Margaret Mahy

by Tessa Duder

  Resting on the shank of her scythe, Dido turned her head and looked straight over at Angela, but the slumberous lid of the verandah was half-closed over the small eye of Angela’s bedroom, and besides, Angela could plainly see that Dido’s own eyes were so flooded with moonlight that she was radiantly blind, a fairy-tale woman who, having lost her own sight, had been given pale, shining eyes of silver …

  Watching Dido scythe in the moonlight like Mother Time herself, Angela found herself thinking of the road, and wondering at the same time if Dido might not be just a little crazy. Like the road, Dido had a dangerous edge and sometimes she went right out to it and danced, apparently challenging it to crumble away under her. Angela feared for such a reckless dancer, though by now she knew that she, too, had an inside road as well as an outside one, and dangerous edges of her own. Still, sooner or later, she confidently expected to find wonderful happiness in life. But whatever Dido challenged by dancing on dangerous edges was no sort of happiness Angela could recognise. Dido scythed on, leaving a swathe of shadow behind her …

  A Washington Post Bookworld writer noted that, for intelligent adolescents, Margaret writes ‘with all the force and precision and richness of a poet’; another that her books for young readers ‘are full of linguistic pyrotechnics … as well as plenty to eat’. Indeed, the duality of Margaret’s prodigious storytelling gifts has often been spoken of: the wacky and whimsical stories for young children, the compelling and suspenseful novels for teenagers.

  Throughout all her work, she deals with opposing concepts of reality and illusion, truth and imagination, the fabulous in the ordinary, the fantastic in the domestic. The many witches, wizards, clowns, robbers and pirates challenge, often with humour but sometimes in darker tones, the commonplace and the respectable; she ‘uses fantasy as a light to illuminate aspects of our so-called ordinary lives’. In her YA novels she ‘often takes a realistic theme within a family setting and supercharges it with fantastical or supernatural elements’. Her resolutely non-sexist perspective is often noted: she ‘continually pushes at the boundaries of [fairy-tale conventions]’ and ‘roots out the sexism that used to be integral’ to fiction for young readers. And shining through everything she writes is her conviction in ‘the power of love and the power of the imagination to enhance and redeem our world’.

  Yet she also writes unflinchingly of starkly contemporary and universal philosophical issues. ‘The double aspect of things — man and beast, [good] and evil, young and old intrigues Margaret Mahy,’ wrote Sarah Hayes in the Times Literary Supplement. David Rees has drawn parallels in Margaret’s work with the Dracula story, that metaphor ‘for the basic human fear of being (or desire to be) changed into somebody or something else. It questions the very concept of having an identity … one recurring theme from The Haunting onwards is that our ancestors have power over us whether we like it or not; we resemble them physically, they bequeath us certain characteristics and there is little we can do to escape from this inheritance. They are to some extent spirits moulding our lives …’

  And among the many critics who have drawn attention to the inherent sexiness of her narratives is the award-winning English writer Francis Spufford. In his elegant memoir of childhood reading, Spufford singles out an American and a New Zealander from the many authors who appeared in the 1980s with novels ‘designed to lead “young adults” gently out of children’s books by offering them the certainties of a children’s book narration, only applied to the lives of those who had entered the Age of Acne.’ As an 80s teenager, he ‘could have read Cynthia Voight’s extraordinarily tough, and sparely beautiful, series of novels about the Tillermans … or the New Zealand novelist Margaret Mahy’s terrific Bronteesque supernatural thrillers, The Changeover, The Haunting and The Tricksters. Mahy did family life with an elegant, witty realism that made you feel you were getting a leg-up to being an altogether more noticing kind of person; simultaneously, she understood how inchoately sexy magic is, at a point in your life when real sex is still three wishes away, and gleams with as much mixed fascination and alarm as if it were truly a spell.’

