Yatterings

Mike Wilks‘ new book, Mirrorstorm, is  the second in his Mirrorscape trilogy and escapes the sluggishness normally associated with middle books.  It takes the argument of Mirrorworld, and further develops it the ideas in it. What began as an excursion into art develops into meta-narrative and a commentary onto how to see the world.

Mel, one the heroes of the first book, overhears a plan to start off three storms between Vlam and the Mirrorscape. Questioning some of the facts leads him to the library where he finds that books have been going missing and hears about the theological split between the Ters and the Fas. The heresy turns into a power struggle which affects both worlds. Following the trail, they find the fabled Paper Belfry but Mel, Ludo and Wren escape into the Mirrorscape when they are being hunted by the Morg.

Once inside the world, they find it in chaos and are drawn into restoring the world. Escaping with Cassetti, an ambassador for the Cloud Kingdoms (one of the few interfaces between the real and mirror worlds), they are given a “luck compass” . Cassetti makes them works the artefact out themselves which is one of the themes of the book. If Mirrorworld asked us to look at art in a different way, then Mirrorstorm asks us to question the world and do the research ourselves. In contrast to the Vlam library which appears to require specialist knowledge to navigate, the Mirrorscape search engine is called Cogito which will not help them unless a question is asked correctly. As the worlds come together, Mel, Ludo and Wren come across some old adversaries and discover what makes them truly tick.

Underneath it all Wilks writes with more than some verve and pace, developing the depth of the world and its argument. Having shown us the world behind pictures (with the arguments about the nature of high and low art), he manages to place it into a wider argument about how art is used and experienced. We get more out of the world by questioning it and finding out how it works and why. I’m waiting eagerly for Mirrorshade  when it comes out in September.

In an earlier post, I talked about Philip Pullman’s opening speech of the Place and Space conference held at Keble College.  The rest of the conference took place on the Saturday was well worth attending.

Peter Hunt’s opening session at the Place and Space conference reflected Pullman’s opening speech the night before in terms of the negotation of space. For him, though, the space is negotiated between the adult author and the child reader and he expanded by exploring Alice in Wonderland and Wind in the Willows.

In his talk about Wind in the Willows, he expanded the theme in that it was never written or marketed as  a children’s book (something that does pop up frequently) and that any rebellion in the book is quashed to maintain the idyll (which he has argued in fractured in his Wind inthe Willows: A Fractured Arcadia). Making mention of the Secret Garden and Puck of Pook’s Hill where the physical spaces get smaller as they become more internal. His argument for Alice was that the novel is  a game between the author and a girl given the amount of local knowledge needed to understands the novel where the reader encounters a known place with new eyes.

Margaret Kean talked about the experience that reading allows for the imaginative space. Speaking about the Botanic Garden, she drew the link between the republic of Heaven beginning in there and the notion that it was originally a Physic Garden so it is also the beginning of the science.

Maria Nikolaeva talked about George MacDonald’s novel, Lilith, and the cult of the childhood. The fairy tale world is entered through the mirror world and use of heterotopia, rather than a plain motion into a fairy tale world. The other world becomes an explicit internal world and even when the child returns from fairy, the world is not the same and nor is the traveller.

In the Fairy Tale Spaces thread, the theme that appeared to combine the panels was the notion that context is defined by the period and also illustrations. Sandra Beckett talked about the Red Riding Hood and how the basic story has been adapted through the details and visual narrative of the illustrator. It adds fun but the story is not implicitly bound into a time and space to be understood. In contrast there was an argument that the tale can only exist within a social and cultural moment as illustrated by the tale of Cinderella and its adoption in Poland.

Susan Cahill talked about Mairin Cregan, an Irish writer of the 1930s and 40s, who was active in the political establishment of the Irish state along with her husband. Cahill explored the dual creation of the fairy tale version of Ireland to create, one on hand, a cultural nation and other the other, create a fairy tale version of the homeland for expatriates in the US where she was also popular. It echoes, in my mind, the use of the fantastic to express nationalist values and to explore the idea of children being the future.

