Good God! There's writing on both sides of that paper!

“Zac buried his head under the pillow. ‘Go away. I’m asleep.’
“It’s freezing out here. Hurry up!’
He knew it was the kitten. The cats of Starspill were cool and haughty and rarely spoke to humans if they could help it…”

At this point a lesser writer would waste time inventing an explanation for how it comes about that the cats of Starspill can speak to humans at all. Fisher simply gives it for a fact: this is how things are in the world I have made, where fog permanently smothers the town so that artificial light is always needed; where a wolf has swallowed the sun and where stars, or pieces of stars, hot enough to burn the hand but small enough to fit in a pocket, periodically fall and are made into lamps.  Says the Storyteller; ‘And thus is my tale told. Yet there is no end, for the tale goes on and we are inside it.’

When one has created a story-world, the next necessary thing is to imagine convincingly how things work inside it. The lack of natural light, and the inadequacy and price of the substitutes (candles and the star-lamps, which mostly don’t function much better than oil-lamps, or are beyond people’s means), have had a predictable effect; “hardly anyone read much now, as light was so expensive”. In consequence school ends at an early age for most, and though his friend Alys is still there, our protagonist Zac, who must be somewhere in his early teens, has left to work for his brother Gryff, star-collector and lamp-maker.

It is a novel of several linked quests, and in that way reminiscent of the old Welsh legend of Culhwch and Olwen, of which Fisher published a retelling for children earlier this year. The plot concerns how Zac and Alys (the A-Z as one might say), helped by a mysterious bookseller and under orders from the town’s imperious cats, try to find and win three embers of the lost sun, which if combined will defeat the fog – an end unpopular with some, who have come to worship darkness and a wolf-cult, while others have ceased to believe that things were, or ever could be different:

“’Would you like it if the Sun came back?’ Zac said suddenly.
She stared at him. ‘Not much chance of that.’
‘But if?
‘Blue sky, heat, green things growing, birds singing? It’s a myth, Zac, just a story. It could never happen. Things were never that good.’”

If you wanted, you could easily enough see allegory in this novel. The map which illuminates the labyrinth through which the questers must travel is in a bookshop. Aurelian the bookseller explains:

“It was a secret way of travelling, a system of hidden ways through the world. […] They say there is no time there, that you can enter and be a hundred miles away in a moment. There are certain secret entrances – they are called Thresholds and the Map shows where they are”.

But it isn’t as simple as “books = doors into new worlds” or “fog = ignorance” (or perhaps, given Zac’s divided feelings about it, “familiarity”). It makes more sense to see fog, wolf etc as folk-tale archetypes that can have many different incarnations in the real world. In this particular real world, there is a basic conflict between those who fear the light because it “will show you all the foolish and dangerous things that should not be seen” and those who believe that “we need to see and understand our world”. This conflict has been going on throughout history and it is not hard to think of other examples of it. I should imagine the Taliban dislike most books, but if they were capable of understanding this one, they would be especially averse to it.

Zac is a likeable protagonist, but for most readers the star will be the self-possessed kitten who shares his adventures. It is also oddly pleasing that while the humans in the story have various more or less complex motives for wanting or not wanting the sun back, the motivation of the town’s cats is simple: they just want to be able to bask in sunlight. Fittingly, the book is dedicated to the author’s own two cats.

“Every tale has another chapter”


In her blog at https://www.catherine-fisher.com/culhwch-and-olwen/, Catherine Fisher explains what drew her to this particular Welsh legend and made her want to write a version of it for today’s children: “Culhwch and Olwen is not one story, but many different tales, held inside a framework. It’s a heap, a tapestry, a tangle, a hedgerow of stories”.

It begins, in fact, with a noblewoman giving birth in a pigsty because she has fled her home for reasons not plain even to her, never mind anyone else, and which would clearly make a story of their own; it ends with a young man and his wife returning to a court where it is hard to imagine him being safe, let alone happy. Along the way, there are all manner of other stories peering round corners and asking to be investigated, and some are, taking the reader down various byways, but others are tantalisingly unexplored: what became of the kind swineherd; who was Tywyllych’s dead husband; where did the great boar end up?
Being a writer very much disinclined to talk down to children, Fisher does not minimise the harsh elements of the tale: the pain of childbirth, the grief of an early death, the animosity bred in individuals by war and conquest, the clash of generations. But she does show how love, friendship, generosity and gratitude can mitigate these. Her favourite character in this huge galaxy is the Arthurian knight Cai – prickly, arrogant, dangerous – for whom she has shown a partiality in other books, but my favourite was a lame though determined ant. It will be no surprise to those who know her as a poet that she is adept at conveying the lyrical side of the story, but for any adults not acquainted with the hard edge of her YA novels, here are Cai and Bedwyr fulfilling one of Culhwch’s tasks by making a leash for the hound Drudwyn. It must be made from the beard-hairs of the fearsome Dillus, and these must be plucked while he is still alive. Fortunately, he happens to be asleep and drunk when they find him:

