A Poison Tree

The Girl who Became a Tree by Joseph Coelho; illustrated by Kate Milner 

(Otter-Barry Books 2020)

 
William Blake tells us:

I was angry with my foe: 

I told it not, my wrath did grow.

But what happens when you can't accept that you're angry with yourself?

***

In Joseph Coelho's and Kate Milner's The Girl Who Became A Tree, Daphne is angry: Dad has gone; Mum doesn't understand her; she doesn't understand herself any more. Hers is a silent, brooding presence in the library. The librarian seems to understand, seems to know what she needs, but she's not going to let him in.

Then, quite suddenly, we snap out of this story and we're watching the myth of Daphne. Where did that come from? The girl who evades danger by entreating her father to transform her into a tree is just a bit too obvious...isn't it? 

Well, no. Because myth isn't real. And although myth is there to make sense of things, Coelho's story shows us that, in some cases, myth doesn't make sense of anything. So the old story is forced to give up the ghost with an angry outburst at Peneus and then crawls away to lick its axe-wounds. 

Now bereft of any guidance, Coelho's Daphne finds her way into an ancient forest via the library.

And Hoc takes charge. 

What is he? Malevolent forest god? Mischief maker? Lazy, huge, sprawling, decadent, deep-rooted, rotten, old, he sits with self-satisfied power over Daphne. He feeds her anger, teases her with promises of returning what she has lost; then transforms her - not to help her escape any danger as the myth would have us predict, but to encase her, to trap her, to stultify her real growth. 

Daphne is strong though. Cocooned in wood, she learns the value of introspection. She can let go of certain things, those things that she thought were all she had left but which she sees finally as fleeting, ephemeral. 

Dad, the tree surgeon, is not the woodcutter of fairy tale: he can't save Red Riding Hood from harm. Nor is Dad any god either: his mortality proves to Daphne that Peneus did the wrong thing, he tried too hard to protect: these physical bonds we have with our parents can't be for ever. Growth is what's needed, although Blake only told half the story: the cultivation of a Poison Tree doesn't always have to end in death or bitter triumph.

Coelho's story is tough. The language is tough. Life and death are tough. The viewpoint veers from deeply personal  self-questioning to subjective allegory through everything else in between. 

Milner's illustrations - inky, smeared, surreal; then razor-sharp and chilling - swing nightmarishly between physical clarity and metaphoric obfuscation. Sense appositely evades comprehension.

There are no soft-centred platitudes offered up. Adolescence hurts: grief hurts: true feelings  hurt. There's nothing easy in any of it. Learning to tell yourself that you are the foe - learning to be your own true friend, even when this involves hardship and massive effort - results in a different story, says The Girl Who Became A Tree:

Wrath will end. 

With grateful thanks to Nicky Potter of Otter-Barry Books, who provided some of Kate Milner's beautiful pictures for this blog.