Sylvia Path’s children’s books were discussed by Aneesh Barai as negotiations of domestic spaces which are refigure d into fantastic spaces, perhaps echoing and extending E. Nesbit’s take on children’s fantasy. The garden was re-explored as a space to renegotiate gender and identity through the works of Juliana Horatio Ewing, Kate Greenaway and Christina Rossetti’s Speaking Likenesses. Ewing and Greenaway’s gardens are very much orderly space, an extension of the interior. Rosetti, on the other hand, delights in the forest being dangerous and grotesque. It is somewhat isolated and more of a journey towards growing up and leaving the comforts of childhood.

Kiera Vaclavik spoke about underground narratives in children’s literature: abduction (MacDonald and Ewing) and katabatic (Carroll, MacDonald and Pullman). Katabasis, from ancient Greek,  is a descent and implies a more orderly approach to going underground which is normally a male arena. She talked about Alice losing her language (which she does in Wonderland) but not about the reversal in Through the Looking Glass where she helps to faun in the forest which is in a similar position to her earlier self which suggests to me that there is a change through growing up, though the second book doesn’t deal with going underground.

Amy Boesky talked about Jamaica Kincaid’s work in politicising space in response to Antigua’s history. She talked about Said’s thoughts of memory as imaginative geography and the notion of mourning as a way of dealing with the new homeland in rejecting it in favour of the land that has been left.

Ruth Feingold talked about Elizabeth Knox’s Dreamhunter Duet and notions of transplanted traditions and the colonised space of The Place - a geographic space which is manipulated and not all the population can enter it. Of thise that can, some are Transgressors, the Dreamhunters, and some maintain its role, the Rangers. It is up to the Dreamhunters to delve in to the true nature of the Place. I’ve been meaning to read these books for a while and this paper has pushed them up the list.

Last weekend was spent at the Place and Space conference at Keble College.

Philip Pullman gave the key note speech, Inside, Outside, Elsewhere, on Friday afternoon where he talked about the notion of the Borderland and reading. He defined the area as one defined by reader and book, a shared area partially created the book’s imagination and the reader’s imagination.

He questioned the idea of the primary world being somehow lesser than the secondary world at the end of Amber Spyglass with Heaven’s  idea that the real world is lesser in its Utopia. There is no elsewhere in the republic of Heaven. The author and the reader need to interact for the imagination to be ignited. Using images from Gwen John, where the woman in the picture reading standing up in contemplation, and Caspar David Friedrich’s image of a man standing overlooking the mountains which illustrated his idea of reading not always being easy. A reader gets as much out of a book as they put in and that the experience should be democratic in terms of author and reader balance.

Using the illustrations of, amongst others,  Tove Janssen, BB, Arthur Ransome and the images in Leon Garfield’s novels, Pullman argued that there are two kinds of author and reader. The first kind is where action and character are central and in the second, action and landscape are central. He did make me take a second look at the Rupert images by Bestall in terms of the ways of reading the relationship between image and text in terms of there being five ways of reading the story.  Firstly, the images on their own; secondly the rhyming couplets; thirdly the text; fourthly, the images around the header and lastly, the heading itself. Children’s literature, along with graphica, mixes text and art in such a central way and its going to be something for me to explore.

In both main sections, the text is central to the reader and author intention is only part of the literary experience and that reader response is equally important.

Lastly, he showed shots of some text mining software that Tim Regan at Microsoft has been developing that really interesting in terms of the being able to give the reader basic information quickly so that they can ask more complex questions of a text or series of texts.

I gave a paper recently at the Children’s Literature and Youth Culture Colloquium that Maria Cecire runs at the University of Oxford. It was called Dreaming the World: Mirror worlds in Neil Gaiman’s Coraline and Mirrormask. I’ve attached the paper here in Word format and posted it online here on Yatterings. The conversation afterwards was really useful and fruitful and I’m currently working on some revisions and expansions to the ideas in the current version.

No doubt there will be other writings coming online. I’m still working on identifying a proper license that I’m happy with but in the meantime, if you want to use it, please just drop me a line at iainemsley at N0gmail dot SPAM com and make the changes to the address).