“Cai took a spade from his horse and began to dig. He dug a deep narrow pit and rolled Dillus into it, upright, and filled in the earth and trampled it down so that only the man’s sleeping head remained above ground.
“Tweezers”, he said. Bedwyr handed them over.
Cai crouched and plucked out a hair from the bristly black beard. Dillus gave a yell of pain and his eyes snapped open. He wriggled and struggled.
But he was buried deep.
Swiftly Cai plucked strand after strand of the beard and gave them to Bedwyr, who was already weaving and plaiting them into a leash.
But the huge man’s struggles were causing earthquakes and tremors. The whole mountaintop was shaking. “When I get out of here,” he roared, “you are DEAD!” Cai kept plucking. Suddenly Dillus roared out and one arm came free. Then the other.
“Look out!” Bedwyr leaped back.
“Do we have enough?” Cai snapped.
“Yes! Yes! Plenty.”
“Good. Then he doesn’t have to stay alive any more.” Cai stood up. With one slice of his sword he took off the man’s head,
Then he turned and walked away.

In the blog, she regrets having to play down the “list” feature so typical of these legends, though she does manage to echo it in one of the poems scattered through the narrative. But given the intended audience, I don’t think she could have done otherwise; most young readers would be unwilling to accept such long pauses in a story full of incident and narrative drive. She uses the poems to echo points where the original narrative is “written in a heightened prose” and to change the pace. They can also serve to see the story from a different angle, rather as Kipling uses poems to comment on short stories, and the first poem, “The Priest Tends the Grave” is a fine example of this. Prince Cilydd has assured his wife Goleuddydd, dying in childbirth, that he will never remarry. She, rating this promise at its true value and not wanting her son to have a stepmother, makes Cilydd vow to remarry only when he sees a bramble growing on her grave; then, unbeknown to him, she lays a duty on the priest attending her to weed the grave. Only after the old man’s death does the bramble grow:

He's busy. Gets there late on an autumn evening.
There are shoots. On his neck her angry breathing.

A decade of dandelion, nettle-sting,
He has grey hair now. His hands, uprooting.

Who can stop this green life? It just comes.
A dead queen torments his dreams
.
Boys play on the graveyard wall. His knees hurt.
Thorns tangle around his heart
.
He’ll be as cold as her next winter.
Every tale has another chapter.

Several of the story’s themes are miraculously condensed here, notably the attempts of the old and dead to control the young and alive, and the resurgence of life against all odds. Like all Catherine Fisher’s books for children and young adults, this has plenty to interest older readers as well.

“…he stood up there like someone important, spouting as if he knew it all, but he didn’t, did he? He had no idea. Were all adults such frauds, was it all false, the way they pretended to know things, to be experienced, to have learned, have passed exams? Were they really all fakes like he, Jack, was?”
 

It may seem perverse to start by quoting the one story in this volume that has no supernatural element. But in a way, “Not Such a Bad Thing” is key, because Jack, who has plagiarised a story from an old book for his English homework, is experiencing a revelation about how little the adults whom he has seen as omniscient actually know. His teacher has not spotted it, the head of English has entered it for a competition, the judges too have awarded it first prize. Jack acquires a new perspective on himself and his world, and this is what happens in most of the stories here.

( Read more... )

Sell me, the house says, sell me.
I'm tired of you,
the way you neglect me,
don't quite see me any more.
The way you gaze through me every night
as if you wanted something else. (The House to its Owner)

This lippy house is one of several opinionated edifices and locations in Catherine Fisher's long-awaited new collection. An ominous row of conifers near Avebury deters a walker; a woman living in a building converted from a cinema finds her flat full of images from its past:

In bed she sleeps among the other couples,
a rapid flicker of embraces

while, in what for me was a stand-out poem, "The Building and the Boy", a classic fairytale castle in a forest entraps and defeats a potential explorer as it has done many before. This building has mixed feelings; it develops a fondness for its hapless challengers:

He leaves a trail of breadcrumbs,
unravels wool his mother made him bring,
marks corners with his name, doors with initials […]

The building smiles. The building feels quite tickled.
Rather likes the artless images.
Closes the gate carefully. Withdraws the bridge.

