It's been over two years since Margaret Mahy passed away, one of New Zealand's best and most popular authors, winner of the Hans Christian Anderson Award for her lasting contribution to children's literature, and best known to me through her novels for young adults. Though I never got the chance to meet her in person, it's difficult to recall a time when I didn't know her name (or at least her work).
Her stories have followed me throughout my life, from childhood (The Lion in the Meadow, The Boy With Two Shadows), to primary school (The Downhill Crocodile Whizz) to early adolescence (The Haunting, Maddigan's Fantasia) and even my university years (The Changeover and The Tricksters). She lived in Governor's Bay, a twenty minute drive from my house and one of my favourite places to visit, with a memorial plaque now placed on a beautiful stretch of land that I've walked many times.
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| Yet for some reason I have no decent pictures of. |
The more I think of her, the more I realize how much of an influence she's had on my experiences as a reader/writer, and having attended a seminar last May as part of the Christchurch Writer's Festival that focused on her best-known works, I was inspired to re-read three of my favourite Mahy novels.
In my mind at least, they form an unofficial trilogy: The Haunting (1982), The Changeover (1984) and The Tricksters (1986). The first two won the Carnegie Medal in their respective years (making her one of only seven authors to win it twice) and the third is generally considered one of her most mature and complex works.
As it happens, I did not come to The Changeover and The Tricksters until quite late; I was in my early twenties and at university when I read them for the first time. The Haunting, on the other hand, was introduced to me when I was eleven years old, by a student teacher who read it aloud to my class and lent me her copy when it became apparent no one else was particularly interested.
Though that doesn't sound like a high recommendation for the book (or else just a scathing indictment of my fellow classmates' capacity for understanding it) I can attest that on returning to the story nearly two decades later, I was astonished at how well I remembered it. Not just the course of the plot, but specific details and turns of phrase. What the ghost was wearing when it first appears to Barney. Tabitha's desire to be a novelist. How Great-Granny Scholar is described. What happened to Elizabeth's hair.
It was like running into an old childhood friend and recalling all the shared memories of the school playground. Every chapter was imprinted on my brain as clear as day, though it took some time to figure out why. Though I didn't know it at the time, The Haunting was a book that treated me as an intelligent child. It didn't spell out exactly what was going on, and so it was a challenge for me to read closely and figure out what was happening at the same pace the protagonists did. Mahy not only excelled at the "show don't tell" rule, but was also an absolute master of descriptive prose, crafting vivid imagery that bursts to life on the page:
Troy seemed to move around in the heart of her own private storm, struggling against tempests no one else could see.
"I don't mind [Great-Granny] being wrinkled. It's just that her wrinkles are so angry. She's like a wall with furious swear words scribbled all over it."
A room so still that the very silence seemed to sing around the with a cricket voice, not heard with the ear but felt in the blood.
But more than any of that, she had an extraordinary gift of taking what is in truth a very simple plot, and filling it with complexity by dint of her characters, insights and understanding of universal human experiences. As Robert Ebert would say, it's not what the story is, but how the story is told.
***
The word "formulaic" has bad connotations when it comes to writing, and I've used it myself plenty of times in describing TV shows that seem to tell the same story every week with little variation. But the word formula is a slightly more nuanced term, one to describe a pattern or recurring set of ingredients that a particular writer is pointedly interested in. Let's take one of Steven Moffat's recent Doctor Who offerings as an example: Listen. It contains a lot of tropes that appear consistently throughout his body of work: spooky nursery rhymes, half-empty public buildings, monsters that can't be seen, lovers meeting out of chronological order, going back to meet an established character as a child – we've seen all this from Moffat before, and yet the episode manages to be quite different from any previous episode.
It's not following a formula, but rather utilizing a range of this particular writer's favourite themes, a creative technique that sums up the novels I'm exploring here. In Mahy's case, what is prevalent throughout all three of her seminal works is the juxtaposition between a loving family unit and the cold touch of the supernatural.
In taking this basic premise, Mahy spins three very different stories that nevertheless are clearly derived from the same imagination. All are set in New Zealand, all revolve around a family that is disjointed in some way (a stepmother, a divorce and an illegitimate child respectively) all have the domestic sphere invaded by a supernatural entity which is recognized only by our highly sensitive protagonist, and all three are YA fiction (though The Haunting is aimed at a slightly younger readership than the other two).