In this paper, I am going to look at two of Neil Gaiman’s children’s novels, Coraline and Mirrormask, which use the Alice books as a textual reference.

When Alice wakes up from her dream at the end of Through the Looking Glass, she asks her cat “Now, Kitty, let’s consider who it was that dreamt it all… You see, Kitty, it must have been either me or the Red King”ⁱ. She raises a question about her own agency in her dream where she has created the world. In her dream, she marches through a codified progress from childhood into the adult world in the symbolic progress from pawn to Queen. Her journey will force her to abandon the innocent world of the child and to become aware of her own agency in the world and thus be culpable for her actions. Although she constructs her world, she is not in control of it; its rules control her and define the space in which she can grow. She has to take the chosen path across the chess board since pawns can only go forward and cannot deviate from this unless taking another piece, whereby they can move diagonally for one space before relentlessly moving forward.

Neil Gaiman develops the arguments in Lewis Carroll’s books about how his female protagonists create their own mirror worlds through dreaming and then inhabit them in a time of family stress. Having created these worlds, Coraline and Helena must begin to explore them and to find their edges. Through this exploration, they come across demonic, other versions of their own mothers and must battle them to gain their own agency. This fight manifests itself as a quest to find something, either as simple as a mask or metaphysical as a soul, which allows the girls to defeat their other mother’s desires for a utopian family and, perhaps crucially, to remain as themselves as they return to the real world.There are two questions to be asked of the books. Firstly, how do Coraline and Helena, both different ages, deal with their dream worlds and secondly, how does these experiences relate to Alice’s question and experience.

In these two novels, I’m going to argue that the protagonists develop a dream world and once they appreciate the unwritten rules, are able to define their own identities and places within the real world in stark contrast to Alice who is clearly aware of her own future and identity but does not truly understand it. If she did, she would not need to ask her question.

In Coraline, the Jones family have just moved to a new house which has been divided into flats. Nearing the end of the summer holidays, Coraline is bored and starts exploring the house, meeting the other tenants. None of them pronounce her name properly, calling her “Caroline” to which she quietly replies “I asked you not to call me Caroline. Its Coraline.”ⁱⁱ. With her name changed and ignored by the other tenants, she continues her exploration through the garden and house, finding the edges of the land and going to the Well which Miss Forcible and Miss Spink have told her is dangerous. In this small act of insubordination, she begins to gain her own sense of which boundaries can be broken, a fact she finds useful later in the novel. Her own parents continue this sense of stripping her self as she tries to play with them during the day. They set her challenges which she finds easy and completes quickly and when she craves more attention, her father replies “leave me alone to work” (Coraline, p 14), ignoring her boredom.

In this quest she finds the door which seemingly leads to nowhere. During the day, it opens up onto a brick facade as evidence of the house’s former status as one entity. However during the night, she hears the creak of the unlocked, useless door and her imagination lead her to explore the passage way between the worlds. At first she is cautious but gingerly goes through the passageway into the world when her parents disappear. At first, she remains in the house, waiting for them but when they do not return she tries to call the police but is rebuffed as playing silly games and time-wasting, leaving her increasingly isolated. It is with some desperation that she goes into the mirror world and meets the other mother.

In Mirrormask, Helena, the protagonist, opens the book with defining the story as her own account of a weird dream and the first page ends with her writing “I call this story Mirrormask and it is written and illustrated by me, Helena Campbell”(Mirrormask p1). It opens with the world already made unstable as she claims to be writing the story which she is sure she has not made up. Helena’s parents run a circus and when her mother is taken ill, she is unintentionally pushed to one side by her father who is caught up in keeping everything running whilst the circus is off the road, despite her centrality in covering extra roles in the circus when necessary. Like Coraline, she is continually sidelined as not being able to understand her mother’s illness and retreats into imagining a different world through art. When her father calls the circus together in the flat, she is physically barred from the living room due to the amount of people in it. She goes up to the roof as “everything seems very small and a long way away” (Mirrormask), where she has the space to begin drawing a world full of gargoyles and monsters. Confronting her father, she is further rebuffed with him failing to communicate the extent of the necessary operation. In both books, the child’s identity is stripped and pushed to one side, though both children are able to compensate with their imaginations. As the worlds are different, their rules and perhaps more importantly, boundaries must be sought out.