Fisher has always played variations on myth, but while some of those here are recognisably traceable to different sources, like the Odyssey and the Mabinogi, others, like the sentient Building, the "Clockwork Crow" and the "Daughter of the Sun", feel more archetypal, indeed as if their ultimate source might be the inside of the poet's head. And even the Sleeping Beauty sequence subverts its source; this sounds more like a princess in a coma, who may always have been more conscious than she looked. The back cover's description of "darkly resonant" is more apt than these sometimes are; there is a thread of darkness running through most of these poems. The cover picture is a detail from Botticelli's "Primavera", and it relates to the poem "Post-War", about the moment when Wynford Vaughan-Thomas and others happened on a cache of priceless paintings stored in Montegufoni castle for fear of bombing. The painting is an allegory on the coming of spring, and the poem too ends on an optimistic note, of rebirth "despite the dead. Despite everything". Yet when one looks carefully at the detail selected, things are more complicated. The image shows Flora's hands and arms against her dress covered in red-pink flowers. Her lacy sleeves are red-tinted too, and look for all the world as if the arms beneath are bleeding. Which could be so, because in Ovid's version, which this poem references, Flora was originally a wood-nymph, Chloris, ("green"), who is ravished by the West Wind and, in the act, turns into the goddess of spring, "flowers spilling from her mouth". The story may be a fanciful gloss on how green shoots turn to blossom, but it is a dark tale, the red flowers too reminiscent of blood for any sentimental comfort. Spring survives the war, as did the painting, "despite the dead", but that does not alter the facts of death and suffering.

It is the dark thread, the blood among the flowers, that gives these poems their vigour and vim. Those already familiar with Fisher's acclaimed YA fantasy novels will find the same blend of lyricism and violence here. There's even a clockwork crow.

Caz had a fragmented view of something impossible. Caught in the light of the torch was a huge body like a snail, boneless, fluidly rippling. Rust-orange marks striped its sides. Its flesh was an almost-transparent brown. Two pinpoint black eyes swivelled on long, slow muscles.

She swallowed a scream.

The huge moving mass streamed towards her, clogging the tunnel.

This is the sequel to At the World's End, also a Barrington Stoke book. The whole Barrington Stoke list is designed for children who have reading difficulties, to tempt them with books whose reading age is adapted to their ability but whose level of interest is suited to their actual age (this particular one is aimed at reading age 8, interest level teen). The label's remit includes the physical difficulties of dyslexia, hence the font and the off-white, non-see-through paper, but also the problems of "those who haven’t built up the reading stamina yet to manage complex language structures and non-linear plots."

Obviously this imposes constraints. It isn't just that you can't be too linguistically fancy: you can't make your plots and characters too convoluted either. These are not the kind of readers who will willingly look back and check on what they might have missed or mistaken, so you can't do much flipping between plot strands and time zones, nor play around with unreliable narration or morally complex characters who might be goodies, baddies or both by turns.

Since these are all formidable weapons in Fisher's normal armoury, you might expect her to have trouble doing without them. In fact, though, she simply gets down to it and deploys others. Linear narratives can be great page-turners, and this one is extremely pacy, culminating in what's basically a straight but very exciting race and duel. If the baddie must be unequivocally evil, he can also be very scary, and the unnamed white-haired man is all of that. And, being Fisher, she can still create surprises, as with the Giant Mutant Slugs… these monsters out of many a person's nightmare are first seen through the eyes of the protagonist Caz, who has every reason to react as she does to them, but when later we hear from a character who knows more about them… well, it would be wrong to get into spoiler territory.

Suffice it to say that this surely fulfils the remit; I can't imagine the child, reluctant reader or not, who wouldn't want to know "what happens next". When I reviewed this book's predecessor At the World's End, I hazarded a guess that there'd be a sequel, because everything seemed to point to Caz's journey not being complete. It is more so by the end of this one, but there is still a lot of narrative possibility in this ruined future world and when one of the characters says, near the end, "This is not over", I did wonder… At all events, it's great that these sort of books, by acclaimed authors, exist for children with reading problems and I'd certainly recommend them to anyone with such a child.

Catherine Fisher, who lives in Newport, writes both poems and YA fantasy novels. In poetry, she has won the Cardiff International Poetry Prize, while with her novels she has been shortlisted for many awards including the Smarties Books Prize and the Whitbread Prize for Children's Fiction. Her futuristic novel Incarceron was published to widespread praise in 2007, winning the Mythopoeic Society of America's Children's Fiction Award and selected by The Times as its Children's Book of the Year.

SHEENAGH: I think you've said before that you, like me, are one of those who can't write poetry and prose at the same time because the rhythms are so different; the poems just come out prosy. Do you consciously think yourself into a poetry or prose mood? When something starts to germinate in your mind, how soon do you know which form it's going to take? And what would you do if, say, you're in the middle of a novel and you suddenly get a really good impetus for something that just has to be a poem?

