Breakfast At Libraries

It's quite common in fantasy literature for a child to think they are 'normal' and then suddenly discover they're actually magical, at which point they're plunged into a magical world of which they initially struggle to make sense.

Everything I'd read about Through A Glass, Darkly, the 2008 debut novel of Bill Hussey, suggested that I would love it. A horror novel set in an isolated, insular Fenland village. It features a sinister villain who materialises now and again to terrorise children, and his name is Elijah Mendicant, or the Crowman. The Crowman. Yes. Like the creepy one in the black hat from Worzel Gummidge. Seriously, anyone who knows me well would imagine this book to be tailored exclusively to my horror needs.



So it's a shame, then, that I just didn't enjoy it that much. I really, really wanted to like Through A Glass, Darkly, but ultimately the writing was too undisciplined, the horror at times just too overblown, the editing nowhere tight enough. And most importantly, when it came to the hero, I just didn't care.

It would be unfair if I didn't point out that there is still a great deal to like about this book. For a start, it's crammed with brilliant ideas for horror novels - it's just that they've all been squashed into one book, which means that while there are some fine feats of macabre imagination in the story that I very much appreciated, it lacks cohesion as a narrative and feels a little overstuffed, a little confused. Mendicant himself is, quite genuinely, extremely creepy, and his early appearances made me shiver in the best of ways: Hussey is more than capable of writing skin-crawlingly eerie, unsettling scenes, which for me makes it a pity that he relies on gore and gross-out sadism far too often. I like a bit of gore as much as the next girl, but these scenes rarely showcase Bill Hussey's talent - and he does have plenty of talent - to its best advantage, and the atmosphere tends to be lost. There are also some descriptions of outlandish visuals that simply don't work for me; while impressive in terms of the author's vision, I felt at times as if I were reading visual directions from a screenplay, and became rather detached from the action.

The novel's protagonist is ostensibly troubled police officer Jack Trent, fighting a supernatural affliction all of his own while simultaneously trying to prevent Mendicant, a serially reincarnated manifestation of evil, from targeting Jamie, Jack's former girlfriend's son. However, large chunks of the story are told by other people, a device I found to be successful partly because the differing points of view provided variety and colour and helped the different plot strands knit cleverly together, but partly (and unfortunately) because I simply found the other characters far more interesting than tortured, heroic, saintly Jack. As well as being a little too-good-to-be-true, or more to the point too-good-to-be-interesting, Jack's role in the plot involves a police investigation of a missing person case and two child murders: I never found this part of the story especially convincing. Like a film in which the character actors steal the show from a bland leading man, Through A Glass, Darkly is most fun when it's left to the lesser characters to provide the action, and Hussey has done a fine job of making them three-dimensional. I could happily have read the story of Catholic priest Asher Brody and his long-term battle with Mendicant on its own.

There's plenty of excellent stuff in Through A Glass, Darkly, but as a whole, I felt it needed a damn good edit. It's almost as if there are two or three novels in there competing for attention at times, which made it an ultimately unsatisfying read for me. I would still keep an eye out for Bill Hussey's work - this was his first novel, after all - but in the meantime, my search for a British horror novel that manages to be terrifying and tautly-plotted yet beautifully and intelligently written throughout goes on.

Around a year ago I reviewed a crime novel set on the Isle of Lewis: The Blackhouse by Peter May. I had a few fairly strong criticisms of it, but was sufficiently intrigued to download the audiobook of the sequel, The Lewis Man, to which I've just finished listening.

Beside The Sea took me barely more than hour to read - it's only about 120 pages long - and I do think this intense, claustrophobic novella is best read in one sitting. Written by French author Veronique Olmi, the story takes place over 24 hours in the lives of an unnamed mother and her two boys, Stan and Kevin, beginning with her taking them to the seaside on an overnight bus, having suddenly decided that it's essential they see the sea for the first time.



If, like me, you find the opening ten minutes of Casualty almost impossible to watch without wanting to intervene to stop the inevitable accidents, or have to put your hands over your eyes at CCTV footage of someone recklessly running across a railway line or edging along the outside of a motorway bridge, you will find Beside The Sea a deeply unsettling and stressful read. It becomes almost immediately apparent that the narrator is at best inadvertently neglectful of her children and at worst, severely unstable, and it's almost impossible to read her story without wanting to protect the children from her; at the same time, it's also impossible not feel deeply sorry for her.

Endless anxiety and cruelly severe depression torture her daily and, by association, her sons. Aged nine and five, they're left standing outside the school gates until 6pm, dressed in ill-fitting clothes and frequently unfed; their mother's self-confessed inability to stick to any kind of routine means they fend for themselves while she sleeps for whole days at a time. Stan, the elder boy,  frequently finds himself cast in the role of carer for his mother and his little brother as the family struggle desperately to cope. And yet, despite her erratic parenting, despite her infuriating, disturbing state of denial about certain aspects of her neglect, it's obvious the narrator loves her children, wants something better for them, wants to provide for them - and understands them, too. In fact, her love for the children is the one constant in her life, and strangely, it's this that makes the book all the more disturbing as the story comes to an end.

