Margaret Mahy

by Tessa Duder

  This uncharacteristically bleak, ironic scrap appeared in the same book:

  Sensible Questions

  ‘Suppose the land turned into the sea?’

  ‘Don’t be stupid! It couldn’t be!’

  ‘Suppose the sea turned into the land?’

  ‘It wouldn’t happen. You don’t understand!’

  ‘Suppose I waved this grassy stalk,

  And Max the dog began to talk?’

  ‘Your fancy’s foolish. Your ways are wild!

  I often think you’re a silly child!’

  But Marigold waves her stalk of grass

  And all she had asked about came to pass.

  The land rolled up and the sea rolled over

  The waves were covered with grass and clover,

  While Marigold and her reproving aunt

  Who’d kept on saying ‘Don’t!’ and ‘Can’t!’

  Were up to their necks in a wild green sea —

  And Max the dog said ‘Fiddle dee dee!’

  By the late 1980s Margaret was describing herself as ‘one of the oldest writers for children in New Zealand … something that takes me by surprise because I often feel that I am only just beginning to understand what is going on … and I am probably the most internationally known. I certainly have the biggest output, which is not boasting, for it might not necessarily be a good thing. Anyhow it doesn’t have anything to do with my inner view, my own platonic form of what it is to be a writer, who I see as someone purer than I feel myself to be. I write trade books. I write extensively for instructional reading programmes and for film and TV. I have been a full-time writer since 1980 and over the last three years I have made what I think of as a very good living at it, partly because I work very long hours, and I never take a holiday and partly because I’ve been around so long I am increasingly well known. I am fortunate enough to be able to make my living in a way that means there is little separation between work and real life. I enjoyed being a librarian, but when the time came for me to leave the library at the end of the day, I always felt that now my real life was beginning. This does not happen with writing, although parts of it are tedious, and parts of it are desperate in a way that I don’t enjoy, so it isn’t simply to do with having a nice time. I suppose I feel that, when writing, every part of me is usefully engaged, subjective and objective skills, judgement and memory, and that at the same time, just as the outer space probe Giotto transmitted (in the short time before it broke down) information about Halley’s comet in a concentrated burst which it will take a long time to decode and understand, so I am decoding intricate information which I have been receiving in concentrated bursts and storing for years, incapable of doing anything with it when it first came in. One of the things I do when I write is to decode that information, sometimes, I hope, accurately, sometimes speculatively. It doesn’t much matter that much of it is understanding personal experience, because, as I pointed out earlier, one thing that decoding reveals is that one’s most individual experiences are part of another pattern, and the great originality that one is capable of depends upon that network, even when it is extending the network into new areas of perception and response in the writer or reader. I am usually working on several things at the same time … while it takes me over a year to write a novel, and during that period the novel is the story to which I surrender my own life, I am always working on other things as well, for I am never sure that the next long book is going to be as acceptable as the last one, and by now I have come to recognise various stages with attendant moods in the evolution of any book through my life and out the other side.’

  The three books published in 1988 included another surprise for her loyal readers around the world. The Door in the Air and other stories, her first, and so far only book of short stories for teenage readers, was written in response to a request by her publisher.

  Some reviewers, this time, were not quite so beguiled. The Guardian reviewer Mary Sullivan dismissed the collection as fairy tales of ‘an embarrassing daftness … Or like a fiver’s worth in the sly folds of Pseud’s Corner’, and an American reviewer, while praising the wit and lyricism, inexplicably bemoaned the general lack of plot. But these were handsomely outgunned by the Times Educational Supplement reviewer who compared Margaret to the great Scottish fantasy writer George Macdonald; others praised the language as spirited, incandescent, the collection as invigorating, crackling with high-voltage imaginative energy and altogether a book that should further enhance her reputation. ‘A Work of Art’, in which Mrs Baskin’s cake finds itself being enthusiastically admired in an art gallery, was praised as a wicked, robust satire, while ‘The Two Sisters,’ with powerful Jungian imagery, leaves readers with the notion that ‘all people should be dappled, shadows and light both, and not wholly one thing or the other’.