CATHERINE: It's hard to write both at once; sometimes it works. I don't really do anything consciously with writing- it's all just spur of the moment. If a line comes to mind which is quite obviously a line of verse- or even an image or idea, I try to jot it down and keep it to work on. Whether a vaguer idea will turn out prose or poetry sort of depends on the size of the thing- having written many novels I know now when it's going to be a big story, with lots of complications, rather than a more stripped-down subject for a poem or a series of poems.
    If I'm in the middle of a novel and I get an idea for a poem I usually just do it, or at least make notes about it. A novel takes about a year to write so if you wait you'll have lost it... which happens sometimes.

SHEENAGH: Your poetry is basically aimed at adults while your novels have been marketed to children and young adults. Granted, the divide between YA and "adult" books is a bit artificial, I read your YA fantasy novels with pleasure and I'm sure an intelligent child would like your poems. But have you ever been tempted to write "adult" novels, or poems specifically aimed at children?

CATHERINE: I think I just write the books for me now- I don't really think about the YA or adult thing, and as you say, the adult readership for YA is huge. The only thing that makes the books YA really is that the protagonists tend to be young people- having said that, most of the other characters are adults and they are just as important. In the current set, The Chronoptika books, Jake and Sarah are the nominal heroes, but then there's Venn, Wharton, David, Maskelyne, a whole host of adults who are almost equally important.
    Having said that, publishers have rather different ideas and don't like too many adult characters. They seem to feel that teens only like to read about other teens, which I think is untrue. After all, this is the time in life when the adult world is impinging, and teens want to learn about it. When I was that age there were no YA books really, so I went from Enid Blyton etc straight to Sherlock Holmes and plenty of sf. And that was good.
    So if I wrote an adult book it wouldn't be that different. Though of course there is the bitter truth that so called adult fiction is taken more seriously by critics and pays better. But also it is true that the YA market seems to be prospering, even in these tough times.

SHEENAGH: "I think I just write the books for me now- I don't really think about the YA or adult thing" - That's always been my impression; your books certainly never talk down to young readers. But I know that some of your UK titles have been altered in US editions, because US publishers haven't trusted their readers to understand the British titles (though why Crown of Acorns became Circle of Stones still baffles me; have US children really never seen acorns?) Have you ever encountered any other sort of intervention like this? I'm thinking not only of how you always credit readers with the brains to know or look up what's new to them, but also of times when you've tackled emotionally difficult material - killed off parents, allowed siblings to admit to serious resentment of each other, or allowed your young 18th and 19th-century girl protagonists to be at fairly explicit risk from men, though luckily they're pretty good at taking care of themselves. Has a publisher or editor ever tried to get you to simplify or tone anything down?

CATHERINE: The Crown of Acorns title change baffled me too. Circle of Stones is so bland! I don't really understand some of these changes. The funniest one was the change of The Oracle, a title which was considered too baffling for US kids and finally became The Oracle Prophecies. Of course. So much simpler.
    There are other interventions but they are fairly low-level- mostly questioning word usage, usually because a word can be unfamiliar or idiomatic or mean something else there. I don't think I've ever been asked to tone down content, or had complaints about what goes on in the books- at least not from publishers. Some US librarians have lists which rate you for content.. how much swearing, how much violence etc.
    But I think my books are fairly innocuous compared to the more realistic YA book. At least fantasy distances violence and danger. The stuff that happens in your own street is probably far more frightening, in real terms.

SHEENAGH: "As for poetry, I hope anyone can read it. " - we both know they can't, though. Or at least, they tell themselves they can't. Many adults, certainly, seem to have a mental block as soon as they see what someone described to me as "those little short lines" and to assume it won't be for them. I would hope that doesn't apply so much to children, but I haven't your experience with them. Do you see any way to overcome this reaction of fear, antipathy, whatever one calls it? Particularly if, as I suspect, it isn't natural to children but develops as they grow older.

CATHERINE: I don't think young children have learned an antipathy to poetry. On the contrary they love it, but for them it is an oral art, like singing or stories. Joining in, chanting along, having fun with words.
    I think maybe children learn to fear poetry because somehow they pick up this idea that it is 'difficult', not straightforward, that it doesn't tell a story and hides its meaning in metaphors. So it becomes a puzzle to be solved.
    Having said that, of course poetry is difficult, because it's dense, compacted, packed tight. It's taken neat. Or, in another image which I'm playing with at the moment, a poem is like one of those pellets that owls regurgitate. You have to break it open and pick out all the bones and fur to find out what the poet has been digesting.
    Good teachers can make it loved, but many teachers find it difficult too, I suspect.
    I think the only way to keep that fresh response of the young is to read the stuff aloud, which transforms it. As a kid I chanted reams of poetry to myself because I loved the sounds, the rhythms, the rhyme. As well as the sharp, brilliant visual flashes you get.
    Teaching is hard and in these days there is little room for fun. But the child who 'gets' poetry will never lose their hunger for it..

