote.
Mythago Wood is primarily a fantasy, although it has scientific elements. Huxley and his friend (Edward Wynne-Jones: call it synchronicity!) experiment with electrical devices to hasten the formation of mythagos from their minds. In the later books there are indications that more sophisticated instruments are being used both to encourage, and to repel, the mythagos. Holdstock's 'myth images' and myth genesis are firmly rooted in psychology and anthropology. Hexwood, on the other hand, states its science-fictional setting with the very first sentence: 'The letter was in Earth script, unhandily scrawled in blobby blue ballpoint'.
In Hexwood, entering Banners Wood means leaving the mundane world. Strange things happen to Ann, and Mordion, and Hume, within the boundaries of the wood. Ann's 'voices' tell her when she's been in the wood, and for how long: this generally doesn't equate with her perception of passing time, and often she seems to forget whole episodes. Hume, who is introduced as a young child, doesn't age reliably: it's as though, when Ann enters the wood, she steps into another time.
Eventually Ann realises that she has been the subject of a device called the Bannus, which has been playing through scenes - alternate possibilities - to achieve its required outcome. Hence the time distortion, the sense of deja vu, and the trend that Mordion identifies: 'The Bannus tended to send Ann along at important moments'. Ann is present when Mordion first awakes: for most of his magical experiments: and for Hume's first sight of the Arthurian Castle, where fame and fortune can be found, and an ailing king must be healed.
The Bannus manipulates 'theta-space' fields to run its cast - composed of the aristocracy of Homeworld, the present, corrupt Reigners, and the inhabitants of Hexwood Farm Estate - through a variety of scenes which draw heavily on myth and magic. Where Holdstock delves deep into the subconscious to depict prehistoric ritual and magic, Jones uses Arthurian myth, leavened with folklore and fairy-tale symbolism. Holdstock's The Hollowing draws on the legend of Gawain and the Green Knight (and Gawain turns out to be the villain: Nature, in the aspect of the Green Knight, is the hero). Jones transmogrifies the Fisher King, with his unhealable wound, into a nervous and hypochondriac Reigner Two, who has made a nasty bruise an excuse not to marry the malevolent Reigner Three - Morgan La Trey.
The Bannus is, to some extent, a teaching machine. It also transforms its cast into their true selves. In an echo of Mythago Wood, trees spring up along Wood Street as the Bannus transforms Reigner One, stealthily and without any fuss, into a dragon. But is the Bannus to blame? It isn't the only thing manipulating time and myth in /Hexwood/. The Wood itself is working on the people within its sphere - sometimes co-operating with the Bannus, sometimes not. For example, the Wood effectively imprisons the Bannus, along with assorted luminaries from Homeworld, until Mordion resolves the conflict between machine and nature.
The Bannus is resentful of the fact that, over the centuries of its imprisonment, its theta-space has merged with that of the Wood: the fact that the wood is called Banners Wood is an early indication of this. The Bannus can't control or communicate with the wood at all: it can only learn by trial and error what is allowed. In this, Banners Wood is like Holdstock's Ryhope Wood: it can't be manipulated. But it is a less malevolent wood. Mordion, in his role as magician, has learnt to work with the Wood: in return, the Wood gives him 'special treatment', because he can help it achieve its own desires. When the Bannus gives Morgan La Trey the formula for a poison to destroy Mordion (and does it really want him dead?) the Wood transforms him into a dragon instead of letting him die. It's only in this form, after all, that he can defeat Reigner One.
It is Mordion, in the end, who works out what Banners Wood wants: its own permanent theta-space, 'so that it can be the great Forest all the time, without having to rely on humans'. Ryhope Wood functions by raising 'demons of the mind' against what it perceives as human invasion: Banners Wood is a gentler place, which needs humans to attain its full potential. Once it has persuaded Mordion to give it what it wants, there are mythagos all around: Robin Hood, twig-people, a dragon and a unicorn, all glimpsed through the trees as legends are supposed to be.
Banners Wood and Ryhope Wood are two different places. While Hexwood probably has a higher body count than any other of Jones' novels, there isn't the sheer nastiness and violence of primeval myth that is so dominant in Holdstock's proto-mythologising.
Ryhope Wood is called 'the wildwood': it's a place of violent death, of Ice Age winters and slow starvation. This is the wood of nightmares, where wolves prey on small children and every path curves back on itself.
By contrast, Banners Wood is the fairytale enchanted forest: there are wolves, and a terrible winter, but they are not unconquerable. Besides, the Bannus - like the magical cauldron of Celtic myth - provides whatever is asked of it. Mordion is struck by the beauty and peace of the wood: for him, it is a healing experience rather than the agonising catharsis of Huxley's journey into the wildwood.
Most importantly, perhaps, the way out of Banners Wood is relatively simple to find. Hume and Mordion go hungry in the terrible winter - but only until Mordion realises that he can buy food in the shops on Wood Street. Ryhope Wood holds onto those who come within its bounds: Tallis has to undergo a terrifying series of transformations before she can regain the edge of the wood, and the human world, and other characters never come out at all.
The Bannus gives people a chance to explore their own natures, and learn to accept responsibility for their own actions and the less pleasant aspects of their personalities. In this, Hexwood works well as a rite-of-passage novel: although all of the main characters are past adolescence, they still have much to learn about themselves. In Ann's case, at least, this is achieved by a temporary return to childhood. (Paradoxically, it is as an adolescent that her feelings for Mordion change from a girlish crush to love.) Only then is she able to assume her role in the adult world.
Ryhope Wood forces those who enter to examine their primal natures - and if they don't succeed, they will be lost for ever. In contrast to the romance and happy ending of Hexwood, all three of Holdstock's 'Mythago' novels fail to achieve resolution. (Mythago Wood and The Hollowing end with a man waiting, in the wildwood, for a woman to return. Lavondyss ends with a time loop: it's all going to happen again, just as unhappily …) There are recurrent themes of losing a child, and of the conflict between father and son - both more 'adult' psychological crises than the rites of passage in Hexwood.
The two novels both depict the forest as a sentient thing, a device for translating subconscious hopes and fears into real symbols. (In Hexwood, it's actually the Bannus that does most of this, through a conscious manipulation of character and plot not unlike the writer's.) Both Hexwood and the 'Mythago' sequence examine essential phases of human life, by embodying archetypes to lead and challenge the protagonists. In a sense, Hexwood is 'Mythago Wood for children': the conflicts and changes it examines are those which every child must confront before achieving maturity. Equally, Mythago Wood is Hexwood for adults: a darker and nastier place, with less youthful optimism, but still the Enchanted Forest.
Wednesday, April 01, 1998
Tam Lin -- Pamela Dean
This is one of those books that, having finished, I immediately want to turn back to page 1. And yet I am not sure that it is a 'good' book. The pacing is peculiar: while there are plenty of suggestions of magic, the magical elements take a very long time to reveal themselves for what they are. The 'right' romance takes years to blossom, too.
Tam Lin is based on the ballad of the same name, but the references are neat and unobtrusive – a book to make one think. In the original ballad, for example, Janet is caught by Tam Lin while 'plucking a rose or only two' from a forbidden garden. In Dean's version, it's while she is attempting to borrow The Romance of the Rose from the restricted shelves in the college library.
As in Freedom & Necessity, the magical is explained away: when someone comments on the fact that the mysterious Halloween riders seemed to be glowing in the dark, someone else remarks rather sharply that there are such things as chemistry majors.
