'Clearing' by Doria Walsh; gouache on paper
In a bit of reading serendipity I recently read two books in which imaginative worlds and the fantastic are key, and both of them are from independent publishers, Tin House and Handheld Press. One is a novel and one is a collection of short stories, both take a reader to other realms, but don't lose their connection with this world.
The Maker of Swans is a novel from Irish writer Paraic O'Donnell, and was his first book, although Tin House issued his The House on Vesper Sands first, a wonderful Gothic mystery that I wrote about here. This book also has a Gothic feel to it and is set in an unnamed place somewhere in the English countryside and at a time that sometimes seems vaguely Victorian, but with automobiles. O'Donnell is a writer with a non-stop imagination and gorgeous prose that is a pleasure to lose yourself in. There are wonderful characters such as Clara, Eustace, Elias Cromer, and others, but some things in the book were somewhat too nebulous for me.
Eustace, Clara, and Mr. Crowe live in a large, opulent but neglected mansion set in extensive grounds. On the face of it Eustace is Mr. Crowe's butler, in reality he is much more. For one thing, he cares for and watches over Clara, a young girl who is mute and has special abilities that she is not fully aware of yet. She is the ward of Mr. Crowe, who Eustace works for, and is another one with an unusual gift. There have been incidents during Mr. Crowe's extremely long life when he has lost his temper and the person he's angry with dies by unknown means, and an incident that opens the book will have far-reaching consequences for not only for himself, but quite a few others.
Mr. Crowe's behavior must conform to the rules of the ancient order he belongs to and Mr. Chastern is the one he must answer to. However, this particular incident isn't as straightforward as first appears. Chastern wants something from Mr. Crowe, and he and his sidekick Nazaire will do their utmost to get it. Eustace sets his own preparations into motion for the guests' arrival and other things that could potentially happen.
There are mysterious intimations of the order Mr. Crowe and Mr. Chastern belong to, as well as what exactly Mr. Crowe's and Clara's special abilities are and who they are, but it is all a little too opaque. What is certain is Mr. Crowe's and Clara's gift of creating with words albeit in different ways, and the descriptions of Mr. Crowe's library, what role he has played in literary history, Clara's writing, and her appreciation of books. All this is catnip for a reader.
Words, in their minds, were not fixed to things as a tendon is to a muscle. Every particle of creation, to them, was submerged in a flex of words. Everything was contiguous with everything else, the touching of one word or object setting up currents and mutations that seemed never to stop. They described the world by ceaselessly unsettling it, never letting anything rest.
The way O'Donnell describes places like the estate Clara knows so well, give the book a fullness and specificity the story needs.
It is spreading among them, the idea of flight, taking hold as a fire does, gathering intensity until the first of the swans is compelled to leave the water. It hauls itself aloft with a rapid slicing of its wings, climbing stiffly as another bird finds its wake, shadowing it as they cross the grey fringe of the mere. Soon, the violet stillness is thronged with pale forms keeping close to the water as they leave, passing out of sight in mirrored pairs and triplets.
Sylvia Townsend Warner's Kingdoms of Elfin, is a collection of sixteen short stories in which she conjures a network of Elfin courts from Persia to the Far North. Each have their own rules of etiquette and traditions, they are always ruled by queens, changelings are a feature of court life, and embassies are sent out to other fairy courts. Elfin are shorter than mortals but not tiny, live for hundreds of years, rarely have children, prize beauty, have wings, although it's the servants who fly around not the aristocrats, and they live in the now, without sentiment.
In fact, they are about four-fifths of ordinary human stature, fly or don't fly according to their station in life, and after a life span of centuries die like other people—except that as they do not believe in immortality they die unperturbed. Their life span is portioned into a brief childhood of forty years, an extended plateau of being grown up, a suave decline into old age. As longevity is the common lot, it is taken for granted.
The Elfin aren't the only ones who eschew sentimentality, Warner writes about them and their ways with a dispassionate eye. But it's not only elfin life that she views this way, when it is seen, human life too gets the same treatment. Each piece is a vignette of going-ons in a particular court, from the five black swans circling above Elfhame in Scotland where Queen Tiphaine is dying, to the dismissal of Ludia, the renowned cook at a minor court in Germany because of an annoyed queen.
Nowhere else was stuffed goose such a fulfilling experience, eel soup so exhilarating, haunches of venison of such a texture, substantial yet yielding, game pies so autumnally fragrant, dumplings in such variety of modest perfection, apple strudel so beguiling; though whether Ludia's brandied plums in marzipan jackets did or did not surpass her apple strudel was a pious debate.
Many of the stories have humans becoming part of the fairy courts, at least for a time, or fairies that leave a court and stay outside of it. Changelings might play a special role in a fairy court, but once they age, they are expelled out into the world. The fairies who live out in the world have to cope with practical problems such as finding a place to live, weather, money, and food, but their wings and invisibility are definite assets.
In the last story James Sutherland, a professor of rhetoric, has been fascinated by fairies throughout his life, but when he ends up in the fairy court of Foxcastle during a research trip to the area, at first he's not entirely happy about it. He does make observations about those he's living among though.
They were fickle in their loves and hates, fickle and passionate in their pursuits. Some devoted themselves to astronomy. Others practised the French horn. Others educated squirrels. Some, he presumed, made measurements. Only one thing was certain: they never quarrelled. Even in their fickle hates, they hated without malice. Whisking from one pursuit to the next, they never collided.
Warner wrote these stories at the end of her life after the death of her life partner, Valentine Ackland, when she wanted to write about 'something entirely different'. Most were published in The New Yorker in the 1970s, and the collection of the stories was first published in 1977. This re-issue by Handheld Press has an introduction by Ingrid Hotz-Davies.
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