There's a reason supernaturally-themed stories are conflated with YA fiction, and it's because what we classify as "supernatural" is usually differentiated from "fantasy" by its existence in a setting that is recognizably our own. Naturally there are exceptions, but the creatures that dwell in the supernatural genre – vampires, werewolves, ghosts – dwell closer to our world than those that populate fantasy: unicorns, fairies, centaurs. Supernatural entities hover on the edge of normalcy, they were once human beings, and as such they represent movement between two states of being.
In a similar vein, adolescence is regarded as a transitory period, involving movement between childhood and adulthood, straddling two distinct but connected worlds. This is especially true for teenage girls, standing on the brink of inheriting a strange sort of a power that society seems to be simultaneously obsessed with and terrified of. With that in mind, it's hardly a coincidence that the supernatural so often manifests as a mysterious, beautiful male in YA fiction – though Mahy is more interested in empowering her female characters.
Her forte, especially in these three novels, is to mingle what can only be described as "a supernaturally themed fairy tale" with a coming-of-age narrative. All three books feature a teenage girl shifting from childhood to adulthood. All have a "castle" to fortify and defend against the unknown. Each one contains a vivid sense of what's at stake in their depiction of a loving family and all that entails: comfort, understanding, belonging and love. All are menaced by a supernatural Other which (coincidentally or not) takes masculine form. And in all three cases, it takes the heroine's own inner power, however Mahy choses it to manifest, to defeat her enemy and save her family.
Mahy's skill is in making this supernatural component no less interesting than the day-to-day minutia of ordinary life, in which a child's favourite book or a particular family ritual is portrayed in the same loving detail as a spectral hand or a psychic summons. Even as they pose a danger, the supernatural element serves to heighten or underpin the family dynamics, with the simplicity of Mahy's plots (which in some way or another all come down to "protect the family against a preternatural threat") are married to the psychological complexity of the main character's growth and relationships.
***
The Haunting focuses on imaginative and sensitive Barney Palmer, a young boy on his way back from school when he's confronted by the ghost of a little boy who cries: "Barnaby's dead! Barnaby's dead! And I'm going to be very lonely." On arriving home, Barney learns from his older sisters Troy and Tabitha that their Great-Uncle Barnaby has just died, and promptly faints on the front doorstep.
Because his beloved stepmother Clare is pregnant, and believing that it would be dangerous to upset her in any way, Barney keeps the ensuing "haunting" to himself. Strange messages appear in scrapbooks, footsteps are heard in the back of his mind, and his extended family (comprised of great-uncles, great-aunts, and one very nasty great-grandmother) keep giving him the oddest looks. It's only his sisters that he takes into his confidence, and they discover that there is one great uncle who may yet be alive, estranged from his family because of his magical powers, and now determined to claim Barney as his protégé.
The Changeover shifts to a female perspective, as well as an older one. Laura Chant is a high school student whose three year old brother Jacko is targeted by a sinister storekeeper called Carmody Braque. Jacko becomes gravely ill after his hand is marked by a simple rubber stamp, just as Carmody grows in strength and vitality.
Recognizing there are supernatural forces at work, Laura seeks out the help of a school prefect called Sorenson "Sorry" Carlisle, a boy she has long since identified as a witch. He comes up with a solution that will allow Laura to save her brother's life: by undergoing a "changeover" she will become a witch herself. Only then will she have the power to vanquish the spirit feeding on her brother's life force.
Finally, The Tricksters has the Hamilton family gather at their beach house Carnival's Hide to celebrate Christmas: parents Jack and Naomi, eldest siblings Charlie and Christobel, and younger children Benny and Serena. Seventeen-year-old Harry (short for Ariadne) is smack-dab in the centre, suffering the inevitable fate of any middle-child.
To amuse and validate herself Harry is writing a story - a wonderful story about dangerous men and swooning women that she keeps secret in her attic bedroom. The house itself has a strange history of odd happenings concerning the drowning of Teddy Carnival years ago, and Harry is privy to a family secret that she knows could destroy her happy, comfortable home. These combination of these three ingredients somehow results in the arrival of three brothers, claiming to be descendants of Teddy Carnival and charming most of the Hamiltons.