It's a college novel and a discussion of literature – sometimes in considerable depth, which I suspect would be wasted on many readers. (On the other hand, Janet’s enthusiasm for Christopher Fry led me to reread The Lady’s not for Burning, which is no bad thing to come from a novel). Most of the texts that fascinate Janet turn out to have some relevance to the plot, although some of the links are tenuous in the extreme.
Incidentally, I’ve been avoiding reading Tam Lin since I first saw it in paperback a few years ago, simply because it looked so much like a run-of-the-mill Celtic fantasy. The cover art features a pre-Raphaelite, vaguely Celtic-looking woman gazing wistfully off into the middle distance, and it’s a fair bet that she’s not looking at a piece of gritty urban realism, such as Glasgow. The blurb is not much more informative, rambling on enthusiastically about the Fairy Tale series, edited by Terri Windling, consisting of novels based on well-known tales. Nowhere does it mention what this book in your hand is actually about.
So remember, children: never judge a book by its cover…
Tam Lin is based on the ballad of the same name, but the references are neat and unobtrusive – a book to make one think. In the original ballad, for example, Janet is caught by Tam Lin while 'plucking a rose or only two' from a forbidden garden. In Dean's version, it's while she is attempting to borrow The Romance of the Rose from the restricted shelves in the college library.
As in Freedom & Necessity, the magical is explained away: when someone comments on the fact that the mysterious Halloween riders seemed to be glowing in the dark, someone else remarks rather sharply that there are such things as chemistry majors.
It's a college novel and a discussion of literature – sometimes in considerable depth, which I suspect would be wasted on many readers. (On the other hand, Janet’s enthusiasm for Christopher Fry led me to reread The Lady’s not for Burning, which is no bad thing to come from a novel). Most of the texts that fascinate Janet turn out to have some relevance to the plot, although some of the links are tenuous in the extreme.
Incidentally, I’ve been avoiding reading Tam Lin since I first saw it in paperback a few years ago, simply because it looked so much like a run-of-the-mill Celtic fantasy. The cover art features a pre-Raphaelite, vaguely Celtic-looking woman gazing wistfully off into the middle distance, and it’s a fair bet that she’s not looking at a piece of gritty urban realism, such as Glasgow. The blurb is not much more informative, rambling on enthusiastically about the Fairy Tale series, edited by Terri Windling, consisting of novels based on well-known tales. Nowhere does it mention what this book in your hand is actually about.
So remember, children: never judge a book by its cover…
A Gap in the Landscape
This piece first appeared in Banana Wings #11, 1998, eds Brialey / Plummer
Learning to Love Brahms
I'd always assumed that other peoples' memories worked in much the same way as mine. Recently, though. I was discussing music with a friend of mine, Maggy, who is a keen amateur pianist and singer. I was waxing lyrical about Brahms’ second Piano Concerto, which she's heard several times. She even owns a recording of it.
"You know that bit in the second movement? Where it sounds almost like a peal of bells?" I asked her. (There is probably a technical term for this effect, but I don’t know it. I rely on raw enthusiasm.)
Maggy frowned and shook her head.
"You played the CD earlier," I reminded her.
A look of complete ignorance.
"I’ve got a tape somewhere here," I said, and proceeded to put it on and play it again.
"Ah, I know that bit," said Maggy with relief, and went on to explain to me about '2 against 3' time – where the left hand is playing to a different beat than the right – and other technical difficulties. I wondered what she meant by ‘know’: she didn’t know the piece in the same way as I did, because she apparently lacked the mechanism by which I could play through a piece of music in my head – just as I played the tape – and listen to an approximation of what I’d heard before.
I have entire symphonic movements in my head, although it doesn't take much to distract me from 'hearing' them. The orchestration isn't always accurate, though: there is a great deal of detail in an orchestral piece that I simply don't retain, and which seldom fails to surprise me when I hear the piece again. If I know a piece of music well enough, it can become a soundtrack to my dreams - in the sense that I wake up with a Beethoven finale half-played in my head, and have to play the CD in order to resolve the dream.
Later in the afternoon, Maggy played me a piece – possibly Bach – that she'd been practising for weeks. She only glanced at the score occasionally while she was playing, so I assumed that she knew it fairly well. "Now do it without the music," I said. She couldn't, although she admitted that the printed music was mainly an aide-memoire. She wasn't using it to determine which note came next – but without the music, she couldn't play the rest of the piece. I lost the ability to read music somewhere in my teens, when it became a useless skill (compare that to the nineteenth century, when the ability to read music was a standard 'accomplishment' among middle-class girls, and not being able to play a pretty little accompaniment while singing the latest popular ballad was a social faux pas). I do, however, remember relying more on the shape of the music than on the actual notes. Apparently, Maggy didn't have a visual memory of the music either.
My memory for music is not note-perfect. I was impressed, and astounded, when I first saw someone play Beethoven's Fifth Piano Concerto, in front of an audience, without music. That's forty minutes of music, and lots of notes. On the other hand, when I listened to that performance, I could distinguish the original notes from the grace-notes and decorations added by the pianist. That indicates that somewhere in my memory I do have a note-for-note version of the music – or at least a sensory image of its shape. When I try to hear it in my mind, though, it's always incomplete.
Burnham Wick
I started thinking about music and memory after hearing the world premiere of a piece called 'Burnham Wick', by David Matthews. I usually avoid twentieth-century music: I find it difficult to listen to, because I can't seem to make sense of it. I didn't switch the radio off when they announced 'Burnham Wick', though, because Burnham-on-Crouch is about three miles - as the gull flies - from the place where I grew up. (It's thirty miles by road: the first bridge over the Crouch is ten miles upriver).
Burnham Wick is east of the town: a loose cluster of farmhouses, with single-track roads linking them, and all the land below sea-level. The highest point on the eastern horizon is the sea wall, against the top of which waves lap at the peak flow of spring tides. In 1953 the floods reached as far as the railway line, three miles west of the sea. It's very quiet, and the flatness of the landscape makes the sky seem wider than usual. The fields are nicely squared, and drainage ditches run between them. The next town to the east is Zeebrugge.
David Matthews was there: apparently the piece was inspired by a Sunday walk in spring. His music, which is of the kind I politely term 'abstract', uses a violin (apparently playing the highest possible notes) to emulate a skylark. There's a sense of stillness and suspense. "No", I thought, "that was not it, at all."
For one thing, he seems to have missed out the river entirely. The Crouch estuary is wide and muddy. Recently someone has laid on boat trips 'to see the seals' on sand banks nearer the sea. There is always a plaintive sound of seabirds, and of cables chiming on aluminium masts. (Burnham-on-Crouch is famed for having two major yacht clubs). And the light … with so much water to reflect it, and so few obstructions, the light is a tangible thing. Near sunset there is a peculiar glow to everything, and it's the slow river, not the sun, that seems the source of it. Pale things, like dead grass and sea lavender, look as though they're illuminated by spotlights. Cuttlefish bones seem luminous against the dark bladder wrack on the sea wall. The churches at Canewdon and Ashingdon are haloed on their hills.
Matthews may have put all that in his music: I didn't hear it. What I heard was someone else's perception. I felt that his was a different landscape, one far from the sea, where no one had thought to look up at the sky.
