Jen Campbell – The Beginning of the World In The Middle of The Night

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Adult Faerie Tale, Book Review, Jen Campbell, Myths and Legends, The Beginning of the World in the Middle of the Night

Tender subversion

It has been a long two months since I last disgraced this website. Pressure of work has been intense, and spending too much time at the PC meant I had no more time to spare in front of a screen writing reviews.

I have been reading though, loads, some of it marvellous, but there is a serious review backlog which may never be properly surmounted. My resolution never to start a new book till the review of a just finished one was mapped out crumbled from the off, and I very much doubt whether many of those 15-20 books read in October and December will ever get written

But. What a wonderful find to share here

Jen Campbell’s collection of short stories is magnificent. Somewhere between myth, magic, philosophy and let’s pretend she re-conjures exactly why the short story is a perfect ‘Once Upon A Time’ perhaps a hark back to being read aloud to, or reading aloud to.

Campbell has a wondrous, unique imagination at play here. She takes the stuff of fairy stories, the stuff of reality, and mixes them together, playfully but deeply.

As an example, the title story ‘The Beginning of The World In The Middle of the Night’ is presented like a short play script. A man and a woman, talking, in bed. On one level, what is happening is something about their relationship. On another level, the conversation is about a tree which is due to be cut down by their local council. But…….it might just be a conversation about how the universe came into being. It is all delivered with a light and beautifully balanced wit. And yet…simultaneously, Campbell was making me cry, smile, aching my heart, breathless at the fragile delicacy she creates out of moments ending before we can grasp them. She is like some sculptor of something made out of fine, iridescent glass

A story about The Annunciation makes reference to Rossetti’s painting, so I read with this in my mind’s eye

Forgive the not-really-saying-anything-about-what-the-collection-of stories-is-really about, but no prospective reader should have the magic of their own discovery spoiled

Contrary to my usual habit, I post no excerpts of her writing, as each story needs to be read in entirety. Obviously, this can be done on Look Inside, (or hanging around in a bookshop, even better) to get a flavour. The first, very dark story perfectly illustrates the quote from Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, which Campbell has used to preface this collection

“It is true, we shall be monsters, cut off from all the world; but on that account we shall be more attracted to one another”

Animals, that first story, is horribly dark, mesmeric and also, incredibly moving

A final high five must go to the publishers, Two Roads. The book itself is a thing of beauty, and each story has a lovely line drawing to illustrate it. As no artist is credited I can only assume the illustrations are by Campbell herself

My only advice to a reader is : do not rush and race through these stories. Each is perfectly satisfying and tasty, and if you eat too many at a sitting, you will miss a lot. I rationed myself to one a day, and let the stories settle and unfold

I’m certainly going to be keeping an eye out for future writing by Jen Campbell. She is a poet and author for children, and created a series of books about ‘Weird things people say in bookshops’ having worked in bookshops for ten years, but this, highly assured book is her first adult fiction foray. Perfectly done

I did get this as an ARC via NetGalley, but have to say that there were several formatting errors, which made me abandon the book quite early, as reading was a bit of a pain. Fortunately, i also then had it offered by Amazon Vine, which made for a beautiful read, as the book itself, physical object, is a delight to look upon and savour. Perfectly fits Campbell’s seductive writing, made to be lingered over, letting the flavours of her sentences unfurl. Please, don’t rush your read of this wonderful collection

The Beginning of the World In The Middle of the Night Amazon UK
The Beginning of the World In The Middle of the Night Amazon USA

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Graham Joyce – Some Kind Of Fairy Tale

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Book Review, Fantasy Fiction, Graham Joyce, Myths and Legends, Some Kind Of Fairy Tale

Nothing like Tinkerbell

Graham Joyce’s Some Kind of Fairy Tale is a gentler, sadder story (for adults) than The Tooth Fairy. Joyce writes about the world of myth and magic through very adult eyes indeed, and his fairy world (we are repeatedly told that the denizens of that world get very angry indeed at being referred to as fairies) are sometimes akin to angelic hordes, and sometimes seem to have more than a touch of the demonic about them.

The plot of this is simple. Tara, a young girl, not quite 16, living near Charnwood Forest in Leicestershire, disappears. Fears of course are of abduction, kidnapping and murder. No body is ever found, but her family is broken and devastated. The lives of her parents are blighted, her brother Peter loses not only his beloved sister, but also his best friend Richie, Tara’s boyfriend, suspected by all and sundry (including the police) of having done away with Tara following an argument.

Little Chittenden Wood; bluebell time (fairies’ flower)

The book opens 20 years later, with a knock on the door – Tara has returned, looking no older than 18 at the most, and she has a tale to tell which no one believes.