We're told very little about the narrator's past, except that the children have different fathers and the younger boy's doesn't know his son exists, yet tiny hints (a reference to her missing front teeth; a passing comment that implies she has lived with someone who constantly belittled her) suggest that she may have been a victim of domestic abuse. Is this what has tipped a vulnerable woman over the edge? What was she like before she had her children? Those questions are simply never answered, and I think that perhaps the book is all the better for that: while the narrator's problems are clearly a long way beyond those of most mothers, every parent has moments like hers. Every parent doubts their ability to care for their child; every parent feels guilty, inadequate, over-defensive in the face of other's judgements. What makes this narrative so powerful is knowing this, knowing that even the best of parents can find themselves at the precipice of becoming unable to cope, and wondering how easy it might be to slide over the edge.

This short read is expertly translated by Adriana Hunter, retaining a vivid narrative voice for the protagonist, as fractured and dislocated as her state of mind. In fact I absolutely felt like I was reading the words of a real person rather than a fictional character, and in many ways, this was one of the things that made Beside The Sea a tough read. I have no children, and I'm not sure I could have got through this book if I did. In short, brilliant but devastating.

Boneland is Alan Garner’s adult sequel to his two children’s books, The Weirdstone of Brisingamen and The Moon of Gomrath, modern classics in which two children find themselves dragged into an age-old battle between mythical forces in the ancient countryside of Alderley Edge. They’re eerie, gripping and full of peril, and are strongly rooted in a sense of place and an obsession with shifts in time and repeating cycles of mythology that characterise all Garner’s work. They are also, however, relatively straightforward in plot and structure, and can also be read as nothing more than children’s fantasy adventure stories.

Boneland, on the other hand, despite featuring Weirdstone’s Colin Whisterfield as its protagonist, is far more akin to Garner’s later work for adults – Thursbitch, for instance - or his more 'difficult' children's novels, Red Shift and The Owl Service. Colin, now in his 50s, seems to have acquired some sort of disorder in the autistic spectrum: a brilliant scientist plagued with neuroses and phobias, he lives alone in what seems to be a self-built camping barn and works at Jodrell Bank, endlessly pursuing a single line of research and occasionally hospitalised for bouts of an unspecified mental illness. Despite having a photographic memory of everything he has experienced from the age of 13 onwards, prior to this he recalls nothing except that he had a sister, for whom he is continually searching.

Colin's story is interwoven with that of a Stone Age shaman who inhabits the same locations - perhaps thousands of years ago, perhaps at the same time ... or perhaps he's Colin himself. As in Thursbitch, Garner portrays the Cheshire landscape as a living entity in itself, its stone the very bones of the Earth, and time as something far from linear.

At only 149 pages, Boneland is barely more than a novella, and yet into it Garner has managed to cram enough allusions, hints, clues, ambiguities and scope to fill a 1,000-page epic. It’s a dizzying read that sometimes seems to make no sense at all and other times, so much sense that it’s almost overwhelming.



Like all Garner's later novels, Boneland dwells on themes of myth, landscape and language - and there are times when Garner suggests that these are in fact one and the same thing. This is, as ever, exquisitely expressed in sparse, flint-sharp prose that undercuts the dream-like, almost hallucinatory nature of parts of the book. Every single word counts for something – or more often, for several things – and as the reader responses to the Guardian’s review suggest, every aspect of the novel is open to a myriad of interpretations. Is Meg, Colin’s unorthodox psychiatrist, a benign mother figure or the malevolent Morrigan of the previous Alderley Edge novels? Is Colin a modern-day incarnation of Gawain, or is he to replace Cadellin, the ‘good’ wizard he and his sister met as a child? And as for his sister, it’s not so much a question of where is she now, but who?
It's not so much that Boneland leaves a lot of questions unanswered. It's more that it provides so many answers that we're left to unpick them from a bewildering tangle of possibilities. It's the sort of text that makes you want to underline passages, highlight sections, look up references, all in a bid to solve the puzzle, but without even knowing what the puzzle is - rather like completing a huge, elaborate jigsaw without having access to the picture on the box. I found Boneland to be fascinating, gripping, occasionally frightening and at times desperately sad, and I will undoubtedly be re-reading the other Alderley Edge novels before reading Boneland again (this time, perhaps, with a notebook beside me too).

If I have a criticism, it's that, while it's an immense pleasure to revisit Colin, Garner's beautiful prose and the Weirdstone of Brisingamen world once again, Boneland does, essentially, say much the same thing that all Garner's novels say. His favourite themes happen to be rather well aligned with my own, so I should hardly be in a position to complain, but did I get anything much different from Boneland than I did from, for example, Thursbitch or Strandloper? If I'm being entirely honest, no. This doesn't make Boneland a lesser book, but it does make me long for Garner to explore some entirely different ideas.