Margaret Mahy

by Tessa Duder

  The pirate captain charged forward and slashed at Mrs Hatchett but she, with tremendous skill and a sword of razor sharpness, parried his lunge, and cut through his thick leather belt so that his trousers fell down. He dropped his sword and seized at them desperately, then stepped on to one half of the banana and shot across the room winding up in a dusty corner with the classroom wastepaper basket.

  She was not always pleased by her previous work. ‘Many of my books I don’t like at all now … I am becoming less and less capable of giving a simple answer to anything, and try to justify this by maintaining that there are no simple answers, and there may not even be any real answers, only points where people agree not to argue … I am … untidy with things (not people) and entertained all the time. I am slowly disintegrating but I don’t mind, and would quite like to turn into a tree some day, but not immediately.’

  The Changeover was always going to be a hard act to follow. In terms of order of writing, the third novel should have been The Tricksters, Margaret’s most complex book so far, but the shrewd Vanessa Hamilton suggested that, coming so soon on the heels of two Carnegie Medal winners, both with supernatural themes, the next title should not be a fantasy but something quite different.

  The Catalogue of the Universe appeared in 1985, the year in which she also spent a month in Perth as the writer in residence at the Western Australian College of Advanced Education. When asked to name her favourite novel, Margaret has sometimes expressed a particular fondness for this book, and admitted that, of all her characters, the shy, brainy but ungainly young astronomer and philosopher Tycho Potter is more of a self-portrait than any other, even Tabitha in The Haunting. He is named after the 16th-century Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe — partly because of that telescope she once put together, with her father’s and uncle’s help. ‘It was a very transforming moment when I looked through and saw the craters on the moon and knew that it really was a small planet. It’s part of my own past experience that I’ve passed onto Tycho. But I also think that his interests, his judgements about the contradictory nature of the world, contain some of my own fascinations in a very direct form.’

  The Catalogue of the Universe is ‘social realism’ or, perhaps better, ‘a realistic fairy tale’ set firmly in Christchurch and the Port Hills and described by Tom Fitzgibbon as ‘a love story of Angela and Tycho [which] revolves around the nature of truth’. As in The Changeover, the heroine is a teenage girl living with her mother — the struggling solo-parent family once again. The storyline deals with Angela’s compulsion to meet the father about whom her mother Dido has invented, as much as for herself as for her daughter, a romantic fairy tale of hopeless love for a handsome married man whose child she bore while knowing also she could never expect marriage. Angela, though deeply disillusioned by the cold, unloving businessman she finally confronts, maturely settles for a greater understanding of her relationships with her mother, and the plain but clever Tycho.

  In lesser hands, wrote British reviewer Audrey Laski in the Times Educational Supplement, such elements could ‘have piled cliché upon cliché’, but in fact Mahy spins something ‘entirely new and golden … the happy ending imposes a sense of complete rightness because the reader so much desires it’. And although the ‘substantial paragraphs in which Tycho meditates on the philosophy of astronomy could be off-putting’, there is the final delight for young readers, of ‘the moment when Angela puts The Catalogue of the Universe, the book within the book, to an entirely different purpose from that for which it was intended — the moment when the Frog Prince gets the spell-breaking kiss. Such pleasures should be widely shared.’

  One of the best of many further fine reviews came from the Australian world authority Walter McVitty, who speculated that The Catalogue of the Universe could quite conceivably win Margaret a third Carnegie.

  ‘Margaret Mahy is now one of the most popular and prolific of children’s authors. She is also one of the best. With the exception of English writer Jan Mark, I would say that she is probably without peer today … her books, however simple, are affirmations of life: set your mind free of its shackles and reach out, grab it and embrace it, make it yours. And the wonderful things can be as wonderful as you hope they’ll be, as I discovered in reading The Catalogue of the Universe, Angela describing her mother: “It’s not as if she’s a real eccentric. I mean she’s not what I’d call colourful. It is more as if she was on loan from another planet, almost like ours but not quite — a sort of near miss.” That’s exactly the way I would describe the author herself. Eccentric is certainly not the word for Margaret Mahy. She does, however, have such an extraordinary intellect, combined with rare insight into human nature and such a breathtaking control of words that one could easily believe her gifts to be supernatural. She expresses ideas in the most carefully crafted, felicitous prose — which never takes itself too seriously, being enlivened by a constant undercurrent of humour.’

  If children’s book watchers in the English-speaking world were beginning to wonder what the writer from New Zealand would come up with next, they could hardly have anticipated the four books that appeared in 1986: two story collections, the short novel (also with a New Zealand setting) Aliens in the Family and the major, complex novel that had been written hard on the heels of The Changeover.

  It had taken her a year to write The Tricksters, the only one set entirely away from Christchurch and probably the most audacious of her novels. She said later, ‘I couldn’t work out what was making me so slow. At last I realised that I had never previously written a book with so many characters. It had twelve people in it, and I was used to writing a story with only four or five at the most.’