Woven into Tara’s stories are erudite chapter beginnings involving quotations by some of the great and good who have made serious studies of the importance of myth and fairy stories from a wide ranging geography of cultures – Marina Warner, Bruno Bettelheim, Joseph Campbell, as well as literary writers such as Angela Carter, G.K Chesterton, and who used these stories to uncover the deep subconscious levels they allude to .

Katherine Cameron artwork – Thomas The Rhymer, Wiki Commons

One such quoted chapter heading source is the following rather lovely comment from W.H. Auden

‘A fairy tale……………on the other hand, demands of the reader total surrender; so long as he is in its world, there must for him be no other’

The other woven story is that of a real trial which took place in Ireland, not that long ago, in 1895, where a young woman Bridget Cleary was tortured and burned by her husband, father, other relatives and neighbours, because they believed she had been stolen away by fairies and the woman now appearing to be Bridget was in fact a fairy changeling. Excerpts from the court transcripts are quoted. This is very far from twee.

Joyce, a serious writer with however a mordant and gleeful touch mixes together a story about ageing, memory, lost dreams, yearnings for a world of less ordinary meaning, the real wonder of the world we live in if we only wake from our dream, with these erudite writings and literary traditions from the fairy world.

As for that mordant gleefulness. Much humour is laced in around psychobabble – Tara submits to psychotherapy with a maverick hip practitioner, who nevertheless naval gazes wonderfully poking in the cauldron of the DSM (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual – a self-publicised Bible of mental health diagnosis, where anything remotely human can be rendered as pathology.

Further fun is had with Tara’s 13 year old nephew, very much in the middle of sulking hormonal adolescence, with more than a touch of the Adrian Moles about him. I never thought I would find a dead cat funny……………………….

I enjoyed this enormously and will certainly be making my way through more of Joyce’s canon of work.

My only slight reservation was of the importance of Richie in Tara’s story – it looked as if the relationship was on the out, through Tara’s wishes, when she disappeared, so the ain true love aspect (on her side) didn’t quite feel as potent as suggested

Some Kind Of Fairy Tale Amazon UK
Some Kind Of Fairy Tale Amazon USA

Neil Gaiman – American Gods

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American Gods, Book Review, Fantasy Fiction, Myths and Legends, Neil Gaiman

Rambling, chaotic, wild, confused – and wondrous

This republished version of Neil Gaiman’s novel from 2001 is like a director’s cut of a movie. Originally differently edited, Gaiman here releases the book he originally wrote, more or less.

It is one of those shambling, rambling, picaresque Don Quixote type tall tales – except the landscape is remarkably dark, gothic, terrifying and bloody, as well as quirky, inventive and playful.

A mysterious man, Shadow, whose rather mythic identity will eventually be revealed is released from his prison sentence early. And from then on, things go abysmally wrong. The symbolically named Shadow, who indeed, always seems to be in someone’s, stumbles into a complex ancient battleground of mankind’s yearning dreams, of the stories we told ourselves of gods and heroes, past and present, of what we worshipped and adored.

Religions are by definition, metaphors, after all: God is a dream, a hope, a woman, an ironist, a father, a city, a house of many rooms, a watchmaker who left his prize chronometer in the desert, someone who loves you – even, perhaps, against all evidence, a celestial being whose only interest is to make sure your football team, army, business or marriage thrives, prospers and triumphs over all opposition

Religions are places to stand and look and act, vantage points from which to view the world

Gaiman peoples America with the various gods brought from various parts of the globe, by those who landed on her shores, from history and from prehistory. Bellicose Norse Gods rub shoulders with matriarchal pagans from Africa, Egyptian animal headed gods accompany leprechauns and pixies. Savage humour and horrific zombies party together. Orpheus makes a different kind of journey into a different kind of Hades, and Eurydice is far from a pretty sight.

Four sons of Horus, Wiki Commons

Ancient gods like these have been forgotten, but linger on, and modern America worships new myths, creates new creatures of power – mass media, technology – paler but no less violent gods, and as demanding of human sacrifice.

My people figured that maybe there’s something at the back of it all, a creator, a great spirit, and so we say thank you to it, because its always good to say thank you. But we never built churches. We didn’t need to. The land was the church. The land was the religion. The land was older and wiser than the people who walked on it.

I’m not absolutely certain (not having read the original) whether the ‘writer’s cut’ improves the no doubt rather less rambling version of 10 years ago. There were times, sure, when i felt – oh just get ON with the narrative and stop going round and round, and then another revelation would strike.