  It is surely timely, that in 2005, as Margaret approaches her 70th birthday, her 45th year as a published story writer and her 25th year as a novelist, there should be a new resource on her work available to scholars, beside the general American and British reference books and studies by leading international commentators such as Jack Zipes, Sheila Egoff, Maurice Saxby and Christine Wilkie-Stibbs. A major collection of essays is imminent: Marvellous Codes: The Fiction of Margaret Mahy, edited by two expatriate Kiwis, Dr Elizabeth Hale, of the University of New England, New South Wales, and Dr Sarah Winters, of the University of Toronto. Published by Victoria University Press in Wellington, it features contributions by American, English, Australian and Canadian academics; the New Zealand contributors are Diane Hebley, Claudia Marquis, Lisa Scally, Anna Smith and Kathryn Walls.

  Given the paucity of academic comment on any children’s writing in New Zealand, these studies will provide a new assessment of Margaret’s work both as a ‘New Zealand’ writer and a ‘universal’ one for both younger and older children.

  Thus Diane Hebley and Claudia Marquis produce ample evidence to refute English assertions since the 1980s that Margaret’s novels have little or no New Zealand flavour, even those written after her own affirmation of ‘homecoming’ from The Changeover onwards. Hebley concludes, ‘Clearly, in all her YA novels, Mahy shows extraordinary power in drawing imagery from her own environment to empower her fictional concerns. She is outstanding among her compatriot writers for releasing through her sense of place … a “special country of the mind right for this tale”. Thus she contributes to a valuable sense of national identity for New Zealand readers. Recognisable seascapes and landscapes, and the fault lines in association with distinctions between truth and illusion, reality and imagination, establish her perception of human experience in this land …’ Claudia Marquis, too, touches on The Tricksters’ narrative which ‘insistently attaches itself to local circumstances at many points’, and ultimately challenges us ‘to construct — or reconstruct — the fantasy of adolescence, a fantasy that for none of us is unimaginably distant’.

  Elizabeth Hale’s introduction states: ‘That a writer working in such traditionally marginalised, or non-canonical, genres as children’s and young adults’ literature, and fantasy literature, to say nothing of her consistent representation of marginalised people such as single parents and the elderly, should be one of the foremost writers of a nation marginalised by its size, population, and location, is pleasingly appropriate. Mahy is not wholly a realist, she does not write canonical forms, she does not write the “Great New Zealand novel”, and she does not place New Zealandness front and centre in her writing, having deliberately set her sights on an international marketplace. But in writing within marginalised, rather than central forms, she has been incredibly successful, and, I think, has been instrumental in reframing the possibilities of this country: bringing a kind of wild magic into New Zealand writing, blending European, Maori, and other literary traditions in her work.’

  In another forthcoming publication on the Gothic in children’s literature, Auckland academic Rose Lovell-Smith convincingly defines Margaret’s use of the beach in The Tricksters as a Gothic site, ‘a place where violent and significant events and encounters are common now, and were common in the past. For a long time, the beach was the place where you met the other … where Maori and Pakeha met … where they talked and translated and traded and fought, where animals and goods were imported and exported, where ships were wrecked, and travellers drowned … Beaches therefore seem an improbable Gothic site only until second thoughts reveal them to be the parts of New Zealand with the longest histories. These are some of our most haunted landscapes.’ The Tricksters, she claims, with its story played out around the beach and the rambling, wind-lashed and above all isolated family holiday home beside the Lyttelton Harbour beach, ‘modifies symbols derived from 2
00 years of Gothic novel-writing in Britain’.

  And if the trickster brothers ‘themselves are, as Felix puts it, “tied to that strip of beach”, clearly it is their national culture that tied them there. Mahy, an author often accused of writing like a foreigner, shows an accurate sense of her local heritage in thus relocating her haunting from family home to that elemental yet domestic meeting place, the beach.’

  But as the many facets of her reputation continue to grow, that mischievous Millooonnium witchy voice is never far away.

