The River at Green Knowe

This book by Lucy M Boston is quite different to the other ones. Mostly I think it’s because there’s no Mrs Oldknowe, the grandmother who believes and is connected to the old stories, ghosts and magic. Instead there are two other old ladies, pleasant enough, but who don’t believe. The magic that the three children discover is in the river and islands surrounding Green Knowe – a giant, flying horses, a mouse house – but is not so connected to the place itself, because the children and adults aren’t as connected.

There are two interesting themes; one is of displaced persons, which is what the children are (refugees from Burma and Russia) and the other is the difference between child-like wonder and belief, and the jaded view of adults who can’t allow themselves to believe. The things around the children become what they imagine – wood becomes a giant, a boy pretending to be a mouse becomes a midget – while the real magic in front of the adults’ eyes is invisible to them.

The freedom of spending days and days on the river and in the islands with picnics and wonderful suppers is enticing, and is very English story-tale; but unlike those stories, the heroes aren’t the children, it’s the world they discover, and it’s a limited world because they are still at the end displaced people, and Green Knowe itself is limited to those who believe. In short, another magic realism story which leads rather than pushes you to the wonderful ideas contained inside.

The Pinhoe Egg

This is Diana Wynne Jones’ latest Chrestomanci book. They’re sort of a series, in that they’re all set in the same set of worlds and feature some of the same characters, although every book is complete in itself. This one has her trademark mix of magic and common sense, and it’s set in her kind of England, one which missed most of the industrial revolution. Magic is getting out of control in the villages surrounding Chrestomanci castle; it’s a mess which only Chrestomanci, the nine-lifed magician, can resolve.

Wynne Jones does a good job of writing children, which is why she’s so successful. They’re not all-knowing and brilliant either; she strongly believes (read her autobiography and you’ll see why) that children should be allowed to be children, irresponsible, and directed by a wise(r) adult. While they might have magic powers, they’re like any other talented kid in our world, and need to be trained up and nurtured by people who care. What she hates most of all is apathy and neglect. The end of her stories – in this series – are often the same; the neglected child is taken off to be trained up at Chrestomanci castle.

She introduces a new magic in this book called “dwimmer”, which is kind of the magic of the land, and she introduces the old English folk-tale creatures related to that, such as unicorns and hobgoblins. At the same time she’s got a kind of technology magic going on, with Roger inventing a flying-machine, and her usual painstaking mathematical kind of magic as well. She’s added a few new characters and a few really surprising situations and twists, and resolved a couple of things from previous books. It’s not sharply new or brilliant, but it’s very readable and solid and interesting, and that’s still pretty rare.

Forever in Blue

This is the fourth book by Ann Brashares in the “Travelling Pants” series. The four girls have left school and are doing different things. They haven’t spent time together in ages and they’re finding that the travelling pants aren’t connecting them any longer.

Interesting theme, because the different stories also seemed disconnected. Each one of them are doing very different things – Lena’s doing an art course and having sex; Tibby’s doing a scriptwriting course and having sex; Bridget’s on a dig in Turkey and nearly having sex (with a married man); and Carmen’s acting in a play and not having sex. This is really the book where they’re moving out of adolescence into adulthood and Brashere’s attempting to do it in a natural way. It pretty much works. It’s simplistic, but not overly, and the resolutions aren’t too neat – the only real resolution is their decisions to stay friends, rather than allow the pants to do all the work – and while they’re learning lessons, it’s clear that they’ve got about a million more to go.

Brashares writes in a clear prose which won’t date the books overly, and yet still gives it a young, fresh feel; her characters aren’t too articulate to be realistic, and yet don’t rely too much on colloquialisms which will fade within a year or so. The difficulty with following four characters separately is that none of them can be explored with a lot of depth. There are good moments in all of them, but it’s a tying up of the series rather than a serious coming-of-age novel.

The Line Between

This set of short stories by Peter S Beagle is like all his stuff; of mixed quality. There’s some really good stuff – A Dance for Emilia, for example, which has exactly the right mood for its content, a story about loss. There’s some silly stuff (ala The Last Unicorn) such as his Four Fables. And there’s some clever, interesting stuff (ala Giant Bones) like the story, Quarry. It would be hard to please everyone in a collection with such disparate stories included, but it’s not too bad; you can see the workings of his mind, the workings of a writer, and that’s an interesting thing.

The reviewer compared him to Tolkein (has there ever, ever been a fantasy writer not compared with Tolkein?) but he isn’t at all, of course; he actually reminds me a lot of Ray Bradbury. He has a very American voice, unmistakable, and a kind voice, an earnest voice. He puts a lot into his writing, and he enjoys it; with the result that we enjoy it, too.

Exhumation

This is a mix of reviews, essays and some short stories by Christopher Isherwood who wrote some novels in the thirties and a few plays, too. I doubt he’s well-known (I mean even in literary circles) today. He isn’t bad, but he’s not great, not one to last the ages. His work is like a mix between Graham Greene and Evelyn Waugh, without their uniqueness – in which case, you may as well just read Greene or Waugh. It’s serviceable stuff, but not outstanding.

He certainly was a twentieth century man – the usual British upbringing, then Spain and Germany in the thirties, and the US in the sixties where he became a convert to a form of Hinduism – and his work is a good reflection of this. His book reviews are interesting as historical documents; there’s a review of The Grapes of Wrath, just after it was published. And he was, of course – this is how I’d even heard of him – a great friend of Auden, so the things he writes about that poet are both pertinent and very interesting. For example, he says some of his more obscure poems were just a lot of lines from different poems put together in no particular order. Of course, it’d be more pertinent if Auden himself had said it. All in all, good enough, thoughtful enough, but not brilliant.