Coraline’s other world is subtly different from the one which she has just left. As she is soon to find out, its boundaries are defined by the other mother but the edges are easily found. She goes into the garden of the other house and finds that “the world had become a formless swirling mist with no shapes or shadows behind it, whilst the house appeared to have stretched and become thin” (Coraline p.113). When Coraline asks the cat about the world and its edges which are just outside of the building, he replies “Made it, found it, what’s the difference?… Either way, she’s had it a very long time.”(Coraline, p. 83) Unlike the world of Mirrormask, Coraline’s other world is defined by the ideas of H.P. Lovecraft and his idea that the horrific supernatural is best defined as reality which is subtly different, changes which evoke sensations of fear and uncanny. As she will discover, the other parents’ appearance is not as it seems with buttons sewn onto their faces for eyes and they are slightly taller and more angular than her real parents. As she realises this is the world of nightmares and to join in the depicted utopian family is to lose her identity and become a monster with buttons for her eyes. Where Carroll uses the idea of the mirror world to poke fun at the adult world and its foibles, Gaiman extends this to look at the darker side of family life. Throughout the book, the second family and domestic sphere is characterised as the other; it is specifically different from her family who are trapped in the mirror.

Realising that the mother is playing a game to capture her, Coraline challenges the new mother via offering to play a different game which she has been practising with her parents through finding things. She realises that the only way that she can escape is to try to find the souls of the other lost children who have fallen in to the house’s trap. When she initially challenges the mother, Coraline is put into a mirror where she hears the other children who have been lost. Their first conversation mentions the losing of the name as the first thing to go and Coraline realises that she needs to hold onto this to stop the mother gaining power over her. Although the mother tries to tempt her with her offer of having everything she wants, Coraline rejects this saying “Wouldn’t you be happier if you won me fair and square?”(Coraline, p 98). Coraline chooses the game, moving from the other mother’s strength in riddles and into hers, exploration. Her game takes her throughout the house and she forces the other father into revealing the mother’s plan – although she already knows what it is. Through this confirmation of her knowledge and the stone that she has been given, she is able to see the house for what it is and it becomes significantly flatter as the mother’s world is destroyed. Her imagination allows her to work out that her real family are trapped in between the worlds and so break the trap entirely.

As with Coraline, Helena approaches the mirror world through her dreams where she sees her reflected image. The world she wakes up in is inhabited with jugglers but the danger is quickly apparent when a black cloud touches Eric, the juggler, and turns him into dust. The only way of escaping the cloud is tell the books that they are bad so that they return to the library, which are used to surf away from danger. Valentine, the clown who helps Helena escape, tell her that a black cloud is destroying the city around them. Helena engages with Valentine as a juggling partner when she is arrested.

As with Coraline, Helena faces the removal of her identity in the act. When she questions her arrest by the beetles, it replies “Not exactly, miss … Or should I say … Princess” (Mirrormask) before whisking her away to the palace. Like Coraline, her identity is misappropriated by authority. As she is being carried away, she realises that she does need to look for sense in the world as it created through her dreams. In so doing, she is more in control of herself in the world as she aware that it is irrational. Unlike either Coraline or Alice, Helena begins to take control of the world and to question it. Once she has been brought to the palace and is presented to the Prime Minister, he works out that she is not the real princess and explains that there are two cities. He explains that the dark princess was looking for the Charm when she left the queen in a slumber. Helena recognises that the Queen reflects her mother who is lying in hospital. She needs to find the History of Everything in the Library where she finds that the key to the construction of the world when she reads about the girl who had made the world by drawing it: “The Charm she placed beneath the sign of the Queen, to show the city that she knew it would never be finished, because the city was her life and dream.”(Mirrormask). Beginning her own quest for the Charm, she meets the giants who tell her that it is the Mirror Mask when they give her the box.

