Margaret Mahy

by Tessa Duder

  ‘This in an oblique way of coming to the point which is this: that excellence, an area of great confusion to start with, is composed of many parts, and no matter what excellence a book achieves in the author’s head, and later, unrolling through the typewriter, there is an important aspect of excellence that only comes into existence when people read the book. That is the point where the book begins to work. Obviously I want to write books that work for people. This particular aspect of excellence is composed, in part, of elements that the readers bring with them, in interrogations which I cannot guess at, except in the most general terms. I want with a great deal of anxiety to know what my editors think, what librarians think and what readers think of anything I have written. For these people are my professional family … I think most writers know they have a limited bag of tricks, and there is no such thing as a story that is ever good enough. Somewhere, there is a wonderful story, a platonic form of story, promising infinite amazement and wonder, never worn out by repetition. Readers and writers reach out for it continually, tracing it through other stories that come their way. To receive the Carnegie Medal is a way of being reassured that some people have traced something of that marvellous still unwritten story in one’s own writing.

  ‘Virginia Woolf wrote: “What is the use of saying one is indifferent to reviews when positive praise, though mingled with some blame, give one such a start-on, that instead of feeling dried up one feels flooded with ideas.”

  ‘I think that is what I really wanted to tell you — that this award fills me with elation, not just because it is good to feel one has done well, but because it also makes one feel released to new possibilities, infinite and undefined, but somehow there. One may hope to do even better. I know I am, that we all are, part of a pattern of shared excitement and response as old as human kind, and possibly, since we can’t be certain of the exact nature of creation, as old as time itself.’

  The genesis of The Changeover is now part of the Mahy mythology, and probably known to many a children’s librarian, or teacher, who has stamped an inky image on a young child’s soft, trusting hand.

  ‘One day when I was working at the front desk in the library a woman and a little boy were taking books out and the child smiling with pleasure put out his hand to have a Mickey Mouse stamp on it. I often put stamps on children’s hands in those days, taking pleasure in making them clear and straight. On this occasion however I suddenly felt very sinister, as if I were a goblin king branding a stolen child of a slave. I felt myself acting out something of this ominous thought, looming over the child and putting the stamp on his hand. Then, filled with dismay at myself I glanced rapidly and placatingly at the child’s mother, who stood by smiling and having no idea, I hope, of what was passing through the kindly librarian’s mind. This incident was the beginning of the book The Changeover which I originally saw as a short story about the impossibility of retreating to a state of innocent once innocence has been exchanged for knowledge. You can’t forget what you know — or if you do you are subjecting yourself to a sort of violence. You don’t become innocent again. Like the idea for The Haunting before it, this idea attracted action and characters too varied to make a satisfactory short story … there is no doubt that, once I had that initiating moment, which sprang from every day experience in my power, it immediately made connections with a lot of other things I was unaware of, but it is also true that the experience I described took the form it did because I was monitoring the world as the possessor of a literary imagination. Though later I was to have little goes at being both Laura and Sorenson Carlisle, the first person I acted out was Carmody Braque, the evil and pathetic spirit of the story stuck in a perpetual immaturity. There might be a lesson to learn from this but on the whole I try not to think about it much. In my head at least fantasy and real life are Siamese twins, joined at the heart. The Changeover springing from a real event expressed itself from the beginning as fantasy but immediately attracted all the reinforcement of real experience to such an extent that some people object to it, and others, often teenage girls, assume that I have had supernatural experiences myself, which I have never had. I am a determined rationalist.’

  With the starting point of the stamp, and drawing on themes that had been in her head for some years, Margaret began writing the manuscript ‘on the same level as The Haunting, with Laura having an encounter with a girl at school who turned out to have supernatural powers. I wrote a certain way into the story, but something was a bit flat, not satisfying. Then I suddenly thought to make the girl into a male character and immediately I found the possibilities of the book changing. It stretched up a level and it became a YA novel, and the sexual relationship between Sorry and Laura became quite different. The underlying idea was of one of the Grimm fairy tales, though there are all sorts of folk tale connections, but it’s also the story of a romance, of a girl growing into a new maturity and power for herself, so that a changeover variety of relatively realistic elements are involved along with folk tale. It came quite quickly.’

