A Different Stripe

Guest Post: Pamela Dean on the magic of Carbonel

Pamela Dean is a writer of books for children and adults. She is best known for her  contribution to Terri Windling's Fairy Tale Series, a modern retelling of the Tam Lin story (which Publishers Weekly called a "quintessential college novel, anchoring its fantastic elements in a solid, engaging reality.") and for her Secret Country Trilogy, inspired, in part, by the Carbonel books. We thank her for sharing the story of how a Midwestern girl became enamored of a royal cat.

I found The Kingdom of Carbonel in the St. Louis County Public Library when I was about ten years old. I didn't know that there was an earlier book. I didn't know what had happened to Rosemary and John in Carbonel: The King of the Cats. I knew nothing about life in England in the 1950s, either. I was growing up in a brand new suburb in Missouri, one not unlike the hastily built towns spreading like ribbons across Carbonel's world.

It might be more correct to refer to Carbonel's worlds, for there were two: The everyday world of England, where schools broke up rather than letting out, where war widows had a hard time making ends meet and twig brooms and patched cauldrons were sold in street markets; where the change from braids and sandals to ponytails and flats signaled a girl's growing up and suddenly refusing "to play anything sensible"—a fate that at the time I was very keen to avoid, however it might present itself. To Barbara Sleigh's British readers at least, that was the mundane world. The second world would have been as astonishing to them as it was to me, for this was the world of Cat Country, which appears when darkness falls and all the straight lines of wall and house redraw themselves into wilderness, there streams run with milk that has had herring boiled in it and every chimney pot is a tree or bush. C.S. Lewis talks about a sensation that he calls "Joy," which can be derived from many sources, but which I experienced reading fantasy. Lewis connects it with the divine, but I don't go so far; I merely record it. The moment when Cat Country first made itself known in The Kingdom of Carbonel gave me that flash of wonder, of entering into a larger world. Books that do this are to be cherished. 

After all this, you'll be thinking that the Carbonel books are quaint, old-fashioned things, good for training aspiring writers but perhaps not much good for actually reading. But that's all wrong. They are excellent stories, imbued with wonder and practicality in equal measure, dry humor, and a clear-eyed and sometimes sardonic love of cats. They have a healthy interest in food and a ruthless interest in the logical working-out of the implications of magic. Luckily, since Rosemary is still in the pigtails-and sandals stage, the gender-role differences are not as pronounced as they might be. Both children get into trouble and make mistakes, but they also both get to be competent and clever, they get to try to reverse the trouble they've caused others, however inadvertently. They even feel sorry for the people who mean them ill. And in The Kingdom of Carbonel, Rosemary gets to do the ultimate good deed, by giving up something she loves very much for something else she loves very much.

These books have moved me to laughter and tears, as a child, and again as I write this, even though I am just recalling rather than rereading them. I'm very, very glad that they will be in print in the United States.

      

All three books in the Carbonel Series are currently on sale
at 30% off the cover price.

Witch of the Day: Hecate

Who: One of the most ancient of goddesses, Hecate survived Zeus's banishment of the rest of her tribe from Olympus and was granted part dominion over the earth, sea, and heavens. As such, she  bestowed material blessings those who pleased her. In time, however, she became associated with the underworld, witchcraft, and sorcery. "She is, in short, a convenient symbol of a dark-age notion of 'the feminine'—a figure, in various guises, of mystery, beauty, and fertility, but at heart, a succubus. She attracts, she seduces, she consumes."—Louis Menand, from the introduction to Memoirs of Hecate County
Where:  Edmund Wilson's enchanted suburb, Hecate County, is ruled over by housewives who get up to mischief during by day, but welcome their husbands home in the evening, highball in hand.
Resonance: Hecate represents the Roman trivia, or "three ways." Her three-headed likeness was placed at Roman crossroads. She is the embodiment of choice. The hero of "The Princess with the Golden Hair" is involved with three women. He is afraid that "a spell" has been cast over him.
Her 1940s avatar: "I found her this time in a velvet gown, sumptuous and wine-purple...She was wearing gold-embroidered sandals of the high-heeled kind then in vogue that left the instep attractively unprotected; and she had parted her hair in the middle and plaited it in two gorgeous braids that were wound around her head like a diadem. She was sitting in a carved high-backed chair."
Proof that she retains some traces of power: "The Princess with the Golden Hair" was banned in New York State on the grounds of obscenity. No less great literary authority than Lionel Trilling testified in its defense, to no avail. The case went to the Supreme Court, which upheld the lower court's ban.

Witch of the Day: Lolly Willowes

The classics series is chock-full of witches. And what better time to look in on them than during the week leading up to Halloween?

First up is one of the very first books in the series (the fifth, to be exact).

Who: Lolly Willowes aka Laura Willowes, gentle, resigned, and slightly batty spinster
Where: Lolly can be found in the eponymous book by Sylvia Townsend Warner and dancing at a witch's sabbath in Great Mop, the Chilterns
Why: At 47, Lolly packs up and moves out of her brother's house, stating: "Nothing is impracticable for a single, middle-aged woman with an income of her own"
How: Once in her new home, witchcraft finds her
How she explains it: "If she had been called upon to decide in cold blood between being an aunt and being a witch, she might have been overawed by habit and the cowardice of compunction. But in the moment of election, under the stress and turmoil of the hunted Lolly as under a covering of darkness, the true Laura had settled it all unerringly. She had known where to turn.... She was a witch by vocation. Even in the old days of Lady Place the impulse had stirred in her. What else had set her upon her long solitary walks, her quests for powerful and forgotten herbs, her brews and distillations?"

More at Forgotten Classics and the Guardian book blog

Embarassing moments in bloggery

Way back in May, we were so struck by an assertion in John Clute's introduction to Christopher Priest's Inverted World that it seemed like a good thing to quote here. Problem was—the book wasn't available for a couple more months. Brilliant solution—write up the post and set it to go public when we had finished copies of the book. And here's where the plan went terribly awry. We accidentally published the post, which made it look like the book was indeed available. But who reads this blog anyway? In the five minutes the post was on the front page of the site, someone had sent it to the author (who was justly concerned that the book was on sale before he had approved the text) and it had been picked up by the science fiction blog spun off from Gawker, io9. What followed was a lively debate (sixty-odd coments and counting) about the definition of "hard" science fiction. Things got much nastier than we're used to around here.

The original post
The i09 post

John Wyndham covers through the years

The Caustic Cover Critic has outdone himself with his recent post aggregating what seems thousands of covers of the works of John Wyndham. Given the sci-fi genre treatment (not always the most aesthetically pleasing) that his books could have been given, Wyndham has been served quite well by his publishers over the years.

The entry closes with a shot of the cover of our forthcoming edition of The Crysalids (cover art by Thomas Ruff)—which will be published with an introduction by Christopher Priest.