Midsummer is traditionally associated with fairies and their tricks; long
before Shakespeare's immortal play, fairies were associated with mystery,
fertility and mischief. This year many new novels involving fairies show a
return to the darkness that has for many years been papered over by Disney's
family-friendly pap. The gentlest are Liz Kessler's charming series about a
child and her “fairy godsister”, which, in the second instalment, Philippa
Fisher and the Dream Maker's Daughter (Orion, £9.99; Buy
this book ), has a lonely child falling victim to her parents'
quarrelling, and R.J. Anderson's captivating Knife
(Orchard, £5.99; Buy this book), in which a tomboyish young fairy discovers
not only human love but also the reason why her failing colony is
all-female. At the other end of the scale we have the Australian author Margo
Lanagan, whose forthcoming novel, Tender Morsels (David Fickling, £12.99; Buy
this book), is creating a sensation on both sides of the Atlantic before
its publication next month.
Having suffered sexual abuse at the hands of her father, gang rape and
miscarriage, its heroine, Liga, enters what could either be a psychotic
breakdown or an alternative reality after incestuous childbirth. A striking
retelling of the Grimms' Snow White and Rose Red, told in a rich yet remote
prose style, it is, like Lanagan's awardwinning collection of short stories,
Red Spikes, likely to appeal to teenage girls with a taste for the original
and the sinister.
Feminists have long mined fairytales for their ambiguity and cruelty,
reversing or exploring stories in which heroines appear to be passive
victims, and while the authors who began to write new fairytales were, from
Perrault to George Macdonald, male, it is women who are using fairies and
fairyland in young adult fiction. Less Judy Blume than Angela Carter, this
new vein of fantasy began with the new millennium, and features fairyland as
a place in which children are menaced to the point of madness. As in Pan's
Labyrinth and The Spiderwick Chronicles, children are sent into danger by
the supernatural rather than, as in C.S. Lewis's Narnia tales, Alan Garner's
Elidor or Harry Potter, arriving from the mundane to the magical as
redeemers.
Sally Prue, whose reworking of the Tam Lin legend in her prize-winning debut,
Cold Tom, made her one of the most interesting exponents in the field, says:
“The darkening of children's books is fundamentally linked, I think, to the
comparatively recent emergence of teenage fiction. After all, one of the
principle functions of the teenage genre is to provide a theoretical arena
for first explorations of sex and the sort of explicit violence from which
we try to protect younger children.
“It's certainly easy to see why publishers decided it might make commercial
sense to sell spectacular sex, violence and misery to teenagers. I think
it's unfortunate, though, and part of the responsibility for this must rest
with the children's fiction Establishment, which has tended to hail each
increase in the intensity of the unpleasantness as originality, daring
social comment and literary merit.”
This is a good point, because while thousands of teenagers have always enjoyed
horror there are probably just as many who turn to fantasy for consolation
and moral support. Sally Gardner, whose bestselling historical novel, I,
Coriander, is a superb dramatisation of how a parallel magical world can
comfort and sustain a child in crisis, says: “Fairytales were always dark:
they were never meant for young children but told to girls who had just
reached puberty as a warning of the sexual dangers ahead.
“In the original story of Cinderella, her mother is a queen who on her
deathbed tells the king that he may marry again as long as his bride's
finger fits her wedding ring. The only finger that it fitted was his
daughter's.”
The fear of incest, and the fear of sex itself, is a repeated theme in
fairytales, but the best writers always give readers a way out of their
predicament. Yet children of 11+ are sophisitcated enough in many cases to
accept a film such as Pan's Labyrinth, in which one innocent life is saved
but another is sacrificed. What makes it an extraordinary work of art is
also, within the genre, a shocking betrayal of expectations, and a darkening
of the optimism traditionally associated with fantasy.
Sarah Singleton, whose novels such as Heretic and The Poison Garden explore
the most sinister aspects of supernatural journeys, says: “It was always the
dark side of fairytales that fascinated me most as a child - and many are
notoriously disturbing, such as the story of The Red Shoes; or The Little
Mermaid, whose every step felt like treading on knives; even the 12 dancing
princesses who were obliged to dance their shoes bare every night. They are
thrilling and dangerous in a way the Disney version of The Little Mermaid,
for example, is not. Children and young people have dangerous emotions -
rage, bitter jealousy - [and] enjoy the frisson of the forbidden and feel
the sting of guilt, and I think these stories are an effective and engaging
way to walk in these dark places within the safe environment of an ‘other'
magical world.”
Fairyland has always been a place of both rapture and danger. The story of Tam
Lin, kidnapped by the Fairy Queen as her lover, showed this, as did
countless tales of changelings, and many contemporary children's authors
such as Sarah Singleton, Julie Hearn (The Merrybegot), Antonia Barber
(Catkin), Sophie Masson (In Hollow Lands), Melissa Marr (Wicked, Lovely) and
Susanna Clarke (Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell) have all created versions
of its seductions, horrors and sheer escapism. Like drugs, computer games
and “helicopter parenting”, fairyland has come to represent a place that
seems attractive but that
is worse than reality. As Marina Warner observes in From The Beast to the
Blonde: “The realms of wonder and impossibility converge, and fairytales
function to conjure the first to delineate the second: magic paradoxically
defines normality.”
This is an affecting theme of Lanagan's novel, for although the magic world
that her heroine Liga enters nurtures her, she comes to realise that
“however sweet that other place was, it was not real ... Now you are in the
true world, and a great deal more is required of you ... It is harder. It is
not safe. But it is what you were born to.”