  And there are two stories in this book which many single out as among her finest fantasy: ‘The Magician in the Tower,’ a surreal, lyrical dream-like narrative of Matilda’s loss of innocence and transformation into (maybe) an artist, and especially, ‘The Bridge Builder’, with the dazzling succession of fantastical bridges that only Margaret, the bridge builder’s daughter, could have dreamed up.

  Her inspired, obssessive bridge builder constructs his masterpieces out of increasingly fanciful materials: cobwebs for spiders, flowers and beautiful climbing plants, horsehair and vines for little animals to cross, golden wires for singing birds, glass balustrades for fish, silver thread and mother of pearl, bamboo and peacock feathers and violin strings; he builds bridges with harps for handrails, going over volcanoes to the sounds of music, or going nowhere, bridging air and then time itself, crossing over hours and days. At first people, becoming part of a work of art, go out of their way to cross his bridges: ‘Mystery became a part of crossing over by my father’s bridges’. His power becomes dangerous and threatening; he must be stopped. Wrote one reviewer: ‘The bridge-builder’s son can transmute him magically into one of his own creations — a theme of death at the hands of the next generation … which turns up in several of the stories.’ The father turns out to be ‘a very ordinary-looking bridge himself — a single-span bridge built of stone over an arch of stone … he looked as if he had always been there, as if he would be there for ever, silver moss on his handrails, on his abutments, even on his deck … still, perhaps the job of some rare bridges is to cross over only briefly, and then bring us back to the place we started from.’

  No writer is spared occasional bad reviews by thoughtful, competent reviewers, or silly or destructive comments by incompetent ones, though some authors claim never to read reviews, good or bad. Margaret candidly admits that she reads her reviews with a ‘great deal of anxiety, because I believe them, even though I know how relative all such opinions are … I am sufficiently snobbish enough in a literary way to get pleasure from good reviews in “literary” journals. In some ways this is all a little bit of a literary game which, since I often get good reviews, I quite enjoy playing. However, I know that there are many good books that are well reviewed and impeccable from a literary point of view which have left me unmoved, and other, much more imperfect books which I have loved.’

  Truly bad reviews leave her anxious for a day or so, but she adds with customary generosity, ‘Some people have said that they hated my books, usually because of the supernatural elements in them. What can one say? I am sorry and feel a bit guilty because I want people to enjoy reading what I write, but I also want the freedom as a reader to dislike certain books written with every bit as much sincerity as mine. People like different books and so they should.’ But bad reviews still hurt, and tend to be remembered verbatim: ‘[The Australian critic] Walter McVitty once reviewed The Railway Engine and the Hairy Brigands. The review began “It is terrible when paper is in such short supply that it should be wasted on a book like this.”’ She finds it interesting that she remembers this so precisely yet cannot remember any line of any good review, no matter how pleased to receive them, ‘but I must
add I admired Walter McVitty: he was never sentimental about children’s books’.

  She was now enough of a New Zealand celebrity for her image to be of interest to the women’s magazines. Her clothing choices? At home, she liked to be comfortable in tracksuit trousers, a drab jumper, an old Moroccan robe ‘which makes me look like some sort of medieval monk, but if I was in Morocco people probably wouldn’t notice’. For going out, slightly dressier trouser suits, two favourite Homburg-style hats to help keep her thin and fly-away hair in control, ‘the sort of thing you’d imagine Bogart wearing … I don’t spend a great deal of time thinking about clothes. But I do like the feeling of dressing up when I go out. I like patchwork — it’s colourful and varied, and no two pieces are alike. It seems to relate to a certain sort of clownishness.’ The cover photograph on Gilderdale’s book certainly helped to bring squarely into the public domain the fanciful image that had hitherto been seen mostly in schools and newspaper pictures: Margaret appeared in frothy, pop-art wig and gold-trimmed jade costume, the benign word-witch of popular imagination.