A Gap in the Landscape
Sometimes one notices something only by its absence. Where I grew up there was a small wood, visited by occasional birders and hunters, and by me. The wood was old, if not technically ancient, and tangled. There were a few paths, but they never came out quite where one would expect. At some point a huge tree had fallen in the centre of the wood, but most of it had decayed long before my time: the clearing it left was at the centre of the wood, hedged in with hawthorn and bramble. Most of the trees were oak or elm: the elms were dying, because of the advent of Dutch Elm disease, but the oaks seemed immovable. I'm sure the wood had once been much larger. In a more populous setting, it would have been no more than a copse, full of litter and rope swings. Here, it was allowed to sleep. When the paths became overgrown, no one came to clear them.
A cold day in January, sometime in the early 1980s. I paused on my way downstairs to look out of the landing window. I could see clear to the river, three miles away: I could see sunlight reflecting from the Royal Corinthian Yacht Club in Burnham. Not until I was sitting at the kitchen table did this strike me as odd. There was something wrong. Something missing. A gap.
They had taken away the wood. Where it had been, there was not even a heap of timber: just a bulldozed patch, and a few ashes. Someone had been shooting rabbits, and there were orange gun cartridges like embers. The ground was cold. The farmer had regained perhaps three acres of arable land. He left it fallow for years.
Souvenirs
Music is now how I tie down my experiences. If I'd had more music - and especially portable music - when I grew up, I might now have a recollection of the wood as precise as the one I have of the patterns of snow on Wandsworth Common. I call up that memory by listening to an otherwise undistinguished song called 'Ukraine Ways', which was what was in the Walkman when I went out in the snow one day.
It would be inconvenient, to say the least, if this mental recording occurred every time I listened to music. How many clear and precise memories of my living room do I need? How can I stop myself listening to Beethoven's Ninth now that there's a memory tied to it? Will listening to 'Ukraine Ways' on a sunny beach destroy the evocation of winter and snow? It's partly an involuntary process (which means there are pieces of music I can't listen to casually, in case they awake unwanted memories). Sometimes, with an effort, I can force it to happen, though seldom with a piece of music that I already know well. I certainly can't play a piece of music on the Walkman with the intention of capturing my surroundings, as though I were simply a device for recording sensory impressions.
(Incidentally, it's not just classical music that I can use to evoke memory. Rock music is more difficult, though, not least because there are intelligible words to get in the way. One of the joys of opera is not being able to understand a word of it, and thus being able to treat it simply as music.)
Of course, there's no way of guaranteeing that the images thus evoked are true ones: memory plays false, and I wonder how many lacunae I plaster over each time I remember something. Does this matter? I don't know. These images work for me, in a way that David Matthews' "clearly defined emotional progression" does not. He was not seeing, or feeling, the same thing. It may have been the same physical place, but it was another country.
Gracenotes
The mental event that is triggered when I listen to a significant piece of music (as opposed to one that I simply think sounds good) is a complicated melange of image, sensation and emotion. Needless to say, there is no sound: I have already overdubbed the backing track, simply by linking the occasion to the music. Like my musical memory, my visual memory seems perfect until I try to think about the gaps. I can visualise the entire view from the landing window at home, but there are some parts of it on which I can't focus. Similarly, when I try to hear a piece of music in my head, I'm not hearing the full orchestral version. Quite often the music edits itself, so that when I next listen to the piece I am disturbed by whole sections that seem shockingly new.
There is a familiarity to some of my memories which makes me wonder how much of them I have constructed, or inserted, involuntarily. I can recall standing next to the hollow tree on the south-east corner of the old wood, listening to a wood pigeon. If I think about it, I can remember the smell of rotting leaves. But I don't know if that memory comes from spring or autumn: if it was spring, the rotting leaves are inappropriate, and the memory false. I don't suppose that this sort of memory is ever entirely reliable – unlike a concert pianist's perfect recall of a concerto – but I fear the gradual substitution of imagination for recall.
My father's memories are patchy but distinct: he is suffering from something that may simply be old age. He remembers events that, for all I know, never happened. His focus, when I was a child, was so different to mine that I can't check any of my memories against his. And yet – which gives me hope – his strongest recollections are of long hot summers between the wars. I have clearer memories of a nameless wood that was destroyed than I do of the view from my bedroom window, which I saw this morning. But if I look out of that window tomorrow morning and something has gone, I'll know. I think I'll know.
Learning to Love Brahms
I'd always assumed that other peoples' memories worked in much the same way as mine. Recently, though. I was discussing music with a friend of mine, Maggy, who is a keen amateur pianist and singer. I was waxing lyrical about Brahms’ second Piano Concerto, which she's heard several times. She even owns a recording of it.
"You know that bit in the second movement? Where it sounds almost like a peal of bells?" I asked her. (There is probably a technical term for this effect, but I don’t know it. I rely on raw enthusiasm.)
Maggy frowned and shook her head.
"You played the CD earlier," I reminded her.
A look of complete ignorance.
"I’ve got a tape somewhere here," I said, and proceeded to put it on and play it again.
"Ah, I know that bit," said Maggy with relief, and went on to explain to me about '2 against 3' time – where the left hand is playing to a different beat than the right – and other technical difficulties. I wondered what she meant by ‘know’: she didn’t know the piece in the same way as I did, because she apparently lacked the mechanism by which I could play through a piece of music in my head – just as I played the tape – and listen to an approximation of what I’d heard before.
I have entire symphonic movements in my head, although it doesn't take much to distract me from 'hearing' them. The orchestration isn't always accurate, though: there is a great deal of detail in an orchestral piece that I simply don't retain, and which seldom fails to surprise me when I hear the piece again. If I know a piece of music well enough, it can become a soundtrack to my dreams - in the sense that I wake up with a Beethoven finale half-played in my head, and have to play the CD in order to resolve the dream.
Later in the afternoon, Maggy played me a piece – possibly Bach – that she'd been practising for weeks. She only glanced at the score occasionally while she was playing, so I assumed that she knew it fairly well. "Now do it without the music," I said. She couldn't, although she admitted that the printed music was mainly an aide-memoire. She wasn't using it to determine which note came next – but without the music, she couldn't play the rest of the piece. I lost the ability to read music somewhere in my teens, when it became a useless skill (compare that to the nineteenth century, when the ability to read music was a standard 'accomplishment' among middle-class girls, and not being able to play a pretty little accompaniment while singing the latest popular ballad was a social faux pas). I do, however, remember relying more on the shape of the music than on the actual notes. Apparently, Maggy didn't have a visual memory of the music either.
My memory for music is not note-perfect. I was impressed, and astounded, when I first saw someone play Beethoven's Fifth Piano Concerto, in front of an audience, without music. That's forty minutes of music, and lots of notes. On the other hand, when I listened to that performance, I could distinguish the original notes from the grace-notes and decorations added by the pianist. That indicates that somewhere in my memory I do have a note-for-note version of the music – or at least a sensory image of its shape. When I try to hear it in my mind, though, it's always incomplete.
Burnham Wick
I started thinking about music and memory after hearing the world premiere of a piece called 'Burnham Wick', by David Matthews. I usually avoid twentieth-century music: I find it difficult to listen to, because I can't seem to make sense of it. I didn't switch the radio off when they announced 'Burnham Wick', though, because Burnham-on-Crouch is about three miles - as the gull flies - from the place where I grew up. (It's thirty miles by road: the first bridge over the Crouch is ten miles upriver).