  The Changeover is dedicated ‘to Bridget and other midnight visitors’.

  ‘At this time, Bridget and I lived in Governors Bay and she, along with her friends, were about 14 — too young to legitimately drive over the hill and restructured, when it came to social life, to what was next door or just down the road. I worked late at that stage — well into the early hours of the morning and restless adolescents were likely to turn up, regularly, at our house as late as 11 o’clock at night and sit around talking into the early hours of the morning. There are many stories I could tell about this time in my life, many of them disreputable by a sort of displacement. However the point I am making is that I did hear, from out in the kitchen, as I made yet another cup of coffee, the authentic voices of New Zealand teenagers. They were in the air around me.’

  The last stages of the novel were written in 1984 while Margaret was writer in residence at the university where she had graduated more than 20 years earlier. The choice of the first children’s writer to win a New Zealand university fellowship against ‘adult’ contenders raised a few eyebrows. ‘I was told, as one so often is, that there was opposition to the appointment on the grounds that I was not an academic writer.’ One interviewing staff member, journalism teacher Brian Priestley, was apparently bemused enough by the prospect to explode, ‘Goodness, for the life of me I can’t imagine what a children’s writer is doing at a university!’ Margaret reportedly replied, ‘So I told him — I need the money. He nodded well yes, there is that, there is that.’ As the University Chronicle reported in March 1984, this was an author who insisted that writing for children was not something totally detached from the rest of literature, but simply a genre with a very special character; like many authors she still wrote her first drafts in longhand, in old but large diaries, then typing second and third drafts often late at night, using music and coffee to keep awake.

  The university year was inevitably one of concentrated work but also distractions: students, schools, journalists and, increasingly, readers’ letters all deflecting her from the final stages of The Changeover, intensive work on two further novels, the beginning of a film adaptation of The Haunting, and the new venture of plays and adaptations for Christchurch’s Court Theatre and Canterbury Children’s Theatre. It also, however, offered her the chance to become a student again: she enrolled for the philosophy of science and the philosophy of art at 200 level.

  The reviews for The Changeover were as good as any author would ever hope to get, and translations into 10 or more languages were soon under way.

  Once again, some critics expressed their surprise. ‘Who would’ve expected such a triumph from her first attempt at a full-length novel for older children?’ wrote one British columnist. ‘Well, any admirer of Margaret Mahy’s possibly. In a couple of dozen books she’d already testified to her conviction that “a fairy tale is often the truest way of talking about real life … that humour has a more spiritual function that people are prepare
d to admit”.’ Margery Fisher, who had hosted Margaret on her first visit to Britain 11 years earlier, wrote in Growing Point that here was a book ‘about the whole human condition encapsulated in one small part. This is no thin blueprint for growing up. It is a metaphor for living rising out of a recognised, sharply drawn picture of reality … this new story triumphantly fulfils the promise which has for so long tantalised the admirers of Margaret Mahy’s picture book texts and short stories.’ Another English reviewer said that The Changeover went ‘well beyond a simple story of witchcraft to achieve a moral and psychological subtlety similar to that in the stories of the great British fantasists C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien’.

  American reviews were equally enthusiastic. At the 1985 American Library Association (ALA) annual conference, the editor of the Centre for Children’s Books at the University of Chicago, Betsy Hearne, spoke of The Changeover as a book that fulfils both popular and literary criteria, explaining that it had been ‘selected as an ALA Notable Children’s Book, a YASD [Young Adult Services Division] Best Book for young adults, a School Library Journal Best Book, and an ALA Booklist Editor’s Choice. In at least two of those selection panels, the vote was unanimous … Its critical success is unquestionable.’ The influential Kirkus Review stated: ‘Again, as in The Haunting, New Zealand writer Margaret Mahy proves that all-out supernatural stories can still be written with intelligence, humour, and a fearful intensity that never descends into pretentious murk or lurid sensationalism … Mahy thus invests the occult evils here with a metaphorical, psychological undertow; at the same time, however, while filling out all the characters (including the witches) with textured charm, she never stints on thoroughgoing creeps and scares. In sum, the best supernatural YA fiction around, with Stephen King power and Mahy’s own class and polish.’