  The genesis of the book’s bold and colourful Antipodean summer Christmas setting was the subject of a major lecture she gave in Auckland some years later.

  ‘One day some years ago I was in Great Britain in New Zealand House, listening to some flattering things being said about my work. I was consumed with gratification and at the same time by dismay, since not only my upbringing but my rationality prevents me from believing the flattery in the conditional way I would like to … in the way that instinct seemed to be prompting me to accept it. You know what it is like. Just as at one level part of you is listening and thinking “How true! How true!” other more sensible strands are telling you “They have to say that”. Or “What about all the things that you know are wrong with your story”. Looking furtively sideways at the shiny wall, some sort of marble I seem to remember, I saw a whole company of dark reflections standing apparently on the other side of the reflecting surface, listening intently, reproducing almost exactly our own attentiveness. I say almost exactly, because there was something menacing about the reflected featureless crowd which was certainly not present in the actual one. I was reminded that in Jorge Luis Borges’ book A Dictionary of Imaginary Beings, he tells in a section called ‘The fauna of mirrors’ that a creature called the Fish could be occasionally glimpsed in the depths of mirrors. (One must bear in mind that his account may be apocryphal because Borges is not only an astonishing scholar, but makes a literary point of inventing scholarship which has all the appearance of being genuine.) Once he says, apparently quoting a Cantonese myth, there was a time when the images in mirrors did not imitate us, and men and women could come and go even more freely than Alice through the looking glass surface. However, a battle developed between the world of men and the world of the mirror people. In the end the reflections were shut in behind glass and obliged to repeat, “as in the actions of a dream”, the actions of me. One day we will see an essence called the fish in the glass … a very faint line of no describable colour. From that point on our reflections will start to rebel, little by little they will begin to move in their own ways. They will break out through the water and battle will be joined again. Staring at the reflecting surface there in New Zealand House I wondered if I was possibly about to see the fish there among the dark listeners. It was at that point that I began to think of t
he story subsequently published as The Tricksters. I am sure my ego, replete with the energy of praise, began darting around, searching for a way out … and ran off on its own through the familiar escape route of a story. I was aware of the story because of the stories I had already read, and out of the stuff of these stories and out of what I was seeing I began to construct another story and hide in it.

  ‘At first I had the idea of people coming out of a picture …but not because they were painted in the picture which I imagined as an oil painting of a countryside, and painted with a dark shiny surface. Reflections of people in real life of the story would pass over the surface of the painting. They would live briefly in the painted landscape, and give possible forms to life coming out of it … the residual energy of the painter maybe. It was not an original idea, of course I had read stories that touched on possibilities like these for years. Once as a child I began writing a book about a reflection that came alive, though I never finished that story. Once the reflection had come alive, once that fearsome moment of transformation was past, interest faded. Our reflections and shadows are often candidates for an extended or haunting life that is part of our own lives, yet separate too. The Picture of Dorian Grey [sic] is a notorious tale of a man living in a particularly exploitive relationship with his painted image. Vampires do not have reflections. In a way they are already reflections among us, yet belonging to the other side. In this first speculative version of The Tricksters characters came off the surface of the picture once shapes were provided for them. They came, because they were desired. They were desired by the most powerful of all desirers … a reader, a reading girl.

  ‘As I wrote the book changed, the picture vanished, though the reflecting surface remained. It became the surface of the sea, big reflecting skin of the world. I see the sea every day I am at home. The water of Lyttelton harbour is still water, and is a particularly vivid reflecting surface. I have often commented on the fact that it has been hard for me to write a story set in New Zealand and that when I began to do so in The Changeover the story was set in a city, an environment which has many universal qualities rather than local ones. The Tricksters was the first book I had attempted in years which came directly from my immediate surroundings, and was possible because those surroundings, though real enough, suddenly took on a fantastic dimension. I was able to mediate with my environment through fantasy, the zone into which I had been projected in childhood. I re-entered Lyttelton harbour, the same but different, via London, via reflecting mirrors. Via remembered stories, in the end I wound up at home again …

  ‘The Tricksters always seems to me a moral story because compassion and forgiveness triumph over betrayal. In the end it is the older sister Christobel who manages the heroic act … by vanity she is genuinely determined to force happy endings out of disaster and brave enough to begin to do so … Her friend Emma has after all betrayed [her] by usurping Christobel’s own father, and indeed (as father of Emma’s illegitimate baby) assuming knowledge of him that is forbidden to Christobel herself. Christobel however persists. She rings Emma and invites her to join the family for New Year, only to find that something from the other side of another imperfectly reflecting surface, from the other side of morality if you like, advances to meet her. It is something connected to ego perhaps, but greater than ego. She is surprised to find she is more sincere than she realises. And sometimes this can be done … take my word for it. It is part of the perceived reality of children’s books to end with hope, but that doesn’t mean such endings are impossible. Self-sacrifice or, if you like, the suppression of one’s own ego is not particularly fashionable at present, partly because it was so damagingly insisted on in the past, particularly in the lives of women and the poor. Now it sometimes seems like a false myth or sometimes like a myth insisted on by one part of society in order to command another. Nevertheless it is part of my direct experience and therefore I suggest on its possibility … It is adult reality, built on guilt as well as experience that suggests such endings are necessarily cop outs …

  ‘It now seems to me that The Tricksters and A Lion in the Meadow have the same plot and spring from the same experiences. The little boy in the picture book and Harry in The Tricksters both imagine or desire so strongly in their respective stories that their belief or desire makes a connection and alters reality.’