Only Harry recognizes the supernatural quality to Ovid, Felix and Hadfield, and fears what they might have planned for her family.
***
As you can see, two of our main characters are adolescent girls, one is a prepubescent boy (though he has two teenage sisters) and all belong to a somewhat disjointed but loving family. Barney's mother died in childbirth, but he adores his stepmother Clare. Laura's father is currently starting a new family with his second wife, but she is very close to her mother and devoted to her much younger brother Jacko.
At first glance, Harry's family seems the most intact: her parents are happily married and her siblings encompass a cheerful, squabbling, affectionate mass. But Harry knows the family secret: that her eldest sister's best friend Emma is also the mother of her father's youngest child, the result of a brief extramarital affair that the rest of her siblings know nothing about. What's more, Harry's parents don't know that she knows about the unacknowledged half-sister in their midst.
For all their faults, these families are worth fighting for, and so they are over the course of each story. In what is perhaps the most obvious similarity between all three books, each one opens with the protagonist receiving an instinctive warning of advancing danger:
When, suddenly, on an ordinary Wednesday, it seemed to Barney that the world tilted and ran down in all directions, he knew he was about to be haunted again... the faint dizzy twist in the world around him, the thin singing drone as if some tiny insect were trapped in the curling mazes of his ear.
Once though the door [Laura] stopped. Just for a moment something had frightened her, though she had seen and heard absolutely nothing special. Yet even as she stood there, she felt it again, like the vibration of a plucked string. "It's going to happen," said a voice.
At the sight of [the holiday home], Harry's blood skipped a little. "Something is waiting!" she had cried to her mother many Christmases ago as the green peak came into sight. This time she said nothing, but she knew the waiting was still going on.
In Barney's case, the warning quickly grows into a mystery. Who is the little boy that appears to him? What does the message mean? After it becomes apparent that Great-Uncle Cole is still alive – and what's more, has identified Barney as possessing the same magical qualities – he begins to contact Barney through psychic means, grooming him as a future companion. Naturally, Barney doesn't care for any of this, for his only desire is to stay with his family:
"So there you are," [the voice] said. It was a pleasant, light, husky voice and seemed to come from inside Barney's head and not from outside in his bedroom. It was a man's voice and one he was sure he had not heard before. "I'm on my way, you see. We belong together – you and I."
Barney still could not see the face that belonged to that rustling voice.
"I belong here," he whispered back. "This is where my family is – Dad and Claire and Troy and Tabitha. I belong here."
"You may think you do," the voice replied. "but you'll find that, in the end, there's no place in a family for people like us. It is a discovery we all make. You are taking longer to realize it than I did, that's all."
Barney is not facing death, but something far more frightening to a child: powerlessness in the face of adults and their decisions, and the threat of being removed from the people he loves. From a premise as simple as this does the strength and suspense of the book lie, and throughout the story Mahy adds a number of little details depicting the home that Barney loves so well ("the old table, the green curtains, the worn carpet and the chairs, each one with its own personality, from the uncomfortable straight one with the carved bird on the back to the big soft armchair Barney was sitting in himself").
But when Cole finally arrives to collect Barney, it is not as the dark spectre in his mind, but as a relatively normal – even friendly – man. The confrontation is not staged as a kidnapping or an attack, but as a quick, simple and even polite extraction of a boy from his family – which conversely becomes just as terrifying as a violent attempt could ever be.
Because Barney is so afraid of upsetting his stepmother (who subverts every assumption you have about fictional stepmothers), it falls to Barney's older sister Tabitha to investigate matters. She is a would-be writer who also serves as a prototype to Mahy's later heroines: Laura inherits her protectiveness over a younger brother, while Harry is given her deep interest in writing. An interesting feature of the story is that Barney is quite a reactive protagonist, comparable to Wilbur of Charlotte's Web; a sympathetic and likeable character, but not one who controls the course of the story in any way.
As it happens, the book's climax reveals that it's his oldest sister Troy, not Barney himself, who is the true Palmer magician, and it is she that asserts her own power in finding a solution to Cole and Barney's problem. It's an unexpected ending, one that doesn't involve any magical battles, but rather communication, understanding, and the maxim: "the truth will set you free."
***
To follow the progress of Mahy's supernaturally themed novels is to track a novelist's progression of skill and inspiration. Just as The Tricksters stands on the shoulders of The Changeover, so too does The Changeover rely heavily on the existence of The Haunting.