  And Sarah Hayes in the Times Literary Supplement: ‘The double aspect of things — man and beast, good and evil, young and old — intrigues Margaret Mahy. In the manner of all good supernaturalists, her stories always have a perfectly possible rational explanation. This one could be about the products of a young girl’s fevered imagination during a period of physical and emotional turmoil; or about the influence of a boy traumatised by a cruel foster father and years of psychotherapy; or about a miracle cure, a single parent, and a dirty old man. These explanations are never offered, merely there for the reader to think about if he chooses.

  ‘It is rare to find a novel which captures so well the changeover from child to adult, and from what is real in the mind to what is real outside. Readers who have grown up with Margaret Mahy will recognise here that land of infinite possibilities, discovered out there so many years ago by the lion who might or might not have been in the meadow.’

  For a writer so firmly linked to picture books, The Changeover required a new appreciation of Margaret’s work. This was indisputably a young adult novel, and as one British interviewer wrote, the story contained ‘some heady stuff then, and Margaret Mahy was keen for readers to be warned. There was the sub title, the blurb and the fairly disturbing cover picture on the hardback. “I did the best I could. But I still find people who haven’t picked up the clues and who give the book to a nine-year-old ‘because she’s such a good reader’. People must have to take some responsibility. You can’t say that such books shouldn’t be published, any more than you can say we shouldn’t have the sea, just because a few people will go in too deep.”’

  Some praise was, inevitably, qualified. In his 1990 book of essays on contemporary writers of fiction for children and young adults, What Do Draculas Do, British novelist and commentator David Rees wrote of a ‘considerable difference in quality’ between Margaret’s two Carnegie winners. ‘The Changeover is a rich, powerful many-layered novel that thoroughly deserved its award, but The Haunting, well done though it is, seems rather a slight work to be given such a prestigious accolade as the Carnegie …The Changeover is on an altogether different plane. It is another tale of the supernatural … but “changeover” is a double metaphor: this is also a realistic book about an adolescent girl experiencing another kind of shift, that of becoming adult and adjusting to new relationships, particularly with her mother … on a third level it is a romantic women’s magazine type novel about Laura’s relationship with her boyfriend, Sorry Carlisle … The mixing of such different genres could have been a recipe for disaster, but the triumph of The Changeover is that the author manages to fuse all three with total success …’

  Rees was, however, critical of what he regarded as the lost opportunity ‘to reveal a unique place and culture’ to the outside world: ‘if readers expect New Zealand to be a central issue, as Australia is in the work of Patricia Wrightson and Ivan Southall, they will be disappointed’. He cited Wrightson and Southall, and English writers like Jane Gardam, Lucy Boston and William Mayne, and Americans like Virginia Hamilton, who ‘make their own particular patch a major theme for their books … but Margaret Mahy does not find this important’. Place is there in her work, he conceded, but ‘with the exception of the differences between the seasons (Christmas in The Tricksters) we could be almost anywhere in either the northern or southern hemisphere’. He also speculated, incorrectly, that Margaret’s career seemed to be following the not uncommon phenomenon of ‘growing up’ with her own children, like, say, Penelope Farmer, who moved from picture books to teenage and then to novels for adults. ‘But with Margaret Mahy, the approach to a novel has been remarkably gradual. Thirteen years is a long time to spend being a prolific creator of fiction and not write a novel.’ A New Zealand commentator, even unaware of Margaret’s story but familiar with the bleak local publishing environment and the attitudes of overseas editors, would not have made such observations. (‘I think it was The Changeover,’ Margaret has said, ‘where the editor said it’s wonderful to have a New Zealand story and then proceeded to cut out a lot of New Zealand references.’)