Burnham Wick is east of the town: a loose cluster of farmhouses, with single-track roads linking them, and all the land below sea-level. The highest point on the eastern horizon is the sea wall, against the top of which waves lap at the peak flow of spring tides. In 1953 the floods reached as far as the railway line, three miles west of the sea. It's very quiet, and the flatness of the landscape makes the sky seem wider than usual. The fields are nicely squared, and drainage ditches run between them. The next town to the east is Zeebrugge.
David Matthews was there: apparently the piece was inspired by a Sunday walk in spring. His music, which is of the kind I politely term 'abstract', uses a violin (apparently playing the highest possible notes) to emulate a skylark. There's a sense of stillness and suspense. "No", I thought, "that was not it, at all."
For one thing, he seems to have missed out the river entirely. The Crouch estuary is wide and muddy. Recently someone has laid on boat trips 'to see the seals' on sand banks nearer the sea. There is always a plaintive sound of seabirds, and of cables chiming on aluminium masts. (Burnham-on-Crouch is famed for having two major yacht clubs). And the light … with so much water to reflect it, and so few obstructions, the light is a tangible thing. Near sunset there is a peculiar glow to everything, and it's the slow river, not the sun, that seems the source of it. Pale things, like dead grass and sea lavender, look as though they're illuminated by spotlights. Cuttlefish bones seem luminous against the dark bladder wrack on the sea wall. The churches at Canewdon and Ashingdon are haloed on their hills.
Matthews may have put all that in his music: I didn't hear it. What I heard was someone else's perception. I felt that his was a different landscape, one far from the sea, where no one had thought to look up at the sky.
A Gap in the Landscape
Sometimes one notices something only by its absence. Where I grew up there was a small wood, visited by occasional birders and hunters, and by me. The wood was old, if not technically ancient, and tangled. There were a few paths, but they never came out quite where one would expect. At some point a huge tree had fallen in the centre of the wood, but most of it had decayed long before my time: the clearing it left was at the centre of the wood, hedged in with hawthorn and bramble. Most of the trees were oak or elm: the elms were dying, because of the advent of Dutch Elm disease, but the oaks seemed immovable. I'm sure the wood had once been much larger. In a more populous setting, it would have been no more than a copse, full of litter and rope swings. Here, it was allowed to sleep. When the paths became overgrown, no one came to clear them.
A cold day in January, sometime in the early 1980s. I paused on my way downstairs to look out of the landing window. I could see clear to the river, three miles away: I could see sunlight reflecting from the Royal Corinthian Yacht Club in Burnham. Not until I was sitting at the kitchen table did this strike me as odd. There was something wrong. Something missing. A gap.
They had taken away the wood. Where it had been, there was not even a heap of timber: just a bulldozed patch, and a few ashes. Someone had been shooting rabbits, and there were orange gun cartridges like embers. The ground was cold. The farmer had regained perhaps three acres of arable land. He left it fallow for years.
Souvenirs
Music is now how I tie down my experiences. If I'd had more music - and especially portable music - when I grew up, I might now have a recollection of the wood as precise as the one I have of the patterns of snow on Wandsworth Common. I call up that memory by listening to an otherwise undistinguished song called 'Ukraine Ways', which was what was in the Walkman when I went out in the snow one day.
It would be inconvenient, to say the least, if this mental recording occurred every time I listened to music. How many clear and precise memories of my living room do I need? How can I stop myself listening to Beethoven's Ninth now that there's a memory tied to it? Will listening to 'Ukraine Ways' on a sunny beach destroy the evocation of winter and snow? It's partly an involuntary process (which means there are pieces of music I can't listen to casually, in case they awake unwanted memories). Sometimes, with an effort, I can force it to happen, though seldom with a piece of music that I already know well. I certainly can't play a piece of music on the Walkman with the intention of capturing my surroundings, as though I were simply a device for recording sensory impressions.
(Incidentally, it's not just classical music that I can use to evoke memory. Rock music is more difficult, though, not least because there are intelligible words to get in the way. One of the joys of opera is not being able to understand a word of it, and thus being able to treat it simply as music.)
Of course, there's no way of guaranteeing that the images thus evoked are true ones: memory plays false, and I wonder how many lacunae I plaster over each time I remember something. Does this matter? I don't know. These images work for me, in a way that David Matthews' "clearly defined emotional progression" does not. He was not seeing, or feeling, the same thing. It may have been the same physical place, but it was another country.
Gracenotes
The mental event that is triggered when I listen to a significant piece of music (as opposed to one that I simply think sounds good) is a complicated melange of image, sensation and emotion. Needless to say, there is no sound: I have already overdubbed the backing track, simply by linking the occasion to the music. Like my musical memory, my visual memory seems perfect until I try to think about the gaps. I can visualise the entire view from the landing window at home, but there are some parts of it on which I can't focus. Similarly, when I try to hear a piece of music in my head, I'm not hearing the full orchestral version. Quite often the music edits itself, so that when I next listen to the piece I am disturbed by whole sections that seem shockingly new.
There is a familiarity to some of my memories which makes me wonder how much of them I have constructed, or inserted, involuntarily. I can recall standing next to the hollow tree on the south-east corner of the old wood, listening to a wood pigeon. If I think about it, I can remember the smell of rotting leaves. But I don't know if that memory comes from spring or autumn: if it was spring, the rotting leaves are inappropriate, and the memory false. I don't suppose that this sort of memory is ever entirely reliable – unlike a concert pianist's perfect recall of a concerto – but I fear the gradual substitution of imagination for recall.
My father's memories are patchy but distinct: he is suffering from something that may simply be old age. He remembers events that, for all I know, never happened. His focus, when I was a child, was so different to mine that I can't check any of my memories against his. And yet – which gives me hope – his strongest recollections are of long hot summers between the wars. I have clearer memories of a nameless wood that was destroyed than I do of the view from my bedroom window, which I saw this morning. But if I look out of that window tomorrow morning and something has gone, I'll know. I think I'll know.
Someplace to be Flying -- Charles de Lint
Hank Walker drives an unlicensed cab: one night he's driving through a rough quarter of the city, and sees a woman being beaten up. He intervenes, and is shot by the woman's assailant. Then two identical teenage girls appear from nowhere. One dispatches the mugger with a switchblade: the other heals both Hank and Lily, the woman he's rescued. Then they wander off, arm in arm.
Hank confides to Lily that he thinks the girls were angels: Lily counters with her belief that they were animal people - the 'first people' who were there when the world began. She's heard tales of them from Jack Daw, an itinerant storyteller. Hank's heard the same stories from the same man: he humours Lily. The story, though, is only just beginning.
Someplace to be Flying draws on Native American mythology: crows, coyotes and the creator-being Raven. In this it's comparable to Terri Windling's award-winning The Woodwife: de Lint, however, focuses on the mundane rather than the mystical. While some may find the moral and ethical dilemmas faced by his heroes and heroines to be rather juvenile, they are real-world problems - of more immediate relevance than the archetypal grail-quests and Battles of Good and Evil.
Not that this is a novel without a Grail, or without villains: it's simply that the stage is human-sized, and the characters have human failings -- even when there is little else that is human about them.
De Lint has acquired a reputation for upbeat, imaginative urban fantasy, and Someplace to be Flying is an enjoyable addition to the canon.
