In thrall to Magic

The Time of Green Magic by Hilary McKay 

(Macmillan Books, 2019)  

Magic is a slippery thing in children's books.

Often, it's the kind that's synonymous with Narnia and Hogwarts where spells and enchantments are used as glittering additions, contradictions and counterparts to the realities we already know. But sometimes, more rarely, it surfaces as a surreal adjunct to the everyday, un-dazzling in a way - certainly not 'showy' - but still strange, mysterious, a way to express the inexpressible: Magic.

The 'grown-up' section of large bookshops and libraries readily make this distinction, breaking up a huge stock of fiction into sub-sections: J.R.R. Tolkein and George R.R. Martin ('magic') will be found in Fantasy, Gabriel Garcia-Marquez and Angela Carter ('Magic') nestle in 'Modern Fiction'. Children's departments do not organise themselves that way, though - magic and Magic are combined, generally within an age-category-section. They are mixed together; on the surface there is no distinction.

Without thinking about it too much as adults, we might miss something important here. Take Hilary McKay's most recent (and for me, most rich and impressive) book to date, The Time of Green Magic. Grown-ups picking up this book in the children's department, with 'magic' prominent in the title, may already be making assumptions: spells, magic wands, enchantments, witches, magical beasts. At a first glance, the cover illustrations (both of the U.K. and U.S. editions) emphasise the feel of the fantastic strongly too: the first edition jacket sports a richly-toned night sky speckled with winking stars; a black cat; a girl in an attic room, her window woven all around by guardian - quasi Aurorian - ivy. A fantastic, fairy tale glimpse of the world between the covers. And from these initial reactions a grown-up may be led to read the book as a 'magical' Fantasy. 

A child, though? How would they read it? Children will see the fantastic plainly, just as we adults do; but their realities and self-made Magics are far more intricately interwoven. If we are to read children's books in any way near-authentically - and this book, more than any other, has shown the importance of that to me - then there is a need to re-learn to read: to find a way back to how we used to read as children.

Focusing  on just the most obvious fantastic components in The Time of Green Magic, we have a big decision to make: Is this 'Magic' or 'Fantasy'? The question is not hard to answer in itself, but what is difficult is what to make of the inexplicable if it's not simply made up: What does the 'eerie' quality of the house mean (...'to you, to you'!), the Red-Riding-Hood 'wildwood' depths of the ivy, the visions?

What are we to make of Iffen? 

This creature, elegantly obscure in its description, is the crux of it. If we are to read again as a child, then Iffen must be real, not a fantasy. Philippa Pearce and Allan Ahlberg both wrote about this idea in their short stories, Lion at School and The Improbable Cat respectively. Iffen falls somewhere between these two felines: the protective ferocity of the former with something of the feral malevolence of the latter.

Iffen grows, both in physical size and threat until it is revealed it all its very realness to Abi and then to Max (in chronological order!). But not to Esmé and, most strikingly, not to Theo who pretty much blunders into the creature's path. Some, by their age it seems, cannot see what is really there - only children can comprehend. 

And then there's the creature's name: a small boy's mishearing of a word becomes the (accidentally?) perfect choice to embody everything about his burgeoning need for his mother, encompassing possibility, anxious wondering, wishfulness. If only...

Abi's sea voyage and her vision of Anne Frank's attic embody the stark contrast of her fantasies - at once a need for escape and also a desire for family security. Max's developing adolescent feelings, on the other hand, appear to him as a prehistoric stampede. It's the same scene - primal, untamed, deep-rooted and old - from which Iffen has emerged; the (unwitting) revelation gifted to both young males - though for different reasons - by the only grown-up female in the house: one a presence of a kind of comfort; the other frightening, raw, wild.

The world of fairy tale also is never far from the surface - the story is replete with transposed figures - 'fairy grandmother', (Step-)Father and (Step-)Mother, idyllic cottage in the ivy Deepwood (in the deep-urban landscape) - but as with all fairy tales this is true Magic, as deeply real as any reality can be, symbols and archetypes of an ancient kind. Everything is a deeply real experience seen through the eyes and feelings of children trying to cope both with family upheaval and the exhilarating and exhausting process of growing up. It is truly authentic - McKay's great insight into the world of childhood shared with us as adults and freely given to children in solidarity and trust. 

 We have all simply to listen; then let in the Magic.