  A 1986 interview picked up an aspect of The Tricksters that some have found a step too far, just too bizarre, even for Mahy. Harry becomes ‘romantically involved with a ghost, one of a trio of charismatic reincarnations who range from violent to sensitive … but Margaret Mahy doesn’t believe in ghosts. She confirms that her phantoms are teenage desires come to life.

  ‘“They aren’t meant to suggest that I have any belief in the supernatural. The ghosts are imaginative projections or metaphors, or psychological devices. They work for me by producing mysterious moments which though fictional still manage to enlighten mysterious moments in real life.” Margaret Mahy sharply recalls her own adolescent confusion at the sexuality of adults, and with it the fear, when she was on the brink of womanhood, that next year wasn’t going to be as nice as last year. It’s an aspect of adolescence she thinks should be dealt with. “Adolescents can’t opt out of their physical changes, and these developments are very important. Sexuality is one of the central preoccupations of the novel from Pamela onwards. I think most people, including adolescents, want to lead passionate lives, so I allow my characters a certain amount of liberty where this is involved … I think happy endings are therapeutic, but even in my adult life I find some acknowledgement of my troubles in literature helpful. I think I am writing about something that is very real. The books have a fairy-tale structure, even though I’m writing for older children, but they’re disguised fairy tales. They have a lot of realistic reinforcement. In many ways I think I still write for adults.”’

  At least one American reviewer agreed, describing the book as strong, heady stuff and suggesting that ‘it would take very little to market the book as an adult novel … her writing is sensuous and lush; the story is magical and compelling’, while Diane Hebley, in the Listener, felt that The Tricksters, being ‘both credible and incredible’, moved beyond ‘children’s’ literature as exemplified by Mahy’s earlier Carnegie winners. Other critics drew attention to the affectionate and vivid description of the spectacular Lyttelton Harbour landscape. In a long and particularly astute piece in the New York Times Book Review, Robin McKinley stated that, as in her two earlier novels, ‘Ms Mahy has proved she can handle, as no other writer has, the first terrifying awakening of teenage sexuality. She seems to know the delicate balances of the highly indelicate things that hormones start doing to you at around age 14, and she describes them in a funny, real, significant and haunting way that no one old enough to write as elegantly as she does should be old enough to remember … there is more going on in them than just the mechanics of a clever plot; on different levels The Tricksters is a parable of the responsibility of the artist, or a simple ghost story, or a tale of the girl’s first understanding that adulthood will mean a more complex vision of situations and people that through childhood have been taken for granted. I am in danger of doing Margaret Mahy a disservice by recommending her too enthusiastically, but she deserves the recommendation, and she is a strong enough writer to stand up under it … [though her material is universal], it’s that in her hands the matter of living in the world we must share with other people becomes cleaner, kinder, more involving and more exciting.’

  The publication of The Tricksters completed a kind of fantasy hat trick, one that had demonstrated Margaret’s increasing willingness to take risks, both emotional and literary. Margaret told one interviewer, ‘The Haunting, The Changeover and The Tricksters aren’t a trilogy — they are about different characters — but they do form a triptych. Each one is more disturbing than the one before and the three supernatural brothers in the latest one are more obviously sinister. They are figures summoned up by the girl Harry�
�s own writing.’ When asked if she was disturbed by what she was conjuring up, Margaret immediately agreed. ‘We like to test ourselves against something that’s dangerous and thrilling. The idea of being overtaken by something that’s overwhelming and too strong to resist appeals to both men and women. I did feel disturbed when I wrote The Tricksters and I wanted my readers to feel uneasy because I enjoy reading that sort of book.’ She did concede, however, that she had gone as far as she wanted along that path, ‘and there won’t be any more books of that kind’— unless she gets an idea she can’t resist.

  Now, as the writer of four acclaimed novels, Margaret was increasingly being called on to share some of her writing methods and her secrets.

  ‘Reading [a manuscript] all through again one sometimes finds ideas one doesn’t like! How have they got in in the first place? I don’t always recognise the first time round just what is going into the story. Frequently I make things too wordy, or too dramatic. I always have to simplify. Sometimes something I meant to sound touching sounds sickly and sentimental. At second draft stage I start looking very seriously for things like that, as well as for places where the plot stops working, where people might stop believing in the story. At this stage too, however, just to make things more complicated, I also add many things as the network of association comes into play — with parallels, analogies, metaphors, other literary references, ideas and echoes from other areas of knowledge.