  The Door in the Air collection proved to be Margaret’s last serious work for young adults for six years. Perhaps, as she neared the end of a decade of intense creativity, it might be considered time for a slight let-up of the pressure, heeding the rather dispiriting advice coming from Vanessa Hamilton in England and her American publisher Margaret McElderry in New York that overall the young adult genre was currently selling less well than expected, and that she should now concentrate on books for younger readers.

  But now, as well as the constant stream of smaller stories for picture books and reading programmes, the constant New Zealand and overseas travel, as well as the new delights of grandmotherhood (the first of Penny’s five children was born in 1986), much of her creative energy was going into television — three series and a TV movie for children, and a major six-part drama series for adults, which screened in New Zealand and elsewhere between 1986 and 1994.

  Back in the early 1980s Margaret had cheerfully decided that she would do any form of writing ‘compatible with self-respect’ to earn money. Selling the rights, writing storylines and sometimes actual scripts for television brings rewards undreamed of by most writers of books, except when, as gradually happened for Margaret, international sales and translations of multiple award-winning books start to accumulate in huge markets like the United States, Britain, Europe and Asia.

  She has always been fascinated with film, building up that huge library of video housed in both her Governors Bay home and the Cranmer Square apartment. Her favourite film is 2001 — a Space Odyssey, which she watched over and over again when first approached to write for television, to see how effects were achieved. ‘I don’t think I’m a born scriptwriter,’ she said, ‘but I’ve learned a lot over the years, and I’d be really sorry if I never wrote another script.’ Working with television ‘had meant an end to being an innocent consumer, even if it means being a much more knowledgeable one: I’ll never again see films in the same way — it’s even changed my way of listening to them.’

  Her first scriptwriting was for Kim Gabara and a programme called Seagull. She quickly discovered that writing for film and TV is very different from writing a book, involving teamwork, a pragmatic acceptance of compromises and, compared with a book, a certain detachment. Nevertheless, although, from the very beginning, ‘the story’s never your own’, she found working as part of a team very entertaining; ‘you don’t feel as alone with it in the very intense and exciting way you sometimes do with a book. I think this feeling is modified in the case of a TV script, but I like working with people, and I like the surprises they give me.’ She found that her dialogue was often far too wordy, ‘more than the medium can bear’, and was often spoken by actors in ways quite different from what she heard in her head. And there were often surprises, usually pleasant but occasionally disappointing, in how her script was visualised by prop makers and set and costume designers.

  And if she was pushed too hard? ‘Yes, I probably have been at times and probably have backed off, but what’s happened is a certain disinterest has crept in; I try to do as well as I could, but I’m no longer interested in it or connected with it in quite the same way. The script becomes a professional commitment with its own interest and enthusiasm but it’s no longer my story in quite the same way.’

  Her principal collaboration was with producer Dave Gibson and director Yvonne Mackay, of the Gibson Group, with, first, Cuckooland, a zany six-part television series that screened in New Zealand in 1986 and collected a gold medal in the New York Film and Television Festival in the same year. As Mackay has explained, Cuckooland was the result of Gibson’s decision, around 1975, to move into children’s programmes, following a successful adaptation of a Frank Sargeson short story, and first-hand experience at Cannes of the interest in children’s TV. They were led to Margaret via the School Journal (and, coincidentally, to Joy Cowley, for an acclaimed adaptation by Ian Mune of her novel The Silent One).

  With Margaret’s patter songs set to music by the eminent Wellington composer Jenny McLeod, Cuckooland was, says Mackay, a ‘way over the top’ musical show, about a mother and her two children dwelling in a ‘living’ house. Margaret was given a free rein and no one who knew her comic books would have been unduly surprised by the family whizzing along a highway in a land yacht, a crocodile handbag with snapping jaws alarming passers-by, a letter-box with quivering red lips, a bath in a tree constructed of power pylons, or the layer, for adult amusement, of a used car salesman who becomes a pirate, mafia-like tax inspectors and a stern SAS-style librarians’ taskforce in search of overdue books. One reviewer described it as ‘weird, wacky, loud and almost completely incomprehensible in parts’.