  Few reviewers anywhere remarked on the consciously New Zealand setting of The Changeover, a first in Margaret’s writing. And that setting was not a farm, bush or beach, but, much less common in contemporary New Zealand children’s literature, a city. As Margaret wrote in the postscript to the 2003 Collins Modern Classic edition, ‘this was the first story that adequately repaired an imaginative displacement within me,’ even a ‘re-entry,’ but she had not been able to resist an ironic little in-joke in the opening paragraphs of the novel:

  Although the label on the hair shampoo said Paris and had a picture of a beautiful girl with the Eiffel Tower behind her bare shoulder, it was forced to tell the truth in tiny print under the picture. Made in New Zealand, it said, Wisdom Laboratories, Paraparaumu.

  Just for a moment Laura had had a dream of washing her hair and coming out from under the shower to find she was not only marvellously beautiful but also transported to Paris. However, there was no point in washing her hair if she were only going to be moved as far as Paraparaumu. Beside, she knew her hair would not dry in time for school, and she would spend half the morning with chilly ears. These were facts of everyday life, and being made in New Zealand was another. You couldn’t really think your way into being another person with a different morning ahead of you, or shampoo yourself into a beautiful city full of artists drinking wine and eating pancakes cooked in brandy.

  Exotic by name it might sound, but New Zealanders know Paraparaumu (pronounced as Para-para-umu, the first ‘u’ accented) as a rather featureless little settlement on the flat coastal strip north of Wellington, near to a long, grey, very tidal beach of no great appeal. Earlier generations of Pakeha corrupted it to ‘Para-pa-ram’, the last syllable nasally emphasised. Wellingtonians have holiday cottages there, travellers hurry through northwards on State Highway 1, a small shampoo-making factory could fit into its light industry. In England, an equivalent might be Wigan. Not much of a move, indeed.

  By the end of the first chapter, it is clear to New Zealand, or at least Christchurch, readers that this is indeed a ‘New Zealand’ novel, but Margaret
was apparently delving deeper than that.

  ‘And yet, as I wrote the story, I found myself for the first time naturally drawing on the place around me by way of a setting. The story took on not the traditional New Zealand setting of bush and sea, but the character of the city around me. As I drove through Christchurch I found myself confronted with statements and signs, as the story melted into the city and the city transformed around me. Shopping malls and video parlours (relatively new features of the time) suddenly seemed to take on a curious surreal dimension. Street names and road signs took on the character of magical announcement. I had never imagined I would find my way into my own ostentatiously rural land by invoking a city.

  ‘I now think that all cities have both universal and particular characters, and I was able to use the universal form to begin nudging my way imaginatively back into the city I actually lived in, and then into a place from which I had been along with many other New Zealanders, unconsciously expelled. Having found my way in I have never left it but continued to move deeper in with increasing pleasure and confidence. The hills and sea and summer holidays of a later book (The Tricksters), the waterfront and jetty of the picture book A Summery Saturday Morning, would not have come to me as easily and naturally without the re-entry made possible by The Changeover. Though I hope its folk tale references make it generally recognisable and accessible, I still remember with pleasure the exhilaration of what was a sort of homecoming.’

  After two Carnegie Medals and a university fellowship, Margaret’s increased standing in the literary community was reflected by a New Zealand Literary Fund Lifetime Achievement Award in 1985, although at close to fifty she was not even (as it turned out) anywhere near full flower. Interviewers were no longer asking her why she wrote for children, or why her stories were not ‘New Zealand’. The many lengthy interviews and profiles that appeared from this period often shone small, revealing beams of light on her earlier years or on the challenges of the professional writer’s life she was now energetically carving out. One unnamed British reviewer compared her habit of walking, muttering to herself for inspiration, around the edge of Lyttelton Harbour, to Wordsworth stomping around the Lake District, and saw similarities between their homes, with their large gardens, many cats and thousands of books. Margaret, though, with daughters as her sharpest critics, took herself ‘much less seriously’. Indeed, some suggested, passages like this, from her 1983 comic novella, The Pirates’ Mixed-up Voyage, placed her firmly in the tradition of the Goon Show, Monty Python and The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (all Mahy favourites).