  ‘Astonished, amazed, confused,’ she told a teenage magazine’s readers in 2001, asking her to describe herself in three words. She worked in her bedroom in a state of siege, surrounded by books that climbed her walls, hid themselves in odd corners and shouted out mockingly from under her bed. She had been writing for 57 years and two little known and closely guarded facts about her were that ‘I have an elegant though menacing skull tattooed on my right shoulder. It has a rose clenched in its teeth. I had it done when I was 63 so it isn’t a youthful mistake. If people see it they usually think it’s a transfer but it isn’t. And I know more about the history of sewerage (and have more direct contact with it) than any other children’s writer in New Zealand and probably the world.’

  Quick questions: What kind of person were you at school? A chattering liar — but I believed many of my own lies. What are the best things about being an author? Being swallowed and digested by a story. What are the worst things? Being spat out by a story (which then runs off laughing). Which book did you most enjoy writing? The Great White Man-Eating Shark.

  Your ideal day out? Sleep in. Breakfast. Reading, take the dog for a walk, come home, reading, dinner, more reading, more reading and bed. What would you most like to change about yourself? Be able to sing in tune. Least enjoyable job ever done? Finding and clearing out blockages in a drain from a lavatory.

  If not a writer? I would be a much-loved children’s librarian. Writer’s writer? Russell Hoban. What makes you laugh? Practically everything (but I sometimes laugh out of horror and despair). How do you relax? I go to sleep (occasionally while driving). Advice for aspiring writers? Be persistent! Work hard! Be tough! Read! Read! Read!

  The party question — you’re at a party and someone finds out what you do. What is the question they invariably ask? And how do you answer them? Are you still writing? (Then they tell me what they would have written themselves.)

  What is the most important lesson life has taught you? I am still working it out. I can’t help being suspicious of the answers so far.

  By way of a coda, it seems entirely suitable that this narrative should finish with a brief poem which closed one of her earliest speeches, on the theme of building bridges between inner and outer landscapes, delivered to a reading teachers’ conference in 1973.

  ‘When it comes to the end of a talk I always like to contribute something of my own — a story or a poem … I couldn’t think of any story that was appropriate but on the way here I wrote something down. It’s written on a bag that has printed on it “Please fold here after using”. (It was on the back of the seat in front of me on the aeroplane.) I don’t know if this poem actually illustrates very lucidly what I have been talking about, except that in a general way everything I write or do illustrates something …

  When I am old and wrinkled like a raisin

  I will dance like a kite on the bucking back of the wind.

  I won’t look ahead at the few bright days I am facing

  Or look back at the years trailing out like streamers behind.

  Everyone else will be gone. The silence will seem to be mocking,

  But I will dangle and dance in the bright and clear air of the day

  Kicking my old stick legs in their red striped stockings.

  An old leaf wrinkled and brown but golden and gay.

  Dance, dance, little old feet. Spin on your halfpenny of time.

  Roar little old lion in your meadow of cobwebs and rust

  Till you burn with the fiery power of the dance and the rhyme

  And fall back to the earth in a sprinkle of golden dust.

  Epilogue

  Margaret Mahy ONZ died on 23 July 2012. On that day the London Olympics were building up to fever pitch. Heavy fighting was continuing in Syria; the National Party conference had just concluded. A New Zealand netball team had 24 hours earlier triumphed over Australia.

  The breaking news that night was the death of a children’s writer in Christchurch, aged 76, after a short illness. Within hours of Margaret’s passing in the Nurse Maude Hospice, and well before the official announcement, the news had gone like wildfire throughout the social networks. It was top story on TV and radio news, with tributes from the Prime Minister; front page in the next day’s press. The New Zealand Herald ran a poignant cartoon of two downcast toddlers perched on a leather armchair, with the speech bubble ‘Margaret Mahy’s gone. We think she’s … down the back of the chair …’ and a sign with ‘Moe mai, Margaret Mahy’ (rest in peace).