Betrayed by Valentine, Helena finds herself in the Dark Queen’s castle. The Dark Queen echoes the other mother in her desperate attempt at domesticity, controlling the world via the illusion of the happy family, ignoring the underlying problems which have caused the swap of the girls. Whilst Helena tries to explain her quest, the Queen decides that Helena needs a pretty frock instead. Once inside the princess’s room, Helena is “made into the thing that the Dark Queen wanted… perfectly passive and, looking back on it, perfectly pathetic” (Mirrormask). Helena begins to challenge the Queen as this happens but reverts to her passive role and begins to lose herself to the extent of not recognising Valentine. He needs to remind her of her quest which appears to remind Helena, especially when she finds the letter left which states “I can’t live in your world. I have to grow up. I’m going to run away and join Real Life” echoing Helena’s desire to leave her father’s world of the travelling circus. Neither Helena nor the Princess are happy in their current lives and feel trapped through exclusion by their parents without room to develop their own selves. Whilst the dark princess can only think of destroying the world in her rage but Helena realises that that “[i]t’s a lot harder to try and put the world back together again” (Mirrormask). As with Coraline when she decides that it would be awful to have everything desired, this is Helena’s moment where she gains the control over the language of her dream world through abandoning the utopian family dream.

Whilst Helena is in her passive role, the other princess carries on her destruction and rage. As she inhabits the world she sees herself reflected in the mirror, screaming at her father in the real world. As she travels through the world, she sees herself in the real world as the darker side of what she presents to the world. Eventually the other self comes back and begins to tear down the world by destroying the pictures from which it is created when the dark princess realises that Helena is watching her. Helena tries to come back to the world and to reach to her father by shouting at him. She bangs on the shop window that she is looking in for the reflection. As she and Valentine take tea with Mrs Bagwell, they come back to the notion of Valentine’s tower which he has managed to upset. When Helena realises that she needs to use the mirror, she remembers where the Mirrormask is and that she needs to find a window to see the girl. As the pillar of flame is destroying the city, Helena realises that ‘ “She’s destroying the world, ” I told Valentine. And she was. Also snogging boys, eating chips, smoking and fighting with my dad’ (Mirrormask). In those moments of separation of the selves, Helena becomes aware of herself as part of mirror by donning the mirrormask. She gains complete control of the world by acting through becoming the mirror and haunting the other Helena before she brings herself into the real world again by recognising herself and accepting her darker side.

In comparison to the journey that Alice goes through, the Queen and the other mother are trying to prevent the girls growing up. It is only when Helena and Coraline challenge the secondary mothers that they are able to move on. Coraline points out that not everybody wants to have everything they want whilst Helena persuades the queen that she needs to allow her daughter to grow up, much to her horror. As she works out how to return to the world by becoming part of it, the world is destroyed by the other girl, save for one small picture on the roof.

Both Helena and Coraline are accepted back into the family as individuals, through having recognised the flaws in the family structure presented in the mirror worlds. Unlike Alice who unquestioningly dreams her world into existence, Coraline dreams hers as a way of explaining her annoyance with her parents ignoring her. Although she does not create the world, she is able to shape it through her dreams and to expose the nightmare for what it is and thus come through it. She is not as knowing as Helena in her creation of the world but her own curiosity pushes her through the passage. Alice like, her game allows her to transform the domestic idyll and to see the house for what it is and to accept her role in the real world. Unlike Alice’s chess game in Through the Looking Glass which suggests her future, Coraline’s allows her to define her own self. Helena is able to come to terms with herself and finds a language to express her rage at her own situation.