SHEENAGH: Like many YA writers, you are deeply rooted in mythology: Welsh, Egyptian, Norse, among others. And this often goes hand in hand with the futuristic element: ancient archetypes and themes play out in a new guise for a new age. I've noticed that your dystopian futures, as in the Chronoptika books, tend to be materialistic, practical, cleansed of myth, which fortunately reasserts itself like Nature resisting the pitchfork. Again, is that conscious or just the way you naturally see the world? And do you think it would actually happen? (I'm recalling Terry Nation saying gloomily that he couldn't imagine a future that wasn't basically dystopian.)

CATHERINE: Myth is fascinating and eternal. One reason I enjoy it and use it a lot is that these are well tried and tested stories; there is something in them that goes deep, however often they are re-interpreted. And they do go well with the futuristic.
    I have done a few dystopias and yes they tend to be materialistic places, and the reason for that, I suppose is that it's my worst nightmare- places where stories and the past have been obliterated. But the stories always come back. In Incarceron, for example, the prisoners have a whole secret mythology of a prisoner called Sapphique, who once escaped, and will one day return. The really fun part for me is creating this backstory and playing with mythic tropes, writing whole sections of scripture and poetry about him or by him, while keeping the reader wondering if in fact he ever really existed.

SHEENAGH: Following on from that, one mythology I haven't particularly noticed surfacing in your work is Irish, and I know you have Irish ancestry. Any plans in that direction?

CATHERINE: Ah. I love the Irish stuff. It has a peculiar, raw savage feel. It's different to the Welsh stories which are softer - the myths of Cuchulain etc seem primal and unrefined. To start using them would be a challenge- and somehow dangerous, as if I would be handling powerful, unstable dynamite..
    So I have no plans just yet in fiction, but certain poems may happen, as a way into it.
    I don't think humanity will ever lose stories. At the moment we seem to have more of them than ever, and everything is always being reworked. Sometimes I don't like the results, but I like the obsessive need for it.

SHEENAGH: Your little poem pamphlet Folklore (Smith/Doorstop Books 2003) was very much about that, how folk motifs survive by being reworked in each generation. When you say "sometimes I don't like the results", are you thinking of anything in particular?

CATHERINE: Well, I'm being purist here. I love the idea that stories are being constantly reworked. But that means writers can- and do- take liberties with the characters and re-arrange them in new scenarios and different adventures. Which is fine, as long as there is some integrity with the originals. I suppose I'm thinking mostly of TV and film adaptions- things like the recent Jason, and Merlin, which I don't tend to watch because the modern idiom and 21st century responses of the characters irritate me. But then it's always been like that. I bet there was some crusty old scribe back in the 1100s complaining that Chretien de Troyes' new version of the grail story totally wrecked the original, and that things didn't really happen like that.
    The great thing about myths is there is no original and there is no really.
    This impinges a bit on fan fiction, but of course with that there is an original.

SHEENAGH: Talking of which, I know you've encouraged children in the past to write fan fiction based on your books, particularly when they wanted the story to continue and you wanted to go off and write something else! Did you ever read any of it, and if so, how did you react? I know there was a fair bit, and I'm guessing a lot of it revolved round Getting People Together who didn't explicitly come together in the books - young readers don't half want true love to triumph, whatever else happens...

CATHERINE: I gather there is quite a bit of fan fiction around, especially about the worlds of Incarceron and Sapphique but I have never gone looking for it and haven't read much. I have no objection to people writing it as long as it's clear it has nothing to do with me. As you say, I imagine it's mostly people playing with the characters' relationships and re-arranging them to their own liking, or inventing new adventures for them. I understand the desire to do that, if you are so in love with that world or those characters that you just want more and more of them, and the author is too busy (or disinclined) to provide it. Also it can be a way into writing, as copying paintings is for artists.
    But I think in the long run it leads to sterility, and writers have to be brave and take the step away and invent their own stories.
    By the way, earlier I said that with fan fiction there is an original, and that's true, in that say, the book of Incarceron exists. But looking at it in more detail, even that book is actually an assemblage, an artwork created out of thousands of bits of things- paintings, poems, books I've read, films, places I know, and many more tinier, intangible things. Only the way it's put together and expressed is truly mine.
So maybe, even with fiction, there is no ultimate original.
    Which doesn't stop me feeling possessive about the work and uneasy about what happens to it out there..