  Cuckooland was followed by The Haunting of Barney Palmer, a one-hour TV movie adaptation by Margaret of The Haunting, which Mackay had read and immediately wanted to film. The movie, filmed in and around Wellington, was shown in the United States nearly a year before New Zealand viewers got to see it (admittedly in prime time) in October 1987. The film, said producer Dave Gibson, was as close to the chiller genre as a family movie could get at that time.

  Largely on the strength of Margaret’s reputation and her screenplay, the 52-minute film was pre-sold to the Public Service Broadcasting Network and TVNZ. In return for what Gibson described as a ‘substantial sum’ of money, the contractual agreement stipulated an American actor, who turned out to be Ned Beatty (Deliverance, All the President’s Men, Superman and Wise Blood) who played Great-Uncle Cole. This, says Yvonne Mackay, required some rewriting, to make the character an uncle who had lived overseas for many years. ‘I remember Ned Beatty arriving here, as many stars do, needing to be placated, not a happy chappy, wanting to discuss the script. That really means changing his lines, to make them acceptable to him and a US audience. It was extraordinary: he met Margaret and sort of fell in love with her, and she with him — I remember them at the wrap party, dancing round, and by this time Beatty had decided that we were a real bunch of troupers, just like a New York repertory company. She won this extraordinary respect from him, and everyone — especially for that quite thoughtful way of speaking, with her eyes going off to one side, a giant pause while she thinks, finding the precise word, making connections with maybe something from a newspaper item which she’s wondered or puzzled about, and which she’ll work back into her response — which is always worth waiting for. Everyone on the set was fascinated, and very respectful.’

  The Haunting of Barney Palmer was the Gibson’s Group first experience with a production for overseas television; a stunning review in the influential Variety magazine was the best of gratifyingly good reviews both overseas and, when it was finally screened, in New Zealand. While ‘not a merry prank, by a long shot … Margaret Mahy’s script, taken from her own novel, doesn’t spell everything out, and the results are neatly alarming — with the suggestion that it might all be too true,’ said Variety. Overall, the child actors, Yvonn
e Lawley as the crabby Great-Grandmother Scholar, music again by Jenny McLeod and the special effects all earned high praise from reviewers. And for the Evening Post a children’s panel, aged between 12 and 14, gave the film its seal of approval: ‘The Haunting of Barney Palmer wasn’t weird — it was scary. We don’t think it could have been any scarier — like the time that gloved hand came down on Barney’s shoulder, or when the mirror cracked and water flowed out of it — really creepy. The music and their facial expressions helped too. The storyline was excellent and the special effects were brilliant … to enjoy the storyline we think you’d have to be a bit older but the special effects would attract younger kinds — about six — they might also scare them. When you’re a kid you don’t really seem to worry about what the story is about. We think the whole family will like it.’

  Gibson’s also seriously considered making The Changeover into a feature film. ‘After The Haunting, we had a possible French buyer who struggled with The Changeover for a long time, but they were worried with the sexual aspect and it came to nothing,’ says Mackay. ‘I’ve carried a candle for it also for a long time and we have struggled with the young adult genre problem, but in the end, in film terms it is neither one thing or the other.’ In addition, she notes, films for younger audiences present producers with special problems: they are harder to finance and promote than an adult film; audiences of half-price children’s seats means returns are lower; and children’s movies are screened on TV at times when your colleagues are not watching. ‘But currently the Shreks are changing that line of demarcation, in that adults will go to a “children’s” film without accompanying a child, so maybe the time has come for a second look at Margaret’s young adult books.’