Whilst Coraline’s nightmare is subtly different from the real world, she discovers its boundaries and the limits of the house defined by the other Mother. As she understands it, it becomes flatter or paler since she can see through the illusion. At the outset, Helena makes it clear that the fantasy land is her own creation but through her journey, she is able to become part of its fabric and gain a better sense of self. Both clearly answer Alice’s question by accepting that they have created their own mirrors. The distorted reflections of a utopian family life allow Coraline and Helena to learn the language to define their own roles. Yet Helena is able to go on further than Coraline in that Mirrormask is purportedly her book, her creation; she controls the language that describes her and tells her story, not the Dark Queen or apparently the person we would consider as the author. The mirror experience allows them to define underlying fears and to gain a mastery over them, even if these fears still exist, through acknowledging the mirror space and making their own definition of the space.

Carroll’s dream world is a ludic one, playful in its interrogation of the real world, but ultimately deterministic in his portrayal of Alice’s future, which is out of her hands. Gaiman on the other hand uses the mirror world to allow the girls to confront their own fears about the world and to find a way of coping with them.

In contrast to Alice who is not allowed to be aware of her own self, Gaiman’s travellers are able to answer the original question with a clear answer: “it was I who dreamt it all”.

The Independent has an article on the new Coroners and Justice Bill which is being introduced to parliament this week and  a possible effect on graphic novels. The Bill contains a clause that is targeted towards hardcore paedophiliac pornography but my understanding is that the terms are vague enough to catch a book like Alan Moore’s Lost Girls (which I’ve yet to get).

If, as the Independent says, the Bill defines a child as under 18 years of age when the age of consent is 16 (though I think gay sex might still be 18), this poses a potential issue for writers and artists depicting an act which is legal between two consenting parties. Whilst it will of course be denied that graphica is the target, there can be little doubt that at some point this law will be applied to a book that somebody finds offensive.

In response to a letter about a CBLDF case, Neil Gaiman wrote on his blog:

“If you accept — and I do — that freedom of speech is important, then you are going to have to defend the indefensible. That means you are going to be defending the right of people to read, or to write, or to say, what you don’t say or like or want said.

The Law is a huge blunt weapon that does not and will not make distinctions between what you find acceptable and what you don’t. This is how the Law is made.”

This law is bound to be used as a blunt weapon when the next Mary Whitehouse or Daily Mail campaign begins. Not if, when.

We are seemingly heading towards an increasingly authoritarian society which I doubt would change with the advent of a Conservative government. We need to rethink, as a culture, how we respond to art that pushes our  buttons and boundaries.

I’ve just caught this interview with Alan Moore on the Guardian website where he talks about the Watchmen film, Lost Girls (which Top Shelf are bringing out in one volume in May) and a sequel to Voice of the Fire which sounds very much like an Iain Sinclair type endeavour but set in Northampton.

The Minnipins (republished as the first part in a series, The Whisper of Glocken (Carol Kendall’s Tales of the Minnipins) ) is an odd book from an American author, Carol Kendall, but one which reflects the debate in the US about joining the Second World War. Heavily influenced by Tolkien’s Hobbit, the Minnipins live in a secluded valley which is peaceful, having left their old lives behind entirely. Only one Minnipin has left the valley, Old Fooley via balloon, but he is normally seen as an idiot and his attempt to engage with the modern world is rebuffed.

Years later, Walter the Earl finds Old Fooley’s treasure, sets of suits of armour and weapons, despite Fooley’s heirs deliberately trying to ignore the war-like past. Whilst Walter tries to work out what the sword is and how to use, Ltd., who is Mayor, is more concerned with winning the trophy for the best village. Muggles, equally an outsider through her untidiness (Minnipins are extremely tidy), joins Walter as they leave the village to its own devices and go up river on a raft where they see fires in the mountains that presage the return of the Mushrooms. (A section that echoes very strongly the trip into the Goblins in the Mountains when Bilbo meets Gollum down to the sword glowing in the presence of enemies.) When they return, the outlaws need to persuade the village that the Mushrooms are approaching and that they must fight. In the aftermath, the village manages to win the trophy which is left in the square.

At one level its obvious that this is a slight re-working of the US entry into the war, which was only forced after Pearl Harbour. Like Tolkien, Kendall celebrates the idyllic life but sees the need to defend it from external threats. It is an active book, rather than passively coming into contact with it, marking the generational change in perspective which the war provoked and enabled. The Minnipins does not have the bite of the Oz’s remaking the fairy tale or James Thurber’s writing as it is less critical and still influenced by the cosy myth making of Tolkien.