It too focuses on a close-knit family menaced by a supernatural threat, though with a few modifications here and there. Unlike The Haunting, in which the supernatural was a man who could be reasoned with, Carmody Braque is a lemure who allows for no such thing. He's not attempting to remove a child from his family for misguided purposes, but to murder one in the attempt to extend his unnaturally long life.
Jacko resembles Barney in that he's the youngest son of a family with at least one older sister, but has been relegated to a Living McGuffin rather than a Useless Protagonist. And though Laura may start out like Barney (Mahy uses the term "sensitive" to describe each one's ability to detect the uncanny qualities of those around them) she gradually becomes more like Troy as she harnesses her magical potential.
But perhaps the biggest difference is the presence of a dynamic that is entirely absent from The Haunting: adolescent attraction. In her afterword, Mahy comments on this shift in perspective, and how it helped shape the construction of the plot:
I began writing this story at a younger level. I imagined it as being rather like The Haunting in which two girls become involved in a threatening, supernatural adventure. The heroine, a girl aged about eleven, seeking to save her small brother who has fallen into the power of a wicked enchanter, turns for assistance to a girl her own age – a school acquaintance in whom she has detected a supernatural capacity.
I wrote a little way into the story, read and reread what I had written, and felt suddenly dissatisfied with it. Somehow the interaction between the girls was too bland. The story needed a different sort of tension. I decided to turn one of the female characters into a male one and immediately found that the level of the story had changed too. The heroine must become a teenager, for suddenly there was a sexual flow between her and the newly created hero.
And so The Changeover is clearly for a slightly older audience: its main character is older than Barney, and its page length is significantly longer. And of course, the switching of the character Sorensen Carlisle from female to male changes the relationship with Laura dramatically.
From this simple reconfiguration in age and gender, we get a story that's aimed at older readers, even as it remains heavily rooted in the structure, motifs and meaning of fairy tales. A wicked monster is feasting on the life of an innocent child, and to save him the heroine must go through a test of endurance; a journey of transformation to unlock her own magical potential and wield it against her enemy. Unlike Troy, whose magical gifts were inherent, Laura's must be won through undergoing the titular Changeover, helped along the way by a trio of witches.
To emphasis this further, The Changeover is filled with mentions of and allusions to various other stories: The Gingerbread Man, Little Red Riding Hood, Alice in Wonderland, The Wizard of Oz, even William Blake's Tyger, Tyger. Carmody Braque's tempting shop front is described in a tantalizing way, reminiscent of the Gingerbread House from Hansel and Gretel: "it was transformed, its window blossoming out into a cottage garden of tiny, pretty things: clothes-peg dolls and doll's house furniture, matchbox toys, clear marbles with colour twisted in their hearts, pictures as big as postage stamps in frames carved from matchsticks, seven owls made of walnut shells, a peep-show shaped like an egg, and a box shaped like a book full of minute buttons and glass beads hardly bigger than grains of coloured sugar."
There's even a chance that Laura is named after the character in Goblin Market, as not only is Christina Rossetti's poem referenced by name, but the Laura of both book and poem is changed by the tasting of forbidden fruit.
But there's a third element that makes The Changeover so unique, and that is its setting. Despite the fact that its narrative is filled with traditional fairy tale (and therefore European) connotations, the story takes place in what is unmistakably New Zealand.
As it happens, The Changeover deeply resonates with me, for not only was it published in the same year I was born, but the suburb in which Laura lives – called Gardendale – is clearly based on Bishopdale, where I grew up. The simplicity of the story means it could have been set anywhere, which naturally means that the setting Mahy does decides on is deeply relevant. She describes the feeling of "imaginative displacement" in her own words, and what it often feels like to be a New Zealand writer:
I lived in New Zealand all my life. It was my country and I felt its hills and long beaches to be essentially part of me, but if I wrote about them I did not quite believe what came back to me from the page, and I imagine other readers might have felt something of the same uncertainty.
I now think this was because, like most bookish children of my time, I had been brought up almost exclusively on English stories. My mother read me A.A. Milne, Alison Uttley and Beatrix Potter; my imagination, colonised by reversed seasons, was taken over by a countryside that was home, not merely to rabbits (a New Zealand scourge) but to creatures that had never lived in New Zealand – to squirrels, moles, foxes and badgers.
