Margaret Mahy

by Tessa Duder

  Dashing dog! Dashing dog! Oh, what a sight to see!

  Cleaned up and curlicued — what a delight to be

  Walking a dog who is brushed-up and downery

  Dare-devil-daring and Dog-about Townery.

  Down on the sand, gulls perambulate pondering

  Keeping one eye on whatever comes wandering

  OFF goes the dog, keen to catch every quill of them

  UP go the gulls, every feather and bill of them.

  And when, his immaculate grooming quickly destroyed by running through seaweed and bracken, Dashing Dog sees the wind blow a baby off the jetty:

  Run! How we run! But a comet goes ripping past

  Rushing and racing and skilfully skipping past.

  Diving and dipping where Betty is floundering

  Saving our girl from the danger of drowndering.

  Hurrah for the hero who swims, full of cheer to us

  Bringing back Betty so precious and dear to us.

  Out on the jetty we’re towing then tugging them,

  Petting and patting, and holding and hugging them.

  Coat in confusion, his hairy tiara gone

  Dipping and draggling — but oh! what a paragon!

  Look at the wagging tail — wet every bend of it

  But he’s our HERO — and that is the end of it.

  ‘This story is a joke — a primitive fantasy with its basis in everyday life. I do have a dog — a large standard poodle — and poodles in themselves are fantasies made actually according to human desires rather than any desire on the dog’s part. Originally they were hunting dogs, but nowadays they exist as dogs reduced to human accessories. Of course this is not how poodles see themselves. They think they are simply dogs and that is that. Anyhow every so often I take my dog to be groomed and tidied up (poodles grow wool instead of traditional dog hair and don’t shed it. I don’t have him cut in patterns or anything like that, but some people do which is imposing an even more exaggerated human fantasy on the dog). Anyhow for a brief time my dog looks smart and urban according to some human judgement, which the dog himself does not share. (Of course he hasn’t shared the expense either.) Immediately we leave the dog grooming parlour entropy swings in. My dog Baxter has no vanity and is disinterested in his appearance. He behaves like a dog … drinks from puddles dangling his carefully brushed ears in them (after all his ears are simply his ears) and his expensive ordering immediately begins to collapse. Though I have paid good money to achieve this appearance a more subversive part of seeing this disintegration fulfils my observing life. This underlying truth is fantasised in this story. Practically every event in the story … chasing gulls, leaping up after a Frisbee, scruffling with other dogs, pursuing a cat … is a real event though they don’t necessarily happen in the same walk. My dog has never saved anyone from drowning — poodles are waterdogs and have webbed paws, but Baxter thinks his webbed paws are not enough and he deeply mistrusts water. However the idea of noble dog saving a child from drowning is deeply entrenched in traditional story and seems to me at least to flow out of the story I have just told quite naturally.’

  With Alchemy, also published in 2002, many felt that Margaret returned to the subtle, chilling and challenging complexities of The Changeover and The Tricksters. There are the similar Christchurch settings, similar fairy-tale good versus evil elements; similar clever, articulate but troubled teenage protagonists challenged by, in this case, a sinister fairground magician named Quando who inhabits Roland’s childhood dreams and, reappearing unpleasantly in his life, seeks to steal the teenagers’ powers, in a prolonged struggle culminating in what is possibly Margaret’s most eerie and terrifying fictional climax. Alchemy studies the idea that love and hate can both release powerful energy, and, in the perilous transformation of the gifted but self-absorbed Roland into a young man of greater self-knowledge and empathy with others, warns of the dangers of denying one’s true nature.

  Alchemy was another instance of strong publisher recommendation, almost insistence, to lower the age of the main character. ‘I started writing about someone who was nineteen and the publishers quickly came back and said no, that’s too old for a YA book, pull the age down. It’s to do with all sorts of categorisations, and to do with wanting the character to be the same age as the reader — which isn’t necessarily a true thing at all.’ To Margaret’s admirers in New Zealand, it came as no surprise that Alchemy swept away the opposition for the 2003 New Zealand Post Senior Fiction Award: it was widely seen as vintage Mahy, as intricately layered and compelling as any of the 1980s novels.

  Always, as the century of the three ‘0’s’ settled down, there was international travel, and major speeches and essays to write: in 2000, for the 7th World Congress of the International Reading Association held in Auckland; in 2002, for the Auckland College of Education as the first recipient of their Sylvia Ashton-Warner Fellowship; also in 2002, a keynote speech for the Australasian conference organised by Centre for Children’s Literature of the Christchurch College of Education. In 2003, her essay, Notes of a Bag Lady, was acclaimed as one of the very best of the new Montana Estates Essay Series, published in attractive mini-book format by editor Lloyd Jones and credited with reviving interest in the essay as a literary form in New Zealand. It was a fascinating short take on her life and influences, the ‘drinking from puddles’ story and Allan Quatermain and all, in a necessary but often very funny shorthand, her unmistakeable voice clearly chuckling.

