Tag Archives: fantasy

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The Rise and Fall of Mount Majestic

RiseAndFallOfMountMajestic

What do you do when your ten-year-old daughter hands you a book and says, “You have to read this. Then, I want to see it on your blog. And I’ll help.”

You read it, of course. So I did.

Persimmony Smudge lives in Candlenut, by the Willow Wood, where the summit of Mount Majestic is plainly visible. The castle of King Lucas the Loftier is there, and to all appearances it’s an ordinary mountain. But appearances can be deceiving. Underneath it sleeps a giant. If he awakes, the whole island will be destroyed, and it’s up to Persimmony to spread the word to a skeptical population of Leaf-eaters, Rumblebumps, King and villagers.

It’s a tall order, but somehow we always believe that Persimmony, a spunky 10-year-old heroine with hair like dirty dishwater, will rise to the occasion. She and her band of unlikely companions — a poetry-writing general, the shriveled and fearful Worvil, and an aged potter named Theodore — all work together to save the day.

The book is filled with memorable characters, including Mrs. Smudge, who has moral objections to many things including reading and birthday parties; King Lucas, whose favorite food is pepper; and Theodore, who makes magic pots that produce not necessarily what you want, but what you need.

I love the story’s premise. Who hasn’t looked at a hillside and had the fleeting thought, “That looks like a giant sleeping”? Yet what an uncertain, wonder-filled world it would be if the ground underfoot might rise up and crumble any minute. Also under the ground are the Leaf-eaters, a humanish species with their own code of conduct and a deep-seated grudge against the “Sunspitters” who live on the earth’s surface. Somehow the surface-dwellers need to make a kind of peace with these and other forces beyond their control.

The conclusion affirms the wonder and the gift of each day, but not without a few thrills and chills along the way. Both my daughter and I were a little disappointed with one mystery that never gets solved, and I wished we could have gotten to know the giant a little better. But all in all it was a great adventure story with a very likable heroine. I especially liked that this was the first book my daughter has ever assigned to me!

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Charlotte Sometimes

This haunting novel is classified as a children’s book, though to my mind it seems more like an adult book with child characters. Although it’s poetic and truthful in its depiction of character and psychology, its storyline is intriguing, and for many it’s considered a modern classic, it’s not a book I recommend.

First, the details. Charlotte Sometimes is a time-travel story with a twist, originally published in 1969. 13-year-old Charlotte Makepeace goes to boarding school and sleeps in a unique bed with wheels. Though it’s never explained how or why, the bed facilitates an exchange with Clare Moby, a girl sleeping in the same bed 50 years earlier in 1918. Every other day, the girls find themselves trading places. They start to keep a diary whereby they communicate essential details to make the transitions easier. Then they find themselves trapped in the wrong times. How will they get back where they belong?

The story is told through Charlotte’s perspective, and the loss of identity she feels is quite delicately and compellingly drawn. When she finds herself transported back to 1918, she “becomes” Clare, and pervading the novel is her sense of wondering what makes her uniquely “her.” Clare has a sister, Emily, at the boarding school, and even she doesn’t catch on right away to the fact that her sister has become someone else. The ordinary, and our expectations and assumptions, exert a tremendous power over what we perceive, the novel suggests. Sometimes they cloak reality. And sometimes they isolate and alienate.

The World War I historical context is deftly drawn in realistic detail. We are immersed in the experience of boarding school life in an England at war, where water, gas and food must be consumed “patriotically,” and where one can never be sure whether she’ll see her father or brother again because they are doing their duty as soldiers.

What I didn’t like about the novel was the introduction of occult themes. While trapped in 1918, Charlotte and Emily go “into lodgings” with a British family for a season. Instead of living at the school, they live with the Chisel Brown family — an elderly couple and their grown daughter Agnes — at their tomb-like home, Flintlock. Flintlock is essentially a shrine to Arthur, the couple’s son who went to war and was killed.

One evening Charlotte has a dream in which she “becomes” Arthur as a child having a nightmare. At another point, the family has a seance to conjure up their dead son, and somehow they get Clare, trapped 50 years into the future, instead. The whole conception of a chaotic spiritual realm full of souls with permeable boundaries between life and death, and between one person and another, is disturbing. It was further compounded for me by the characterization of Clare as an extremely pious Christian. The idea that she could be conjured from one era to another by a medium is as false to anything the Bible has to say about spiritualism as it’s possible to get.

The fictional situation does get resolved eventually, but it’s a bittersweet resolution at best. For me the atmosphere of the tale is pervaded by sorrow; whatever its literary merits, its overall effect is oppressive. I read the 1986 edition — the only one available in our library system. It wasn’t till I sat down to write this review that I learned its ending had been altered from the 1969 edition. (Apparently there are three versions: 1969, 1986, and now a more recent one that restores the original ending.) The original ending sounds like it might offer slightly more closure, but still no real satisfaction.

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The Dragon of Og

I’ve never seen Rumer Godden’s The Dragon of Og on a list of classic children’s books, but if it were up to me it would be there. I picked it up at the library last week and read it to my kids, and all of us were charmed.