SHEENAGH: Talking of originals, both your poems and your novels sometimes use historical characters, but very differently. When, in your poems, you get into a past voice, like James Hartshill in The Unexplored Ocean, or the two adversaries in "Incident at Conwy", it seems you're trying to get as close as possible to the reality of being them. But with the historical characters in your novels, like John Dee, Maskelyne, John Wood of Bath, it seems the first thing you do is work free of the reality, changing names and at least lightly fictionalising the character. Why might that be?

CATHERINE: Actually these two examples are quite similar. James Hartshill, for instance, is invented. I wanted to write a set of poems about Cook's voyages and initially tried to use Cook's voice, but that method was full of potential pitfalls. His diaries exist, he was a real person. So I could easily be seen to get things wrong, be inaccurate, and would be constrained by his responses and the things he really did. It was easier to comment on Cook through Hartshill, who can be or say anything I want him to be. He starts off as very young and naive and grows disillusioned.
    So that is very similar to the way I use Jonathon Forest as a fictionalised version of John Wood. Wood was a wonderful man and full of crazy theories, but the demands of fiction meant that his life had to be re-arranged into the pattern I needed. So Forrest is Wood, but not quite.
    For example, Wood actually met a young woman called Sylvia and took her into his household, but she later committed suicide. In my story Crown of Acorns she does not do that.
    It's as if one is writing an alternative form of what happened, or trying to impose pattern, because real lives are so chaotic and random. I think that this is the need underlying most fiction.

SHEENAGH: Many of your YA protagonists, especially the girls, are quite spiky, combative characters. Is that a reaction against the sort of "heroines" you and I mostly had to put up with in the books of our childhood?

CATHERINE: Oh well, we've all cringed at the stereotypes. It is a reaction against them, but in fact I think YA readers- who tend to be mostly girls- now simply expect them. In my teen reading I had no trouble being the boy hero in my mind, but now readers don't have to do that. Things have changed, and that's good...

SHEENAGH: For some reason I've never quite figured out, I found the tree buried upside down in Darkhenge hugely sinister and unsettling! Where did you get the idea for that?

CATHERINE: It is immensely sinister, which is why I love it. It comes from Sea Henge, the neolithic timber circle found on a beach in Norfolk, I think, and which was the subject of a huge row between neopagans and archaeologists. In the centre of the circle was what turned out to be the remains of an upturned tree-trunk. Enigmatic. Unexplained. Just there.
    There is just something so intriguing about that. Such a sense of lost stories and rituals.
    Hence the book's themes of the Unworld, and the shamanic ladder into other dimensions. Incidentally if you are ever in the Fwrrwm in Caerleon they have a modern sculpture there of an upturned tree which is truly tremendous, and maybe a bit like how the original might have looked.

SHEENAGH: A huge row between neopagans and archaeologists sounds such a wonderful scenario, I want to read the book about it! I know you've been very involved with archaeology; its influence is obvious in many of your books. Is there anything else from that arena that you're thinking of writing about? (I bet we could show you some inspirational stuff in Shetland if you ever come up so far!)

CATHERINE: In Darkhenge I did try to convey both sides of that argument- whether to leave the remains in situ and let the sea destroy them, or take up the timbers and preserve them, even though it's the place they surround that's important. By the way, Seahenge by Francis Pryor is probably the book.)
    I love archaeology and especially the Neolithic, which has such fascinating mysteries. What we lack, of course are the stories those people told. And without them we will never understand them, however familiar we become with their material circumstances.
    Imagine trying to understand Christianity without knowing the story of Christ, or Norse myth without Odin, Thor and co...You'd have a vague idea, that's all. Not even any names.
    I'm not planning anything from that far back in the past at the moment though, as my next book is a contemporary one. But that's all top secret yet

SHEENAGH: We'll be waiting with interest…


Catherine's website is here

Poems

The White Ship

The white ship sails all night out of his dreams,
her fierce figurehead drinking the cold sea.
He leans and fingers her smooth, open lips.

Spindles of ice her frosted spars,
sails crumpling, sloughing and filling
with the salt breathing of the wind.

All day he sits, talks, works, and he forgets her,
till in a window or in someone's words
comes sea-glitter, a gull's rebuke,

and in the turning of his head he's back
among creaks and whispers, the rotating wheel
that no-one grasps, the cabin with its lamp

swinging on the outspread charts.
It's those charts he never can remember;
always as he gropes for them they've gone,

leaving a sense of infinite distance;
islands marked with strange calligraphy;
and names, names he almost knows,

that tantalise but just won't come,
so that in songs or a poem's skirl
he tries their echoes over on his tongue.

Each night he journeys on the winter ship,
hands on the ropes, feeling the spray,
living in the cracks between his days.