  I could easily have been an alcoholic, though as things stand I can only lay claim to the lesser title of binge drinker. Sometimes I think, a little wistfully, that I might still make it, but really I have missed my chance, for the days when alcoholism seemed a necessary confirmation of one’s artistic capacity are over. And these days I am mostly too tired to be bothered. Still, I remember drinking for the first time and the seductive feeling of being at ease with the world, I remember the clarity and fluency that comes with the first two drinks. Above all, the huge relief. The world is still there in all its searing wonder and horror — one can still acknowledge its complexity, name its features, but somehow one is no longer trapped by it all.

  I am, therefore, fascinated by the way in which people try to present that drinking is a matter of good taste and nothing to do with getting drunk. Recently I have listened, amazed, to BBC connoisseurs enlivening the early hours of the television morning by discussing the flavour and scent of wine, have even leaped from bed to write their comments down so that I can frown over them in the more rational light of day. ‘It smells like an embrocation for tired muscles …’ said one expert tasting one particular wine, ‘like very ripe pineapples. It tastes sweet but floral — not sugary.’

  ‘Get your nose in!’ commanded yet another expert, speaking poetically and being heard on the other side of the world by someone who, having no judgement herself, was naturally sceptical of the discernment of others. ‘It smells like grapefruit and that bobbly grass. It smells silky — a lovely lissom wine.’ None of them once mentioned the possibility that the wine might smell of grapes. In an article on New Zealand white wine published in the New Scientist, one author, presumably a person of taste and judgement, mentioned (apparently intending it as a compliment) that our wine tasted of apples and cat’s pee. Could I ever, even with the most single-minded dedication, have developed such delicacy of recognition? I don’t think so. I have rarely been anything but brutal where wine is concerned.

  The years of 2002 and 2003 were clouded by first, the unwelcome news from England of her agent Vanessa Hamilton’s illness, and early in 2003, her death from cancer at just over 60. Vanessa had been editor, agent, adviser and friend for 30 years; the dependable, methodical and assertive administrator of Margaret’s literary affairs, her most ardent, loyal admirer. It had been her deepest desire to see Margaret awarded the Hans Christian Andersen Medal, and she was instrumental in helping the New Zealand organisers put together the elaborate documentation for the first 2002 nomination. However, sh
e passed on to Margaret’s new London agent, Mandy Little, a strong hope that Margaret’s fantasy trilogy, long sidelined by her advisers in favour of her shorter trademark ‘realistic stories with fantasy elements,’ would now come to fruition.

  This lengthy manuscript, with the working title of Heriot, has been intriguing listeners for two decades when mentioned in conversations, talks and interviews. ‘The shortest book I have had published is nine words long and the longest is two hundred and sixty-five pages. The longest book I have written is over 800 pages at present [1987] but when I mention this, which I do with a mixture of pride and uneasiness, my daughter tells me I am off on mathematics not literature. I can’t help being secretly impressed with it, a carry-over from childhood, I suppose, when the excellence of a book was equated with its length.’ In 2002 she told a Christchurch audience that ‘about four years ago I had a novel turned down on the grounds that the voice underlying the story, as well as its central preoccupation, was too adult’. In 2004 the trilogy has risen again as one of her major projects with still ‘a heck of a lot of work to do’ and publication (in a market now crowded with such works) still some way off. It is, she admits, ‘tremendously dear to me’. As far back as 1987, when discussing the long book with Murray Edmond, she admitted that when she was writing it, she would ‘quite often work all night’. She has described its setting as an ‘elsewhere’, vaguely European, requiring a lot of research on the towns of the pre-Renaissance period, ‘a sort of pre-industrial world. I suppose it is approximately the same as early Tudor times. Printing has been established. There are quite a lot of sophisticated reactions towards art and the world of ideas.

  ‘The hero is a young man with long hair who, having had a supernatural power detected in him, is removed from his home, becoming (like Barney in The Haunting) very passive; the heroine a feisty girl who dresses as a boy, who’s been sexually abused and finds herself a child on the streets. At the same time, there’s a parallel story about a prince of the city who also is a damaged character, but wants in a romantic way to be not just a king, but something more, a magician of power and standing, plus another involving a tomboyish princess from an outlying kingdom who feels much reduced by her father’s wish to have a son as his heir. It’s for young adults, more at the sixteen to seventeen level than twelve, and possibly even an adult fantasy at the same time.’

  ‘This novel’, she says, ‘has transposed all the supernatural elements of my other books to a more conventional supernatural setting, in that it’s an imaginary world where it’s possible to envisage the sort of energy people like Laura (in The Changeover) and Troy (in The Haunting) have, being able to go. As long as you keep it in the domestic, realistic setting, it becomes very difficult to think of some ways, somewhere for that energy to go … giving the individual who possesses it [energy] something I would like to have myself — a wonderful, pure insight into the structure of nature. Which is not too different from what I was doing when I was a child and wanted to talk to the animals. So I do a lot of repetition of what I did when I was a child, but I hope it’s a spiral repetition rather than purely circular.’