I have Rumer Godden classified in my mind as a heartbreaking writer. I’m not sure why. I know I read The Diddakoi, but I don’t remember much of it at all.

The Dragon of Og is only briefly heartbreaking. And although it concerns a dragon, it isn’t scary, but whimsical. The pictures by Pauline Baynes, some in color and some in black and white, are lovely and look like medieval tapestries.

The basic situation is that a dragon has lived quietly in his cave in a pool in Scotland for years, eating a bullock every two or three weeks. Angus Og decides he should not be allowed his bullocks anymore. A battle of wits ensues — between Angus and his spirited wife Matilda, his steward Donald, and the knight Sir Robert Le Douce, who’s commissioned to come and deal with the dragon.

The ending leaves you with the feeling that even though you don’t live in Scotland, and even though you live in the twenty-first century, the whole thing just might have happened very close by, so you’d better keep your eyes open:

This was all a long time ago. Angus Og and Matilda lie in the churchyard now, and all the little Angus Ogs and Matildas. On the hill there is no Castle, only an ordinary house and where the bailey used to be there is a garden. The meadows are still rich in grass and clover though the forests are only woods, but the Water of Milk still runs and the big pool is there; people say so is the Dragon but no one has seen him which is not surprising as he is now very old and spends most of his time asleep.

Now and again, the taste comes back to him of junket and mead; then he gives a sigh that sets the pool water swirling. People think it is the wind, but it is the Dragon…

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Westmark

Westmark was published in 1981, but it’s a new Lloyd Alexander find for me. I’ve read the Prydain Chronicles, but hadn’t ever delved into this author’s other books. There are quite a few, and perhaps I didn’t know where to begin.

Westmark has some of the same qualities I loved about the Prydain Chronicles:

  • a flawed but true boy/young man for its main character
  • a quest for identity
  • fast-paced adventure
  • a fictional realm that (apparently) gets developed in the rest of the series
  • exuberance and wit at every turn

I found Westmark more philosophical, though. The effects of propoganda, war, and corrupt governance all figure into the story, as does the question of whether killing is ever justified or right.

The king of Westmark, grieving the mysterious loss of his only daughter, is all too willing to surrender the bulk of kingdom-running to his scheming chief minister Cabbarus. (I quoted him here.) Theo, an apprentice to a printer who has been destroyed by Cabbarus’ oppressive policies, is left to fend for himself. In his travels he meets a good-natured con-man and his dwarf assistant, an orphaned street girl, and a band of high-minded rebels led by a disillusioned aristocrat named Florian who thinks the monarchy should be abolished entirely.

Theo, especially, wrestles with moral questions. He asks Florian,

I have to understand… Killing is wrong. I believed that. I still do. But now I wonder. Do I believe it because I want to be a decent man? Or — because I’m a coward?… Who decides what’s right?

Which group of seemingly good people should he ally himself with, and to what extent? In the moment of crisis, what should be his response to an evil person? How responsible is he for his friends? Some of these types of questions, as I recall, are raised in Taran’s adventures in Prydain. But there’s something, not less lively, but less quirky, about their treatment in Westmark. I think I liked it a little better, much though I like Prydain. It’s one of those “children’s books” that packs a punch for readers of all ages.

I’m glad Sherry mentioned this title in her recognition of Lloyd Alexander’s birthday, and I may go back and pick up the others in the series.

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Stardust

I thoroughly enjoyed this fairytale for adults. Fast-paced, witty, and full of the off-beat mystery of the realm of faerie, Stardust appealed to me in the same way Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell did. It’s no wonder Susanna Clarke and Neil Gaiman are friends. How I’d love to hear one of their conversations about their art.

This tale begins in Victorian England, in the village of Wall, so named for the wall that marks the boundary between the town and the enchanted lands. There is one opening in the wall, guarded at all times to protect the village children (or anyone else, for that matter) from wandering through and getting lost in the dreamlike lands beyond. But for reasons explained early on, Tristran Thorn ventures in after a fallen star, and finds himself involved in an adventure intertwined with two other stories. The account of his escapades beyond the wall and their ultimate resolution makes for entertaining, gripping reading.

It’s not surprising that Stardust reminded me of Susanna Clarke, for one of her short stories in The Ladies of Grace Adieu is a response to this one. By turns I was reminded of other authors and characters, too: the enchanted woods of Phantastes and The Hobbit, the stars dropping from the sky in The Last Battle, the animal nature within people in The Princess and Curdie, the by-all-accounts commonplace figure who pursues a grand destiny in Lord of the Rings. And so on. As his poem “Instructions” makes plain, this is an author well-versed in the conventions of the fairytale, using them inventively to further his own story.

When I come to the end of a tale like this, I marvel at the imaginative reach and the superb writing. I started American Gods earlier this year and didn’t like it, but this one I couldn’t put down and even left the lounge during my one free period at homeschool co-op on Friday to seek out a quiet place to read. (I ended up in the deserted baby nursery, nervous that someone would stumble upon me and think I was utterly weird and antisocial, but reading on, helplessly.) Stardust is my first real acquaintance with Neil Gaiman’s fiction, but I suspect it won’t be my last.