As I wrote the story, I found myself for the first time naturally drawing on the places around me by way of a setting. The story took on not the traditional New Zealand setting of bush and sea, but the character of the city around me... I now think that all cities have both universal and particular characters, and I was able to use the universal form to begin nudging my way imaginatively back into the city I actually lived in, and then into a place from which I had been, along with many other New Zealanders, unconsciously expelled.
Mahy's great gift to me was to take my own surroundings – the schools, the parks, the streets, the shopping malls – and craft a fairy tale out of them. The Changeover is filled with the ancient symbols and patterns we all learn as a child, but the story belongs to this country, to this city, to me. Laura is the heroine of a fairy tale, but instead of a princess with skin as white as snow, she's a high school student with olive skin and dark hair, "because her genes were paying a random tribute to the Polynesian warrior among her eight great-great grandfathers". She does not have a castle to defend, but a single mother and a little brother to protect. And when she finally enters what Mahy described as the "universal form" in order to work the Changeover, it is to find the place where the universal meets the singular; where the stories everyone knows are mingled with Laura's (and mine) own environment.
She was in a forest that was all forests, the forest at the heart of fairy tales, the looking-glass forest where names disappeared, the forests of the night where Carmody Braque devoured tiger cubs, the wood around Janua Caeli inhabited by yet another tiger which might have a human face behind its mask, and Laura's own forest, the forest without trees, the subdivision, the city.
Between the straight trunks of the birches, the earth-moving machines lumbered like shadow, disinterested beats, a distant supermarket parking lot showed like a little desert of cars. Mrs Fangboner, hair newly set, came out from between the ferns and called, "Laura, don't get into dangerous spots. Don’t let yourself go."
But Laura was already going. The shop for fuller figures could be seen through broad, green leaves, its windows full, not of dresses, but fat zeroes, pot-bellied legless sixes and bosomy eights, and threes like pregnant, primitive goddesses. In the teashop the chairs were being stood on top of the tables and made a forest of their own, sprouting upwards in fountains of coloured leaves. Among them Jacko sat, hunched and very fail, looking at Laura with a face of a little old man, his can of apple juice in front of him.
It's a New Zealand fairy tale and a coming-of-age story, one which concludes when Laura claims a new degree of power over the male influences in her life: by saving her brother, defeating her enemy, accepting her father's absence and the arrival of her mother's new boyfriend, and taking the first few steps into her own romantic relationship with Sorry. The book ends with her in control of her inner and external worlds, over the men in her life, and over herself.
***
It's a theme that's continued in The Tricksters, a book that has Mahy at the height of her powers, unafraid to experiment with the nature of the supernatural and domestic realms, twining them together into a book that yields more insight and complexity with each re-read.
Like The Changeover, it has the New Zealand landscape as its backdrop, strongly rooting the characters to a particular time and place, putting especial emphasis on the fact our Christmas occurs smack-dab in the middle of summer. To convey this feeling of dislocation (at least for readers in the northern hemisphere) Mahy adds the English character of Anthony Hesketh, who comments on the inverted seasons and the idea of having Christmas dinner on the beach:
Shortly after, food began to come down from the house – at first just mince pies and sandwiches. Naomi had put plastic holly around them as a decoration, but Serena had added sprays of tom-thumb roses from the sprawling bush at the corner of the wash-house. Down came the candle-ring bread, the air over its lighted candle quivering with invisible flame; down came the first of two Christmas cakes wrapped in merry red frills.
"Holly and roses!" exclaimed Anthony, rather as if he were making fun of a Christmas that defiantly mixed its summers with story-book winters.
He has accompanied the Hamilton family to their holiday home on the shorefront; a house called Carnival's Hide that is nearly ninety years old (ancient by New Zealand standards). Years ago, Edward Carnival built the place, only to abandon it again after his young son Teddy died in mysterious circumstances.
The Hamilton children keep the memory of Teddy alive with a yearly ritual that involves chanting his name in the place where he was said to have drowned, and Harry especially has always felt his presence there. At seventeen years old, Harry is short for Ariadne (her entire self-image is encapsulated in this rather unattractive diminutive), lost between the glamour of her older sister Christobel and the demands the younger children make on their parents.