Hank confides to Lily that he thinks the girls were angels: Lily counters with her belief that they were animal people - the 'first people' who were there when the world began. She's heard tales of them from Jack Daw, an itinerant storyteller. Hank's heard the same stories from the same man: he humours Lily. The story, though, is only just beginning.
Someplace to be Flying draws on Native American mythology: crows, coyotes and the creator-being Raven. In this it's comparable to Terri Windling's award-winning The Woodwife: de Lint, however, focuses on the mundane rather than the mystical. While some may find the moral and ethical dilemmas faced by his heroes and heroines to be rather juvenile, they are real-world problems - of more immediate relevance than the archetypal grail-quests and Battles of Good and Evil.
Not that this is a novel without a Grail, or without villains: it's simply that the stage is human-sized, and the characters have human failings -- even when there is little else that is human about them.
De Lint has acquired a reputation for upbeat, imaginative urban fantasy, and Someplace to be Flying is an enjoyable addition to the canon.
Monday, September 01, 1997
Ancient Surfaces
This piece first appeared in Banana Wings #8, 1997 (eds Brialey / Plummer)
Going Back (1)
A hot summer's day. Mother and child sitting in the back garden (though this has not the connotation of privacy that it might have to you: no one ever comes past the front of the house either). Mother is smoking and reading a magazine. Her daughter, about nine years old, is sipping cherryade and reading a book.
Some people come down the track past the house. This track is technically private, but there is nothing to stop anyone on foot from slipping through the gap at the side of the gate and walking along it. The track is separated from the garden by a ditch full of nettles and stagnant water (hidden under trailing convolvuli) and a fence of corrugated iron, leaning slightly under the weight of vegetation. This barrier is not enough to stop mother and child hearing a woman say, "That used to be our house."
The mother is fascinated, and runs around the far side of the house and over the bridge (a railway sleeper) by the electricity pole to invite the strangers in for a cup of tea.
The child is outraged, and runs and hides in her bedroom. Not only is she painfully shy, but this is her house – at least her family's house – and how dare anyone say otherwise?
She sulks.
Going Back (2)
A warm day in autumn. A man and a woman are spending a weekend in the countryside. The woman wants to revisit the places she knew as a child: of late she has become increasingly homesick and nostalgic. The man is there to keep her company, and drive her around, and because he likes making her happy. They have parked in the entrance to a track, in front of a gate bedecked with locks and barbed wire. It's a mile and a half to the nearest village, and this is not themeland country: no one famous ever lived here: there are no scenic stopping places or picnic areas.
Next to the entrance with the gate, there's an opening in the hedge which leads from the gate down to the nearest roadside house. The woman stands at this opening, as close as she cares to get to an impenetrable barrier of brambles, and barbed wire, and wired-together wooden lathes. She peers through the tangle, trying to spot familiar landmarks. A line of trees leads off south-east, following the track. Most of the trees are elms and quite a few of them are dead. This area was hit badly by Dutch Elm disease in the sixties and seventies, and many of the remaining trees didn't survive the hurricane of 1987. She can't see the electricity poles, or the lake: the vegetation is too thick.
The man is examining the locks on the gate. He asks why the gate is locked. The track leads to a fishing pond owned by a local angling society, she tells him. They've always been keen on keeping people out.
The road is used by heavy lorries going to and from the timber wharf out on the island. It's not a safe place to stop. A car pulls up, and a man asks them to move their vehicle so he can get to the gate. There's nowhere else to park: the couple drive off.
It takes several days for the woman to realise that she could have explained why she was there, and that maybe he'd have understood and let them drive up the private track.
She does not sulk. She regrets.
Ancient Surfaces
Recently, reading about excavations at a palaeolithic site in Sussex, I was much taken by the idea of an ancient surface. The term referred to a separate, buried, but intact stratum that was once the surface of the land: the ground. This is rarer than you might think. Most of the land in the south of England is pretty much the same as it was when the glaciers last retreated, about ten thousand years ago. Any archaeological investigation has to contend with thousands of years of human habitation, but if you get deep enough you might at least find some indication of what the previous tenants were doing on that land. The land isn't in neat layers which can be dug through until you get to the century of choice. It's been mixed up by successive generations of farming, building and irrigation. Geological factors also play a part in this disruption.
At Boxgrove, in Sussex, the surface they've excavated hasn't been on the surface for half a million years. It was a beach, back when the sea was higher than it is now. Then it became a grassy plain, and was inhabited by humans. Then the climate cooled, the humans left, and sea and glaciers between them covered the landscape with silt. As a record of palaeolithic life, it is apparently almost unique.
There's a field to the north-east of the fishermen's track. Horses graze in it, and there are a few jumps, so they're probably exercised there. Under that field there's a surface – not so very ancient – that was almost my entire world when I was a child.
You Can Never Go Back
"I can't go back," I said.
"You can never go back."
"I didn't mean it like that. I meant it literally. It's not there any more. No one else knew it. I was the only person who knew it: I'm the only person who remembers it."
"In England? There can't be any land in the south of England that no one's used."
"It started as corn fields, and they were level with the road. Then a company found gravel, and they came and dug it out. They went away and left the wasteland. I explored it, every inch: I could still draw you a map. There was a wood, which might have been what they call ancient woodland now: other people went there, birdwatchers and hunters. But between that and the road, there was just rough marshy ground, with a few willow copses, and some hills where they'd left earth from the gravel pits, and lakes – ponds – where they'd dug deeper. There was a stony plain where they hadn't taken all the gravel, and sandy cliffs at the edges of where the pit had been. There was a rabbit warren over near the wood, and a single electricity pole on a high island in the middle of another lake, which had been there before they'd started to dig. There was ..."
"Write it down."
So I am.
The Map is Not the Territory
I don't remember who said that "the map is not the territory". Barthes or some other one of those post-modern types, no doubt. I used to know, but I've forgotten. I forget things like that. I could draw you a map of a few acres of land that have been buried for over a decade. A very detailed map.
I tried to buy a map of the area. The Ordnance Survey sell a range of maps called Pathfinders, which are 2½ inches to the mile: 4 cm to 1 km in what I persist in calling the new system. (The standard OS maps are 1¼ inches to the mile: Pathfinders show more footpaths, tracks and minor land features such as fens and gravel pits).
The map I found was Pathfinder 1143. It shows a truly desolate piece of countryside, with the occasional small village and one medium-sized town (Burnham-on-Crouch, home to the Royal Corinthian Yacht Club). I studied the representation of the place where I grew up.
The map was wrong. That is, the map didn't match my memories. Where I remembered ponds, they'd marked fields. There was a wide track across the middle of the wasteland, according to them: according to me, that would be just around the gap in the elms where the snowdrifts were over my head in that bad winter. (No great feat: I wasn't even five feet tall then).
Could I have misremembered? Were my childhood memories that hazy?
No. The map hasn't been amended since 1976, and then only in part. By a process of deduction, I'd say that the place where I grew up was mapped around 1970. By the time I knew the land, it had changed. Even the contour line (which breaks at the house where I lived, and is resumed right down near the Wash) is different now.
The map in my head, then, is the only map there is for what was there.
I'm sure the landowner had maps, and kept them up-to-date. Some of the hunters probably made maps of their own: rabbits here, pheasants there, stay away from this bit because there is a Child. The angling society might have mapped out the area to which they had access. I wonder if my father has kept any of the maps I made as a child, replete with my own personal mythologies.
