THE SERPENT GIFT (10+)
By Lene Kaaberbol
Hodder, £5.99; 432pp
ISBN 0 340 88363 4
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THE MERRYBEGOT (10+)
By Julie Hearn
OUP, £5.99; 224pp
ISBN 0 192 79157 5
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What is it about Wicca that makes it so attractive to pubescent girls these days? Where I remember being a fervent Christian between 11 and 13, my own daughter has nearly set fire to the house, lighting candles for Isis at the full moon. With the cult television series Charmed to back it up, novels about the occult are as essential for wannabe witches as black nail varnish.

Lene Kaaberbol’s series, translated from the Danish, is the most original new fiction of this kind, although the only power its heroines possess is that of being a Shamer. When Dina or her mother look at a man, woman or child, she unmasks their darkest secrets. Not surprisingly, this supernatural gift makes them outcasts, feared as witches yet sought as human lie-detectors. Their adventures are narrated in alternating chapters by Dina and her brother Davin, whose robust courage as the only man of the family make the Shamer series equally appealing to boys. In The Serpent Gift, the family have to leave their cottage and the protection of the Kensie clan to fly from a cruelly seductive Blackmaster, who uses music to bind men’s minds to his will, and who turns out to be Dina’s father. Before the family can be free of his pursuit, they must free Davin and a host of terrified children from the evil Vardo, who feeds dissidents to the Wyrm, a monster living in the lake, and has his own methods of thought-control. Here be dragons, sorcery and battles, but Kaaberbol’s thrilling and thoughtful series is really about perceiving the limitations and deceits of adulthood.

A merrybegot is a child conceived on a May morning, believed to have magical powers. Such is the case with Nell, born during the height of the 17th-century craze for witch-hunts. Nell’s friend Sam is seduced by the minister’s older daughter, and when she gets pregnant by him she begs an abortion from Nell’s senile grandmother. Meanwhile, the minister’s younger daughter Patience decides she wants attention at all costs, and Nell becomes her victim. Like Arthur Miller ’s play The Crucible, this is as much a novel about adolescent sexual hysteria and parental conflict — as about witchcraft — yet in The Merrybegot, the piskies are real, as amoral as weather, and affect the course of history. Told in clear, vivid prose, and peopled with sympathetic yet complex characters, it is a huge leap forward for a talented new storyteller whose debut, Follow Me Down, was enjoyed by many.

The Wish House in Celia Rees’s new novel was once called The Witch’s House, and has a witch’s garden full of poisonous plants. The teenage Richard, on holiday one hot summer in Wales, sees his first naked woman in the house that was his boyhood haunt, and before long is ensnared in the world of the brilliant bohemian painter Jethro Dalton, a sub Lucian Freud figure whose beautiful and uninhibited young daughter Clio promptly seduces him. First love, first sex and Richard’s first introduction to another class and way of living are played out against a series of sinister Celtic myths and descriptions of Dalton’s suggestive latter-day Pre-Raphaelite paintings.

The hippy era might hold nostalgia value for those old enough to remember it, but to the new generation they were just sad people with tragic hair. One doesn’t care about any of these characters, and the plot they’re in is as skimpy as a cheesecloth tunic even before the predictable hints of incest. Rees has shown such a gift for genuinely magical fiction in Witch Child, it’s disappointing not to find her on characteristic form. Budding young witches might be a little too keen on the full moon, but they aren’t loons.

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