Flabby it may be at times, not, I think, anywhere near as sure and crafted as Gaiman’s latest,The Ocean at the End of the Lane but still, here is a writer who is populist, hugely inventive and with such brilliant imagination and generosity in the telling of tales, that occasional overindulgence must be accepted

Oh, and this one is most definitely NOT a children’s book – some of the sex and violence is very dark indeed

American Gods Amazon UK
American Gods Amazon USA

Aimee Bender – The Color Master

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Aimee Bender, Book Review, Fairy Stories, Myths and Legends, Short story collection, The Color Master

Finally a short story collection which validates the genre itself

I have always found the short story – or rather, the collection of short stories, to be a problematic venture. To a fast reader, one story is not enough for a reading session; yet a well-written story demands a pause for absorption. This is why possibly its best placement is within a magazine, as a single. With a short story collection, if it is the collected works of several writers, the difference in voices, one to another, is a bit like eating a spoonful of steamed fish, followed by a Yorkie Bar, followed by a raw egg, and so on. Or like a collection of literary slaps in the face.

When it comes to a collection by the same author, unless they are highly skilful, the reader quickly masters and absorbs the writer’s literary tics and style, and starts each new story becoming surer and surer of what the author is doing and will do – a sense of déjà vu sets in, the sense of one story written again and again with marginal variation.

Rare is the author who masters this, who can work creatively WITH the form, again and again, but not be mastered, or stultified by it.

Preamble over – I do believe Aimee Bender IS that master. There is a deft, sure use of precise writing, there are (very different) narrative journeys, the volte-faces are satisfying, the characters individual, Inevitably there are some stories which are close to perfect, others a little less satisfying – but, rare is the novelist without the occasional phrase, character, or event that doesn’t act like a sudden stumble, on the reader’s eye and ear.

I was particularly enchanted by the tight little story about a boy from a clearly dysfunctional family, Faces, a story for all the world like a recounting of a case from Oliver Sachs The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, with its beautiful sting in the tail ending. This was a tale which seemed, once the reader sees it, to be about reality. But Bender masters whimsy and fantasy beautifully, too.

Tiger Mending is a sweet and heart-string plucking story which could almost have come from one of Kipling’s Just So Stories – poor fraying tigers in need of help and repair, howling plaintively at their plight. Another story, The Red Ribbon, looks at the adult theme of sexual boredom within a marriage. In The Fake Nazi, is the contrast between those who deny responsibility for their crimes, and those who believe they are responsible for all crimes, even when they could not possibly have committed them – with a devious sting about the durability of our illusions about ourselves, for good or ill. Some fine psychological insights in this one.

Giovanni Lanfranco: Norandino and Lucina Discovered by the Ogre. Wiki Commons

The stories are divided into three sections, with the last section mainly moving away from the realistic, to magical or myth realism, particularly with some longer stories retelling traditional fairy or folk tales, including the title story, The Color Master, and the final, particularly potent re-telling of the story of a woman who marries an ogre, The Ogre’s Wife. For this reader, Bender lays all her glittering skills out in that tale , for the reader’s delectation and delight – finely crafted writing, narrative with dark twists and turns, a simple fairy tale uncovering the chasms beneath, wonderfully casual, unlaboured humour, and finally some irreverent, surprising juxtaposition of physics, myth and humour for the ending and beginning of the universe. I particularly liked the arrangement of this, as an end story, flipping me back to the placement of the first story, Appleless, which, though about other things, by choosing to be based around a woman who won’t eat apples, but tastes of bread, inevitably suggests an untempted Eve, religious symbolisms about bread and Christianity, and a myth of the creation of humanity, which the last story closes, to begin again.

It is difficult to give an example of Bender’s wonderful sense of humour, which has almost a cosmic joke property, as it is simply the placement of a phrase, almost as an aside, within the context of the story, which amuses, but the following, from The Ogre’s Wife made me chortle whilst also going `ouch!’:

The ogre’s wife disliked firmly only one aspect of her husband: his interest in eating the children of humans. It could’ve been me! She told him once in bed while he twirled and twisted her hair over his fingers

And, from a more realistic story in Part 2, The Doctor and the Rabbi:

Although he had initiated the conversation, he found the word “God” offensive, the same way he disliked it when people spoke about remodelling their kitchens

There is a cake vision – read the book and find the story!

A wonderful, assured collection, – if only all short story collections were as satisfying as
this, and all short story writers could produce such a variation in style, genre and approach

I’m grateful to fellow reviewer and blogger FictionFan who assured me The Color Master came with a `Lady Fancifull will absolutely love this’ label attached. She was so right! – here is her review of this wonderful book.

I received this as a digital review copy from the publisher. This is one gifthorse that has all its teeth perfectly formed, thank you very much!
The Color Master Amazon UK
The Color Master Amazon USA

Neil Gaiman – The Ocean At The End Of The Lane

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Adult Faerie Tale, Book Review, Myths and Legends, Neil Gaiman, The Ocean At The End Of The Lane

Deep, Deeper, Deepest – oh why did this have to end!