And where he's sailing to he doesn't know,,
except that it's too late to turn back now;
that here are all the spaces of his art,

the craft he once thought he was master of,
driving him out across an endless sea,
alone under the stars; far from home.

(From Altered States, Seren 1999

Incident at Conwy

During the Wars of the Roses a Lancastrian officer was shot by a marksman stationed on the battlements of Conwy Castle. The river between them was at least half a mile wide. The feat was recorded by several chroniclers.

1. Llewelyn of Nannau

Oh man, you are foolish to wear that surcoat.
the gold and the blue outrage the dull afternoon.
You are a heraldic flicker among the leaves
tempting my pride.
I have not killed men in the stench and fury
of battle only, that I would baulk at this.
I am an archer. I send death winging,
sudden and cold over parapet and fosse;
the lightning that strikes nowhere twice.
I'm too far away to see your pain,
the blood that will sully that bright coat;
too far for the shriek from your lady's arbour.
Nor will imagination spoil my aim.
The taut string creaks against my fingers,
brushes my cheek softly, as I draw back.
My eye is steady down the shaven shaft.
You're a roebuck, a proud stag, a target.
Your words do not goad me, I can't hear what you say.
Your death will be skilfully given, and without rancour.
At least I am not too far from you for that.

2. Rhys ap Gruffudd Coch

The river is wide, and the leaves cover us.
we are safe enough, but they are certainly ready
- each tower and arrowslit is crowded with faces,
and notice the fool on the battlements with his bow.
This castle will drink an oblation of blood
before we break its stone teeth.

That archer has seen me; he lifts his bow.
Well the river will not bleed from his arrow.
Doubtless he would kill me if he could
and boast about it over the spilled wine;
a distant, stout, nameless man
who would never have seen my face.

Then he would thresh about in the straw at night,
seek solace from priests, drink away memory,
but the line would have been thrown between us,
the bright gift passed, that he could not take back.
Look, he draws. If he should strike me down
I will never be so far from him again.

More poems here

And here's an extract from Catherine's ongoing Chronoptika Quartet. This is from the first book in the quartet, The Obsidian Mirror. Gideon is a human boy who was stolen years ago by Summer, the queen of the Shee who live in the wood where "all times are now", and he longs to escape.

The Shee knelt and touched the footprints, sniffed them. Then it raised its hands to its ears. "What is that terrible whining cry?"
    Gideon was wondering that too. "Is it the world freezing up?"
    He had been with them so long, they had taught him to hear as they did. He could hear the cold night coming down, puddles on the gravelled track hardening infinitely slowly, the icy crystals lengthening and creaking to a pitted surface. He could hear the birds edging on their frozen roosts, the blown barbs of their feathers, the blinks of their beady black eyes. He could hear the frost crisp over the windowpanes of Wintercombe.
    But this whine was worse than all of that.
    "Sounds like a human machine," The Shee rose, disgusted.
    Gideon nodded. The creatures' aversion to metal still pleased him, even after all this time. It was their one weakness. The Shee listened, snow dusting its thin shoulders, its moonpale hair glimmering.
    "Summer will want us to investigate." Gideon turned.
    The Shee's eyes went sly. "Enter the Dwelling? Many have tried. Venn is too careful."
    "For you, he is. But I might be able to…"
    "Summer forbids it."
    It was a risk. They were treacherous beings – this one would betray him in an instant. So he said heavily, "You're right. And after all, tonight there's the Feast."
    The creature grinned, as he had known it would. "The Midwinter Feast! I'd forgotten. We must get back."
    Its quicksilver mind would be full instantly of the promise of the music, the terrible, tormenting, fascinating music of the Shee. The music that devoured lives and time and his own humanity, the music that enslaved him and haunted him and that he hungered for like a drug.
    "You go," he said. "I'll come later."
    "I have to bring you. She'll be furious." Its bird-eyes flickered. He saw the small pointed teeth behind its smile.
    "I'll follow you. I just want to see where these prints go."
    It hesitated, tormented. Then nodded. "Very well. But be quick!" It turned, and its patchwork of clothes ebbed colour, a magical camouflage, so that now it wore a suit of ermine and white velvet, the buttons on its coat silver crystals of ice. it stepped sideways, and was gone.

If you're reading this, you've probably already read the first two books in the Chronoptika series, The Obsidian Mirror and The Box of Red Brocade (see links for reviews). Briefly however, for anyone who's not caught up: there is a house called Wintercombe Abbey, in a wood populated by the beautiful but dangerously non-human Shee. The house contains an obsidian mirror, which is a time portal, and a number of ill-assorted persons, not all human and not all from the same time, who have conflicting designs on the mirror. Sarah, from the future, wants to destroy it, having seen what harm it will do there. Venn and Jake want to preserve and use it to rescue loved ones dead or trapped in the past. Maskelyne wants it for purposes unspecified but probably to do with power. Others in the house are uncommitted.