I've tried to draw the map that I want: there is a dimension to the landscape that I can't put on paper, however many techniques I try. I've come up with a whole new set of symbols for places. There are places to read, places that were mirrors of imaginary lands, places where I was scared, places to hide and cry, places where I thought I saw things that weren't there.
I cannot imagine the symbols which could describe it to anyone else. I'm using words, but they play me false.
You Can't Get There From Here
No road leads there any more. When I peered past the barbed wire, what I saw was not the track I walked down every day, winter and summer, through snowdrifts, in power cuts, in the pouring rain, with the cat following me.
I divided the track – the Lane – into four parts. There was the section between the house and the fishermen's' gate. The gate was of iron, not a five-bar gate but a simple frame, divided once horizontally and twice vertically. There was a padlock and chain on the side nearest the house, and next to that a gap wide enough to admit not only me, but my parents. The gate was as far as anyone else usually came. To the left, as you walked down, was a cornfield: to the right, elm trees, brambles and hawthorn.
The second section ran between the Gate and the Gap. The Gap was where the wind came through and the snow drifted highest. There were three strands of barbed wire strung across it, but I had no problems getting through that. To the right of that part of the Lane, the trees were almost all elms: there was a half-dead elm stump just before the Gap where lizards and snakes basked in the summer. On the other side of the Lane was a pond – a lake, as far as I knew – with rushes and water birds and little islands. I learnt to row on that lake: I slid on the ice in winter, and climbed the cliffs (stony sand, all of fifteen feet high) until the landowner sold the pond to the angling society and I had to be more circumspect. By then I had grown from being a painfully shy child to a dumpy, paranoid teenager, so avoiding being seen was a fairly high priority. It was on the second section of lane that the boy from down the road set his Alsation on me. Anoraks, whatever their fashion failings, make good armour, and I ran home with no more than a bruise or two. I didn't tell my parents. I hate dogs.
The third section of the Lane had no distinguishing features. It was delimited by the Gap and by the third of four electricity poles. The trees were elms: there was a great deal of ivy. I didn't usually venture that far down the lake, because by then I was closer to the neighbours' houses than to my own.
The last section of the Lane was pretty much the same as the third, except that there was a matched pair of electricity poles, one at each side. Our paper box was nailed to one of them, until the paper boy stopped delivering. Our dustbin was right at the end of the lane, under an elder tree, because the Lane was too narrow for a dustcart. The dustmen came on Friday mornings, and usually remembered to take our rubbish away.
The elder tree is gone, and I couldn't see the rest. The sign my father painted had been taken away. The barbed wire barricade was, I suppose, much more effective than a polite request to 'please keep out'. I suppose the present occupant uses the farm track to get to the house. That's locked, too.
They can't keep me out. I know it too well.
Going Back (1)
A hot summer's day. Mother and child sitting in the back garden (though this has not the connotation of privacy that it might have to you: no one ever comes past the front of the house either). Mother is smoking and reading a magazine. Her daughter, about nine years old, is sipping cherryade and reading a book.
Some people come down the track past the house. This track is technically private, but there is nothing to stop anyone on foot from slipping through the gap at the side of the gate and walking along it. The track is separated from the garden by a ditch full of nettles and stagnant water (hidden under trailing convolvuli) and a fence of corrugated iron, leaning slightly under the weight of vegetation. This barrier is not enough to stop mother and child hearing a woman say, "That used to be our house."
The mother is fascinated, and runs around the far side of the house and over the bridge (a railway sleeper) by the electricity pole to invite the strangers in for a cup of tea.
The child is outraged, and runs and hides in her bedroom. Not only is she painfully shy, but this is her house – at least her family's house – and how dare anyone say otherwise?
She sulks.
Going Back (2)
A warm day in autumn. A man and a woman are spending a weekend in the countryside. The woman wants to revisit the places she knew as a child: of late she has become increasingly homesick and nostalgic. The man is there to keep her company, and drive her around, and because he likes making her happy. They have parked in the entrance to a track, in front of a gate bedecked with locks and barbed wire. It's a mile and a half to the nearest village, and this is not themeland country: no one famous ever lived here: there are no scenic stopping places or picnic areas.
Next to the entrance with the gate, there's an opening in the hedge which leads from the gate down to the nearest roadside house. The woman stands at this opening, as close as she cares to get to an impenetrable barrier of brambles, and barbed wire, and wired-together wooden lathes. She peers through the tangle, trying to spot familiar landmarks. A line of trees leads off south-east, following the track. Most of the trees are elms and quite a few of them are dead. This area was hit badly by Dutch Elm disease in the sixties and seventies, and many of the remaining trees didn't survive the hurricane of 1987. She can't see the electricity poles, or the lake: the vegetation is too thick.
The man is examining the locks on the gate. He asks why the gate is locked. The track leads to a fishing pond owned by a local angling society, she tells him. They've always been keen on keeping people out.
The road is used by heavy lorries going to and from the timber wharf out on the island. It's not a safe place to stop. A car pulls up, and a man asks them to move their vehicle so he can get to the gate. There's nowhere else to park: the couple drive off.
It takes several days for the woman to realise that she could have explained why she was there, and that maybe he'd have understood and let them drive up the private track.
She does not sulk. She regrets.
Ancient Surfaces
Recently, reading about excavations at a palaeolithic site in Sussex, I was much taken by the idea of an ancient surface. The term referred to a separate, buried, but intact stratum that was once the surface of the land: the ground. This is rarer than you might think. Most of the land in the south of England is pretty much the same as it was when the glaciers last retreated, about ten thousand years ago. Any archaeological investigation has to contend with thousands of years of human habitation, but if you get deep enough you might at least find some indication of what the previous tenants were doing on that land. The land isn't in neat layers which can be dug through until you get to the century of choice. It's been mixed up by successive generations of farming, building and irrigation. Geological factors also play a part in this disruption.
At Boxgrove, in Sussex, the surface they've excavated hasn't been on the surface for half a million years. It was a beach, back when the sea was higher than it is now. Then it became a grassy plain, and was inhabited by humans. Then the climate cooled, the humans left, and sea and glaciers between them covered the landscape with silt. As a record of palaeolithic life, it is apparently almost unique.
There's a field to the north-east of the fishermen's track. Horses graze in it, and there are a few jumps, so they're probably exercised there. Under that field there's a surface – not so very ancient – that was almost my entire world when I was a child.
You Can Never Go Back
"I can't go back," I said.
"You can never go back."
"I didn't mean it like that. I meant it literally. It's not there any more. No one else knew it. I was the only person who knew it: I'm the only person who remembers it."
"In England? There can't be any land in the south of England that no one's used."
"It started as corn fields, and they were level with the road. Then a company found gravel, and they came and dug it out. They went away and left the wasteland. I explored it, every inch: I could still draw you a map. There was a wood, which might have been what they call ancient woodland now: other people went there, birdwatchers and hunters. But between that and the road, there was just rough marshy ground, with a few willow copses, and some hills where they'd left earth from the gravel pits, and lakes – ponds – where they'd dug deeper. There was a stony plain where they hadn't taken all the gravel, and sandy cliffs at the edges of where the pit had been. There was a rabbit warren over near the wood, and a single electricity pole on a high island in the middle of another lake, which had been there before they'd started to dig. There was ..."
"Write it down."
So I am.