  Scheduled for publication in 2005 and 2006 are one very short children’s novel, Zerelda’s Horses; reissues of Shock Forest and The Very Wicked Headmistress; the famous performance piece Down the Back of the Chair as a picture book illustrated by Polly Dunbar; and another short novel, Portable Ghosts. In 2004 Margaret was also working on a war story for a Michael Morpurgo anthology of war stories, a biographical entry on Gavin Bishop for an encyclopaedia, and picture book stories were always ‘lurking around’. Despite assertions that she’s ‘got older and tired so it’s not possible to work through the night in the way that I used to’, this is still a writer who finds it difficult to turn down work or resist ideas which strike out of the blue.

  Before all of these, however, are two projects that venture boldly into new territory: her first novel and TV series written simultaneously, and the first novel ‘for children edging on young adult’ with a Maori title. Kaitangata refers to the story’s setting on an island in Lyttelton Harbour, ‘one of other kaitangata in New Zealand, places where Maori people have eaten other Maori people’. The story has some Maori references — the children’s mother is half-Maori — and echoes of a much earlier true Governors Bay controversy stirred up by an American developer who wanted to subdivide Manson’s Point, known locally as Kaitangata and now owned by Margaret.

  She has little sympathy for the contemporary notion that only Maori can have a spiritual feeling for the land. ‘I don’t think that’s true, it’s up to individuals.’ Nor does she believe that Maori storytellers should have a monopoly on Maori themes: ‘I think that people should be allowed to write what they want, provided that if they get it wrong they don’t mind being told. But I’d be too shy myself to write a book about Maori people — except, I suppose, if they were like my nephews and nieces who are part-Maori and live European lives’. The Maori elements of Kaitangata include the cannibalism of the title, ‘a natural part of history … which never really seems all that terrible — killing people seems terrible, but what you do with them afterwards never seems as terrible to me as it does to other people. Well, they lived in a country where there wasn’t an abundance of protein like there was in Europe, with plenty of cattle; and of course there’s the whole symbolic thing, that you have eaten people and beaten people — in my story the island is capable of taking on this consuming atmosphere and finally consumes the villain.’ In editing discussions with Margaret about the book before she died, Vanessa expressed concern that the villain, though unpleasant, ‘came across as a more attractive character than the children’s father, a rather obsessed man’. Subsequently, Margaret tried to make the villain ‘a bit less attractive … though I have to say I quite liked him the way he was, and now of course they come back and say he’s too unattractive — just one of those ironical things that happen in editing, having to correct what was seen as a fault!’

  The ‘spooky thing’ about Maddigan’s Fantasia, says Margaret, is that it’s a quite new sort of project — a book springing out of a TV series —‘there’s a lot more interest from publishers because of the TV connection … I’ve never done anything quite like that before and I don’t quite know how it’s going to turn out.’ It is some years since she was first approached for the concept; finance proved difficult, but 2004, with a charter in place indicating better times ahead for family television drama, brought a sudden revival by its producers, South Pacific Pictures, in partnership with the BBC. The script conferences, involving Margaret, producer John Barnett and two or three scriptwriters, were ‘quite a disconcerting experience for me because they talk very quickly about things whereas I tend to think, hang on a moment, I need to think about that, and by that time they’ve jumped on to the next story’. Also, any grand ideas about having a whole circus, with horses, had to be modified for reasons of cost and scale. Margaret provided the storyline, backstory and characters of the 13-part series, about a travelling circus playing in various isolated areas of post-apocalyptic New Zealand, and then it was suggested that ‘it would be a good thing if I wrote a book based on the story to come out more or less at the same time’. The book appears — unusually, before the TV series — in May 2005, and the television series, to be shot in Auckland, sometime later in the year.

  The post-apocalyptic New Zealand setting of Maddigan’s Fantasia came about because she liked the idea of creating a series of strange communities set up after war, each remade community different but tied together by government and one or two big cities. Some are reasonably well established, some are really struggling. Into this fantasy she has woven time travel, suggesting echoes of the travelling Punch and Judy puppet shows in Russell Hoban’s 1980 cult book Ridley Walker, one of her great favourites.

  These days Margaret gives the impression of someone in enviable harmony with herself, her family, her many loyal and protective friends, her career and the physical surroundings of
rambling, book-filled home and mature garden she has worked so hard to create. Solitude she regards with the serenity of long habit and preference: ‘the basic human condition is one of loneliness — yes, and it also surprises me how consistently we try to break down our solitude. I think that all the people we love and feel very close to and who love us do, of course, break down our solitude to a big extent. But in the end, if you had a child in pain you can’t take the pain over yourself. The child is alone with that pain, no matter how you love him and how passionately you want to help him; this is true of a lot of human situations. In the end we are locked in a particular skin, a particular nervous system, a particular set of memories; you may share those memories with other people, but they are still particularly your own. Talking with my brother and sisters about memories of our childhood, I realised how much memories of the same incident are affected by our place in the family.’