Carol Kendall, The Minnipins (J.M Dent, London, 1959)

Penelope Farmer’s The Summer Birds, published in 1971, is a strange book which features Charlotte and Emma Makepeace from Charlotte Sometimes. Thematically it continues the idea of loss of childhood innocence and the idea that the summer must end.

Charlotte and Emma live with their grandfather and his housekeeper in a grand house but go to the local school. On their way in one morning, they come across a boy who teaches them to fly. Gradually he teaches all of their friends to do so and the summer world of the children begins which the adults cannot see or experience. In secret they begin playing games and enjoying themselves, tempered only by the two weeks of rain, which exposes the tensions between them.

When he comes to the house, the boy cannot be seen by the housekeeper and leaves Charlotte in trouble when he throw water all over the bathroom. Yet the teacher, Miss Hallibutt can see him when he comes into the school yard. When she comments that she always wanted to fly, he responds “No, I can only teach children. You – you are too old”(page 72). Farmer presages the ending of the innocent fun and in the tensions caused by the rain, a challenge is laid down for the boy to reveal his real identity.

Charlotte starts questioning the boy’s motivations whilst the group are eager to take up his offer to take them to a utopia. The boy reveals that the power can only last until the end of the summer. Charlotte’s honesty forces him to disclose that he is the last of his kind and has been told by the Phoenix that he needs to encourage children onto his island to transform them into birds. Her earlier experience with Clare in Charlotte Sometimes gives her the critical awareness that the merry-go-round must end.

She exposes the darker side of the Peter Pan dream where the consequences are considered. Whilst Peter can happily live as a child for ever and take children to Neverland, there are families who have lost children and must deal with those consequences. Instead of pandering to an adult wish to return to a childhood nirvana, Farmer makes the reader aware of the results of the dream through the non-return to the real world. Rather than remaining as children, they need to grow up and to remember the fun that they had and grow up.

Developing Farmer’s concern with the ending of childhood which starts in Charlotte Sometimes, The Summer Birds comes back to Peter Pan and questions Barrie’s supposition that Neverland is an ideal place to wish for. Instead of the return to childhood, she reacts to the post-war theme of adapting and dealing with the real world, exhorting children to accept that family is important as is growing up.

The Summer Birds, Penelope Farmer (Chatto and Windus, London, 1971 reprint)

Catherine Storr’s Marianne Dreams echoes the sickness and need to remake the world but tempers it with the cruelty of children. Storr comments on the change world where horse and cart no longer delivers the milk but an electric float does. The pastoral world has been morphed into the urban world and Marianne dreams of riding a horse.

Marianne falls ill on her birthday and has to take to her bed. She is given a governess to keep her education up to date and her mother offers to get a subscription to the local library to alleviate her boredom. After drawing a house using her mother’s kit, she dreams of a prairie and the same house. Placing herself in a tradition of sick children, she adds in a boy when she is told of her governess’ other charges and begins exploring the house. Striking up a conversation with him (including Mark, the boy, who is also ill), she begins to fill in the house with items and stairs so that Mark can begin to move having constructed a shared dream space where the two ill children can share an experience.

However they have a row and Marianne traps him through creating bars on the windows to wipe him out. Rather than just trapping him, this action results in Mark ending up in an iron lung due to his illness. Realising the effects of her actions, Marianne tries to reverse them but at makes Mark change his attitude to his illness and be positive. When they escape from the house, both children are followed by Stone creatures which mirror Mark’s own fears about life after illness.

Storr is perhaps unique in the period for discussing the cruelty present in children. Penelope Farmer approaches it but not to the same extent as Storr – though I wonder if this comes from her first marriage to the psychologist, Anthony Storr. She offers the reader the chance to take their own fate into their hands rather than feeling sorry for themselves. The dream world offers both children the chance make their own world and to adapt to it.

Marianne Dreams, Catherine Storr (Patrick Hardy Books, London, 1958)