The Map is Not the Territory
I don't remember who said that "the map is not the territory". Barthes or some other one of those post-modern types, no doubt. I used to know, but I've forgotten. I forget things like that. I could draw you a map of a few acres of land that have been buried for over a decade. A very detailed map.
I tried to buy a map of the area. The Ordnance Survey sell a range of maps called Pathfinders, which are 2½ inches to the mile: 4 cm to 1 km in what I persist in calling the new system. (The standard OS maps are 1¼ inches to the mile: Pathfinders show more footpaths, tracks and minor land features such as fens and gravel pits).
The map I found was Pathfinder 1143. It shows a truly desolate piece of countryside, with the occasional small village and one medium-sized town (Burnham-on-Crouch, home to the Royal Corinthian Yacht Club). I studied the representation of the place where I grew up.
The map was wrong. That is, the map didn't match my memories. Where I remembered ponds, they'd marked fields. There was a wide track across the middle of the wasteland, according to them: according to me, that would be just around the gap in the elms where the snowdrifts were over my head in that bad winter. (No great feat: I wasn't even five feet tall then).
Could I have misremembered? Were my childhood memories that hazy?
No. The map hasn't been amended since 1976, and then only in part. By a process of deduction, I'd say that the place where I grew up was mapped around 1970. By the time I knew the land, it had changed. Even the contour line (which breaks at the house where I lived, and is resumed right down near the Wash) is different now.
The map in my head, then, is the only map there is for what was there.
I'm sure the landowner had maps, and kept them up-to-date. Some of the hunters probably made maps of their own: rabbits here, pheasants there, stay away from this bit because there is a Child. The angling society might have mapped out the area to which they had access. I wonder if my father has kept any of the maps I made as a child, replete with my own personal mythologies.
I've tried to draw the map that I want: there is a dimension to the landscape that I can't put on paper, however many techniques I try. I've come up with a whole new set of symbols for places. There are places to read, places that were mirrors of imaginary lands, places where I was scared, places to hide and cry, places where I thought I saw things that weren't there.
I cannot imagine the symbols which could describe it to anyone else. I'm using words, but they play me false.
You Can't Get There From Here
No road leads there any more. When I peered past the barbed wire, what I saw was not the track I walked down every day, winter and summer, through snowdrifts, in power cuts, in the pouring rain, with the cat following me.
I divided the track – the Lane – into four parts. There was the section between the house and the fishermen's' gate. The gate was of iron, not a five-bar gate but a simple frame, divided once horizontally and twice vertically. There was a padlock and chain on the side nearest the house, and next to that a gap wide enough to admit not only me, but my parents. The gate was as far as anyone else usually came. To the left, as you walked down, was a cornfield: to the right, elm trees, brambles and hawthorn.
The second section ran between the Gate and the Gap. The Gap was where the wind came through and the snow drifted highest. There were three strands of barbed wire strung across it, but I had no problems getting through that. To the right of that part of the Lane, the trees were almost all elms: there was a half-dead elm stump just before the Gap where lizards and snakes basked in the summer. On the other side of the Lane was a pond – a lake, as far as I knew – with rushes and water birds and little islands. I learnt to row on that lake: I slid on the ice in winter, and climbed the cliffs (stony sand, all of fifteen feet high) until the landowner sold the pond to the angling society and I had to be more circumspect. By then I had grown from being a painfully shy child to a dumpy, paranoid teenager, so avoiding being seen was a fairly high priority. It was on the second section of lane that the boy from down the road set his Alsation on me. Anoraks, whatever their fashion failings, make good armour, and I ran home with no more than a bruise or two. I didn't tell my parents. I hate dogs.
The third section of the Lane had no distinguishing features. It was delimited by the Gap and by the third of four electricity poles. The trees were elms: there was a great deal of ivy. I didn't usually venture that far down the lake, because by then I was closer to the neighbours' houses than to my own.
The last section of the Lane was pretty much the same as the third, except that there was a matched pair of electricity poles, one at each side. Our paper box was nailed to one of them, until the paper boy stopped delivering. Our dustbin was right at the end of the lane, under an elder tree, because the Lane was too narrow for a dustcart. The dustmen came on Friday mornings, and usually remembered to take our rubbish away.
The elder tree is gone, and I couldn't see the rest. The sign my father painted had been taken away. The barbed wire barricade was, I suppose, much more effective than a polite request to 'please keep out'. I suppose the present occupant uses the farm track to get to the house. That's locked, too.
They can't keep me out. I know it too well.
Tuesday, July 01, 1997
Freedom and Necessity -- Steven Brust and Emma Bull
What manner of thing is this Freedom & Necessity? Is it a historical novel? a fantasy novel? Or what?
Well, some would say that any novel springing from a collaboration between Steven Brust (Cowboy Feng’s Space Bar and Grill, the Taltos series, The Phoenix Guards etc) and Emma Bull (Falcon, The War for the Oaks, Bone Dance, assorted Borderlands stuff) must be fantasy. I suspect it would be differently categorised if it had been written by other hands.
The excerpt comes from early in the novel, just after James has contacted his cousin after two months of being given up for dead. Richard, who pens this cheery warning in response, is later revealed to be living in sin with Kitty, who takes opium in the hope of finding the Shimmering Path, and has dreams and visions all over the place. But we shouldn’t judge people by the company they keep.
OK, how do we define fantasy? There are no magical beasties: no elves (there is a beautiful, mysterious, dangerous woman who travels around in a mysterious coach, but she's more nymph than elf); no goblins (there is one chap who is described as ‘inhumanly ugly’ early in the novel, but the next person to see him simply regards him as deformed). There are episodes which might be regarded as magical (I shall leave Kitty’s assorted visions, opium-driven and otherwise, out of this: dreams and visions are too commonplace to be of much use in classification). The bits where there might be magic, however, are reported with a refreshingly Enlightenment sensibility – "it was probably just the reflection of the fire", etc. James and Susan, at least, cling firmly to their Rationalist tendencies, and are far happier reforming the world over sherry with Engels than participating in obscure pagan rituals. … Oh yes, there are obscure pagan rituals, but no indication that they have any magical effect.
There’s certain plot elements that confuse me: I can’t decide whether the authors are being very obtuse and subtle, or whether the novel was originally intended to be more fantastical and the emphasis shifted as Brust and Bull became more at home with their characters. For example, early on James is given an iron ring which supposedly comes from the rector's housemaid but is in fact from the mysterious belle dame sans merci. Clearly (to those familiar with fantasy tropes) it is a token of magical significance. But we hear little more of it until near the end of the novel. James relates to Richard how he had the ring cut off by 'a blacksmith at Chandler's Ford', because it became uncomfortable when his hand swelled up after a fight. Richard nods sagely (he is Into This Stuff) and indicates that the blacksmith, and his location, is very significant. Low-key, or simply picking up a dangling end? It strikes me that both authors know exactly what they're doing: one cannot help but feel, though, that it is probably wasted on a significant portion of their audience.
When I started reading, I picked up on the 'British folklore fantasy' elements [if it's any sort of a fantasy, it has roots in British folklore and paganism as much as anywhere else] as a matter of course, because I think I assumed that it was a fantasy novel. After the first section of the novel, the 'fantastical' elements diminished, yet I'm sure that until fairly near the end I was half-expecting a magical denouement. Well, the climax of the book is intended (by the perpetrators) to be a magical ceremony, but whether it actually is, is another matter.
