Breakfast At Libraries: February 2013

Saturday, 16 February 2013

The Land of Decoration by Grace McCleen

One of my favourite books of last year was Among Others by Jo Walton, in which a lonely teenage misfit struggles with her own (self-perceived, at least) ability to perform potentially harmful magic. Grace McCleen's The Land of Decoration has a similar premise in some respects. Narrator Judith, who is bullied and ostracised at school and whose widowed father has brought her up as a member of a fundamentalist Christian sect which appears in all but name to be the Jehovah's Witnesses, is desperate not to go to school and face her tormentor Neil Lewis. On Sunday evening she sprinkles home-made snow over the complex miniature world she has built in her bedroom out of scraps of rubbish. On Monday she awakes to find that a freak October blizzard has all but cut off her home town. And just to prove this isn't mere coincidence, Judith also starts to hear, quite clearly, the voice of God.

The Land of Decoration could easily have been a whimsical, twee novel, with its ten-year-old narrator and her sometimes comic misunderstandings of social interactions and adult hypocrisy. However, while it's beautifully written and almost poetic in places, it's sometimes unsettling, bordering on menacing. Judith's nemesis Neil is far more than a mere school bully, and the manner in which he and his family gradually make life unbearable not just for Judith but also for her father is disturbing for anyone who, like me, finds that kind of insidious, calculated cruelty a deeply uncomfortable subject about which to read. I also found Judith's relationship with her father, widowed the day she was born, desperately sad, and the nature of the voice which Judith believes to be God's is disturbing.

That's not to say that The Land of Decoration is without humour or kindness - far from it. It has many touching moments and Judith is an entertaining and observant narrator with genuine charm and a perspective which is convincing for a bright ten-year-old with an unconventional upbringing. Sheltered from ordinary childhood entertainments like television and fun-fairs, she's also exposed to terrifying sermons about Armageddon and the wrath of God and almost entirely without friends of her own age, so as a character she presents us with an interesting mix of innocence and precociousness which is unnerving and comic by turns. A child's point of view is, of course, highly effective for writers who want to highlight the absurdities inherent in certain types of adult behaviour, and while Judith is sometimes confused, there are also moments when she is sharply perceptive.

The Land of Decoration is a book that I struggled to put down, and one that will stay with me for a long time. Ultimately, I found it uplifting. Some might find it less so - I have no idea how someone with a strong religious faith might feel about about some aspects of the book's conclusion, for instance - but for me, this was an oddly life-affirming read, and a well-crafted one too.

Tuesday, 12 February 2013

Harvest by William Horwood

In the unlikely event that I have any 'regular readers', they might recall that I've previously praised William Horwood's Hyddenworld series, a quartet of novels about the 'hydden' - the small people who have lived secretly alongside humans for thousands of years, adept at 'hyddening' to make themselves go unnoticed. Each book corresponds to a different season and an increasingly urgent quest to recover four missing gems that will, ultimately restore the Earth to its natural balance and avert the end of time.

That description makes the books sound rubbish. But bear with me: they aren't. They're rooted in British folklore and landscape, with an underlying environmental theme, and draw on ancient history and pre-Christian traditions. The characters, both human and hydden, are vividly realised, and the books seem to me to have more in common with, say, Watership Down, or Horwood's own Duncton Wood series, than they do with 'high' fantasy.

The latest Hyddenworld book is Harvest, the Autumn instalment in the quartet, and picks up the story pretty much where the previous book, Awakening, left off. I think most people would struggle to get to grips with Harvest if they hadn't read Hyddenworld and Awakening first; however, in case they haven't, there does appear to be a fair bit of recapping and exposition in Harvest which might grate a little on some readers who are familiar with the previous two novels - although personally I found it useful, as the Hyddenworld quartet is epic in scale with a huge cast of characters and a complex back-story of mythology and it's been around 18 months since I read Awakening.

Harvest is the darkest Hyddenworld novel so far. With a military coup putting the ancient hydden city of Brum in danger from the vicious Fyrd, and the Earth herself apparently wreaking revenge on humanity with a series of natural disasters, Harvest has its fair share of deaths, and there are times when much-loved characters suffer. However, there's still plenty of the warmth and hope and charm that has characterised the series so far, and once again, love in its truest and purest sense is a strong thread that runs through the narrative. There are heroes and villains, but as always, Horwood makes most of his characters far more complex than that, and it's not unusual for them to surprise us.

The novel starts relatively slowly - as did its predecessors - but builds to a conclusion that is genuinely nail-biting stuff as eccentric hero Bedwyn Stort races to find the gem of Autumn before Samhain and Brum battles the Fyrd. I can't wait to see what Winter brings for the Hyddenworld.