Little wonder that (unlike Tabitha in The Haunting) she holds her writing in great secrecy, for it's one of the only things that belongs solely to her. For readers, this is just as well, for what we see of her writing – well, it's about what you'd expect from a seventeen year old. Like many teenage girls, Harry is exploring her burgeoning sexuality by projecting her thoughts and feelings onto fictional characters. In her case, it's through the bland self-insert Lady Jessica and the handsome, dangerous and black-winged Belen:
Suspended over the city, Belen, the black arrow of the air, looked down on the beautiful women gathered together for an entertainment as if he were choosing which one of them he should devour. His eyes were like pools of gold in a golden face and his hair was black as jet, streaked with silver, as if it had been bleached by the moon rather than the sun. He was very strong, and had a foxy sort of smile.
They fell together on to the quilt of fallen blossoms as if on to a bed of silver and ivory. "Now you will be mine," said Belen. "You can't escape. In the end you will beg me to possess you."
Can you believe this was written approximately two decades before Twilight?
On some level, Harry knows that her fiction is rather terrible, and carefully conceals it from the rest of her family. As ever, Mahy is the master at portraying the dynamics of family life, from the younger children's made-up slang (moo is good, grunt is bad), to Christobel's vivacious presence which is felt in the house long before she arrives in person, to the unspoken tension that clearly lies between parents Jack and Naomi.
An elephant is dwelling in the midst of the Hamilton clan, and naturally it is into this tense set-up that the supernatural comes to shake things up.
Of the three books, The Tricksters has the most original antagonist: the spirit of the dead Teddy Carnival who manifests as three brothers embodying the three parts of himself: the heart, the intellect, and the brutish instinct. They emerge out of a range of components that converge on the rocks where Teddy is said to have drowned; a strange alchemy comprised of the children's incantation, the physical presence of Harry's adolescent body, and the tangled thoughts and desires captured in her fiction:
She knew at once they had crawled out of a wrong gap in the world, that they had struggled through holding onto the silken clew of her own story. She had closed one door shutting out Teddy Carnival's bleeding ghost, but had opened another.
As should be obvious by now, Mahy is not interested in logistics when it comes to the workings of magic, only the effect it has on those touched by it. The trifold spirit of Teddy Carnival also carries aspects of Harry's own fictional Belen, becoming a particularly dangerous threat to the susceptible Christobel.
What commences is not only a silent battle between Harry and the brothers, but a battle of supremacy between the brothers themselves. Motivated by the destruction of his own family so long ago, Ovid (the spirit's intellectual aspect) attempts to destroy Harry's, stating: "I'll destroy your family and I'll use you to do it," referencing her deep resentment of Christobel and the secret lying under everyone's nose: that the daughter of Christobel's friend Emma is actually their half-sister, a result of a brief affair between Emma and their father.
The Tricksters is Mahy's most sophisticated work; the intermingling of a ghost story, a family drama and the manifestation of a teenage girl's fictional characters; a complex and challenging book that offers no easy answers and demands at least two reads to grasp all the careful foreshadowing that is strewn throughout.
***
Three books containing three families, each one put through the crucible and each one coming out the other side: changed, battered, but still whole. The simple but effective premise of a family unit becoming the battlefield upon which destructive supernatural forces struggle for control is elevated further by Mahy's gift in making the mundane worth fighting for. Each family is depicted with the same care as the more "exotic" supernatural elements, and you cannot help but invest in the safety and well-being of those each protagonist is trying to protect.
These days supernatural entities are more than likely going to be alluring love interests, methods of escaping the ordinary, interesting and exciting and superior creatures – and so it's refreshing to return to Mahy and her validation of family life, in which her best trick is taking the familiarity of day-to-day life and depicting it as both fascinating and precious.
As such, all three books can be summed up in Harry's reaction to Ovid threatening her family's destruction:
She felt certain that there was much more to her family than Ovid understood. If she had chosen to teeter along a strand of silk high in the air and over risky ground, she was sustained by many things – by the way Jack and Naomi held together, in spite of midnight arguments and differences of opinion; or even by the memory of Tibby holding Crumb, the murderous mouser, in a strangling hold and saying, "This cat loves me," while Crumb swung in her grasp, legs and tail dangling patiently down, extending his claws in despair but still not striking.
"We're not yours to destroy."
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