And I confess that it's a relief to read something where no one makes anything happen by waving their hands around: the fate of the world is not decided (except in James' Chartist tracts): there are no talking animals (I counted): and the fact that it's set in what I can recognise as 'the real world' does not involve a suspension of disbelief.
Let me expand that last point a little. Of course all (most?) novels involve a suspension of disbelief, because their premise is (usually?) that the author is relating a series of true events which just happen to have escaped our attention. The average fantasy novel deals with the reader's inclination to say 'that didn't happen' by setting itself in a different world, or at least an alternate version of our own. F&N is not set in an alternate world, unless you accept that hackneyed old chestnut I occasionally dredge up about every novel constituting an alternate world of its own. F&N is set quite firmly within the bounds of our own history: there's even a clever little aside when James tells Susan that there's a reference to him in Flora Tristan's collection of reminiscences on Britain in the 1840s, Promenades Dans Londres [I haven't been able to check the validity of his quotation]. The authors use contemporary press cuttings, which don't always seem to have much to do with the text of the novel: on flipping back to them, however, you usually find something of significance. As far as I can tell, there is nothing in the novel (apart from some of its characters) which contradicts history As We Know It.
Incidentally, there wasn't any magic in Ellen Kushner's acclaimed 'fantasy' novel Swordspoint, either. What made that fantasy? It was set in a made-up world which owed something to 18th-century Europe, but was clearly not.
Freedom and Necessity reminds me of Sorcery and Cecilia (Patricia Wrede and Caroline Stevermer, Ace Books) because of the use of the epistolary form, and the informed and witty use of history. Unlike Freedom & Necessity, Sorcery and Cecilia is a frothy Regency romance set in an alternate world where magic works. I suppose the two do share a few other aspects: elements of the swashbuckling romance á la Sabatini, for one; a sense of humour; likeable characters: that sort of thing. Freedom and Necessity is a deeper book: the discussions between James and Engels on the emancipation of the poor, and between James and Richard on the nature of thought and reality, are by no means lightweight: they're solid philosophical tracts, and they do lend something to the plot – they're not (all) just there to show us how intelligent the characters are. There's a true Enlightenment mentality to it: a rational, humanitarian outlook which sits oddly, at times, with Kitty's Romantic sensibility.
Well, some would say that any novel springing from a collaboration between Steven Brust (Cowboy Feng’s Space Bar and Grill, the Taltos series, The Phoenix Guards etc) and Emma Bull (Falcon, The War for the Oaks, Bone Dance, assorted Borderlands stuff) must be fantasy. I suspect it would be differently categorised if it had been written by other hands.
Have with you, at all times, iron that cuts, polished silver (a coin will not do), a sprig of mistletoe, and a loaded pistol.
The excerpt comes from early in the novel, just after James has contacted his cousin after two months of being given up for dead. Richard, who pens this cheery warning in response, is later revealed to be living in sin with Kitty, who takes opium in the hope of finding the Shimmering Path, and has dreams and visions all over the place. But we shouldn’t judge people by the company they keep.
OK, how do we define fantasy? There are no magical beasties: no elves (there is a beautiful, mysterious, dangerous woman who travels around in a mysterious coach, but she's more nymph than elf); no goblins (there is one chap who is described as ‘inhumanly ugly’ early in the novel, but the next person to see him simply regards him as deformed). There are episodes which might be regarded as magical (I shall leave Kitty’s assorted visions, opium-driven and otherwise, out of this: dreams and visions are too commonplace to be of much use in classification). The bits where there might be magic, however, are reported with a refreshingly Enlightenment sensibility – "it was probably just the reflection of the fire", etc. James and Susan, at least, cling firmly to their Rationalist tendencies, and are far happier reforming the world over sherry with Engels than participating in obscure pagan rituals. … Oh yes, there are obscure pagan rituals, but no indication that they have any magical effect.
There’s certain plot elements that confuse me: I can’t decide whether the authors are being very obtuse and subtle, or whether the novel was originally intended to be more fantastical and the emphasis shifted as Brust and Bull became more at home with their characters. For example, early on James is given an iron ring which supposedly comes from the rector's housemaid but is in fact from the mysterious belle dame sans merci. Clearly (to those familiar with fantasy tropes) it is a token of magical significance. But we hear little more of it until near the end of the novel. James relates to Richard how he had the ring cut off by 'a blacksmith at Chandler's Ford', because it became uncomfortable when his hand swelled up after a fight. Richard nods sagely (he is Into This Stuff) and indicates that the blacksmith, and his location, is very significant. Low-key, or simply picking up a dangling end? It strikes me that both authors know exactly what they're doing: one cannot help but feel, though, that it is probably wasted on a significant portion of their audience.
When I started reading, I picked up on the 'British folklore fantasy' elements [if it's any sort of a fantasy, it has roots in British folklore and paganism as much as anywhere else] as a matter of course, because I think I assumed that it was a fantasy novel. After the first section of the novel, the 'fantastical' elements diminished, yet I'm sure that until fairly near the end I was half-expecting a magical denouement. Well, the climax of the book is intended (by the perpetrators) to be a magical ceremony, but whether it actually is, is another matter.
And I confess that it's a relief to read something where no one makes anything happen by waving their hands around: the fate of the world is not decided (except in James' Chartist tracts): there are no talking animals (I counted): and the fact that it's set in what I can recognise as 'the real world' does not involve a suspension of disbelief.
Let me expand that last point a little. Of course all (most?) novels involve a suspension of disbelief, because their premise is (usually?) that the author is relating a series of true events which just happen to have escaped our attention. The average fantasy novel deals with the reader's inclination to say 'that didn't happen' by setting itself in a different world, or at least an alternate version of our own. F&N is not set in an alternate world, unless you accept that hackneyed old chestnut I occasionally dredge up about every novel constituting an alternate world of its own. F&N is set quite firmly within the bounds of our own history: there's even a clever little aside when James tells Susan that there's a reference to him in Flora Tristan's collection of reminiscences on Britain in the 1840s, Promenades Dans Londres [I haven't been able to check the validity of his quotation]. The authors use contemporary press cuttings, which don't always seem to have much to do with the text of the novel: on flipping back to them, however, you usually find something of significance. As far as I can tell, there is nothing in the novel (apart from some of its characters) which contradicts history As We Know It.
Incidentally, there wasn't any magic in Ellen Kushner's acclaimed 'fantasy' novel Swordspoint, either. What made that fantasy? It was set in a made-up world which owed something to 18th-century Europe, but was clearly not.
Freedom and Necessity reminds me of Sorcery and Cecilia (Patricia Wrede and Caroline Stevermer, Ace Books) because of the use of the epistolary form, and the informed and witty use of history. Unlike Freedom & Necessity, Sorcery and Cecilia is a frothy Regency romance set in an alternate world where magic works. I suppose the two do share a few other aspects: elements of the swashbuckling romance á la Sabatini, for one; a sense of humour; likeable characters: that sort of thing. Freedom and Necessity is a deeper book: the discussions between James and Engels on the emancipation of the poor, and between James and Richard on the nature of thought and reality, are by no means lightweight: they're solid philosophical tracts, and they do lend something to the plot – they're not (all) just there to show us how intelligent the characters are. There's a true Enlightenment mentality to it: a rational, humanitarian outlook which sits oddly, at times, with Kitty's Romantic sensibility.
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