Neil Gaiman has written a marvellous book here, poised beautifully between literary fiction, fantasy and horror, and adult (or child) fairy story

The central character, a man in middle age, with the disappointments of adult life upon him, turns down memory lane, when the death of a parent and the funeral gathering will unite him with the years passed. A failed marriage, work, creativity and the dreams of youth not having quite turned out in the way the younger man or boy might have wished he physically revisits where he once lived, as a seven year old boy, and recounts and remembers what the adult man has forgotten.

What makes this different from other ‘revisit childhood’ books is that the revisited land is large with powerful myths, and presided over by 3 potent female figures who live by ‘the ocean at the end of the lane’ The 3 powerful women a grandmother, a mother and an 11 year old (crone, mother, maiden)are constantly reminding this reader of other pagan and indeed religious threes – a matriachy of power and goodness to rival patriarchal religion, – including a willing sacrifice – the three Fates of Greek mythology, even as they appear to be initially easily dismissed perhaps as the three witches.

Goya : The Fates

Gaiman narrates a brilliant story – more than a battle between good and ill (is it really good to have all desires met – even the desire to be happy?) but under the tight and page turning narrative drive, the fine writing, the believable characters and relationships, philosophical and psychological insights are placed for the reader to chew on.

Its certainly a book which might be enjoyed by a child, even read to a child, especially as the central character is a child, but it reaches, I think, to the wisdom within a child, and to the child within an adult:

As Gaiman has his central character say:

I liked myths. They weren’t adult stories and they weren’t children’s stories. They were better than that. They just were.

I also liked the absolute truth (so it seems to me) of this:

Grown-ups don’t look like grown-ups on the inside. Outside, they’re big and thoughtless and they always know what they’re doing. Inside, they look just like they always have. like they did when they were your age. The truth is, there aren’t any grown-ups. Not one, in the whole wide world.

And, if you don’t like that sort of psychology, what about the plunges into transcendental experience – perhaps the experience much fine poetry and music takes us towards:

In those dreams I spoke that language too, the first language, and i had dominion over the nature of all that was real. In my dream, it was the tongue of what is, and anything spoken in it becomes real,, because nothing said in that language can be a lie. it is the most basic building block of everything.

As adults, we have (in the main) forgotten the power of words, of the naming of things, of how potent the dominion of naming and language must have been to our species. And why (some of us) venerate poets, who give us back that place

Ailurophiles will appreciate the central part cats play in this book!

The Ocean At The End Of The Lane Amazon UK
The Ocean At The End Of The Lane Amazon USA

Eowyn Ivey – The Snow Child

Tags

Book Review, Eowyn Ivey, Myths and Legends, The Snow Child

Charmingly whimsical, full of heart, in love with landscape

In her afterword first time author Eowyn Ivey recounts the sense that all her life she has been looking for a particular story:

For as long as I can remember, I have been looking for ‘my’ story…….I turned the pages (of everything she read) and searched for something that would fit this empty space inside of me

It is this sense of longing, and that a story can be more than itself which gives this book its flavour. Based on an Arthur Ransome retelling of an old Russian fairy story, Ivey’s The Snow Child speaks of the longing for children, the pain of their loss (whether through death or just the inevitable leaving behind of childhood) and, particularly the connection to landscape.

She sets her story in the Alaska of the 1920s where Mabel and Jack, a childless couple in their 50s have come, leaving the city to find quiet and make a connection with the reality of the land. So the book is also about a group of people who struggle with, and against, the harshness of an implacable, indifferent, stunningly beautiful landscape and climate. As much as the story of the relationships between parents and children, lovers and friends, the fierce independence of frontiers people, this is a story about our connection to the mythic as well as the actual, power and presence of the natural world.

                                Fox In Snow Wikimedia Commons

This might not do for readers who prefer a more directly narrative writing. Ivey takes her time, finding the description of a snowflake as important as narrative drive – here, she diverges from her source, as plot is the essence of the faerie tale, which gets there in the shortest possible time.

If, on the other hand, you are still a reader of faerie and myth, well told, this should delight you with its charm and sweetness – NOT saccharine at all, but a genuine sweetness

As a complete aside, I wondered whether the author’s name was her birth name, or a nom-de-plume. And, if the former, whether given names mould character. Her name is so redolent of misty Gaelic or Olde Anglo-Saxon – I assume her parents may have been Lord Of The Rings afficionados. Perhaps an upbringing richly steeped in the telling of old tales shaped our author’s affinity for them!

The Snow Child Amazon UK
The Snow Child Amazon USA