The first book was set in winter, the second in spring, and in the third we have arrived at Midsummer Eve. Those who've read them will recall also that the first, which was much concerned with Jake and his missing father, was haunted by quotes from, and references to, Hamlet, while the second, in which the corruption of power emerged more strongly, was similarly haunted by Macbeth. But behind both was another Shakespearean influence plainly lurking, that of A Midsummer Night's Dream, and in this volume it comes into its own.

Those who use the mirror are now getting more skilled at it, in particular Moll, the Victorian urchin whom Jake met in vol 1 and who makes a welcome reappearance here. And the fact that they can now do more of what they want means they have to think harder about whether they should. Several of the characters, in this volume, are troubled by conscience and conflicting duties, and those with dual natures, like Venn and Gideon, are faced with choices between them. In this the volume mirrors its Shakespearean inspiration: the Dream is all about choices and loyalties.

As usual, the action moves between different times and locations: the Abbey, the unfathomable Wood that itself contains worlds, and a very believable and exciting Paris at the time of the Terror. And as usual, I read it far too fast because it was so gripping: the lure of "what happens next" was as strong as ever. Now I'm going back to savour the actual writing, in particular the mesmerising evocation of the Shee and their Wood:

The Shee came down round him in clouds. He watched how some of them stayed butterflies and how others transformed, wholly or in part, to the pale tall people he had seen before, their clothes now brilliant scarlets and turquoises and oranges. With soft rustles and crackles their bodies unfolded. Abdomen and antennae became skin and smile.

Quite apart from being invested in the characters and what happens to them – Gideon, in some danger at the end of the volume, Wharton, looking more and more like the representative of human decency, the irrepressible Moll - the vividly described locations make this perhaps Fisher's most gripping project for some time. Only one to go now, and it's beginning to sound as if that one will have to travel, at least for part of the time, into the far future from which Sarah comes and which we haven't yet seen first-hand. Can't wait.

Catherine Fisher's many fans will be delighted to hear that her latest, The Obsidian Mirror, is the start of a sequence. Fisher works differently, I think, in standalone books and sequences. The standalones, like Crown of Acorns, Darkhenge and Corbenic, tend to focus on some deep-seated trauma in the young protagonist's mind; he or she will, via the medium of fantasy, find some way of living with reality. The journey is essentially a foray through an individual mind. In the sequences, Fisher can show her immense craft at world-building (as in the two Incarceron novels, where a misguided attempt to halt change and development has resulted in a world of fake surfaces and hidden realities rather like a film set). In these sequences, although the protagonist will still have his/her own issues to work out, there is also a whole universe of equally fascinating minor characters with their own journeys, sometimes parallel, sometimes interlocking. They are already emerging here as they did in The Book of the Crow, her last work on this scale, and I'm already particularly invested in Molly, a Victorian street urchin of immense character and resourcefulness, of whom we shall surely see more in the next volume.

The workings of time have always been a fascination of Fisher's; in Corbenic, Cal gets off at the wrong station and finds himself in Arthurian times, while in Crown of Acorns three stories, from different times in history, run parallel. But this is the first book of hers I recall in which the possible mechanics of time travel have played any part. The mirror of the title is a way of travelling in time, and both a man, Venn, and a boy, Jake, are trying to use it for personal ends, while another character, from a different time, is trying to destroy it for altruistic reasons. At least, that's how things seem now; anyone acquainted with Fisher's ability to produce plot twists that are both credible and surprising will be wary of coming to any definite conclusion on motives for some time yet.

Another Fisher signature which I am personally delighted to see reappearing is her fascination with cold. Anyone who recalls the gripping imaginative prose of the Snow-Walker trilogy will be happy to find themselves back in the depths of winter, and these descriptions are among the most memorable passages in the book: the moon "a silver fingernail through the branches", the snow that "fell in slow diagonals, twirling out of the dark". One of the most striking moments is when the wood-dwellers emerge:

The Shee were flocking from the wood. They carried bells and chimes, many beat drums and the deep throbbing rhythm made starlings rise from the trees and call to each other across the sky. The snow had stopped falling; now it lay deep and still and the clouds were clearing. High above, like a dust of diamonds on black velvet, the stars were coming out, sherds and slivers of brilliance, eerie over the frozen Wood and the blue-white hummocks of the lawns.

As usual, the narrative impulse was so strong that I devoured the thing in a ridiculous hurry and will need to re-read. But I'm already completely hooked. The sequence is currently set to comprise hopefully four books, possibly three. The more the better, I say.