  In the next few days, editorials, full-page obituaries and huge photographs of the public smiling Margaret appeared in most of the country’s newspapers. National radio stations featured long interviews with book people who had known her; her friend of 40 years, author Joy Cowley, did the honours in the Sunday-Star Times: ‘The Queen of Story is dead’. In Parliament all the party political leaders recorded their tributes for Hansard, while tributes flowed in from writers, illustrators, editors, literary organisations and readers all over the world. Children everywhere were drawing pictures and writing heartfelt letters to send to her family home in Governors Bay.

  Anticipating the private family funeral which took place in Governors Bay a week later, organisers began planning public memorial gatherings. In Christchurch a two-hour celebration of her life, arranged by Margaret’s family and friends with the support of the Christchurch City Council, attracted about 600 people to one of the few large venues available after the February earthquakes, the Geo Dome in Hagley Park. In Auckland many hundreds gathered in the Auckland Town Hall for a similarly packed programme of tributes, anecdotes, songs, readings and book displays arranged by the Storylines Children’s Literature Trust.

  It is hard to remember when a passing last so gripped the nation. Sir Peter Blake, perhaps, back in 2001; no other luminary in sport, the arts or politics has in the last decade occasioned such a widespread outpouring of sorrow at every level of the community. But Sir Peter’s death was a tragic murder at the hands of Amazon River thugs. Margaret’s final struggle had been with an internal adversary and we discovered she had been fighting it for at least some months.

  Her last public appearance was at the Writers and Readers Week of the International Arts Festival in Wellington. Local children’s book expert Barbara Murison was in the audience while Margaret spoke to a theatre ‘full of adoring adults and children. She did Bubble Trouble right off the top of her head. I actually remember thinking how well she looked that day. She was her usual warm and gentle self with the children and came right down to the edge of the stage (a very deep one at Downstage) to engage with them and answer their questions. I was so sad that I didn’t make more of an effort to go and speak to her later but the area where she was signing books was packed deep with the audience, so Julia Marshall from Gecko Press and I decided perhaps it was kinder to leave her to it.’ Typically, Margaret attended Gavin Bishop’s session beforehand, ‘laughing at my jokes with those particularly loud Mahy laughs … it was enormously encouraging to hear them coming from the dark auditorium. Her turn, she was terrific, just like her old self.’

  Gradually, it became known to a few in the literary community that about four weeks after that appearance at Downstage, Margaret was diagnosed with inoperable cancer. Her health in recent years had caused concern to many family and friends, mostly a worrisome fatigue and a persistent chesty cough. Her daily life was made easier with the help of a young companion who lived in the cottage next door, but she often
noted her own chronic tiredness, complaining mildly that she couldn’t work all night like she used to. Yet, even as her health declined through May and June, she was talking of ideas for stories and about the two new books coming out later in the year: Mister Whistler, illustrated by her long-time friend Gavin Bishop, and The Man from the Land of Fandango, another collaboration with the leading British illustrator Polly Dunbar who had added her sure touch and wit to Bubble Trouble and Down the Back of the Chair.

  There was no ‘retirement’ in Margaret’s final years. In 2005 she received three major awards: the Prime Minister’s Award for Fiction, the Arts Foundation’s Icon Award, and an honorary doctorate from the University of Waikato. Several years’ hard work came to fruition with two television-and-book projects. Maddigan’s Quest was a joint TV production by the BBC and South Pacific Pictures, starring the rising young New Zealand actress Rose McIver, with the blockbuster book published as Maddigan’s Fantasia. The series won four awards at the Air New Zealand Screen Awards in 2007, including Best Children’s Programme. Reviews of the book were somewhat mixed. The American Kirkus Book Review summed it up as an intense time-travel tale packed with Mahy’s usual repertoire of memorable tricksters, magical happenings and ominous undertones. Britain’s Guardian felt that the sheer breadth of this ‘rich and engaging brew’ tended to take over at the expense of depth. ‘It comes as no surprise to discover that this book is tied in with a TV series. The episodic nature of the chapters, the emphasis on detailed action in the writing, does suggest that there is a script bursting to assert itself. This does not necessarily detract from the novel, but it does orient it in a particular direction. Certainly, if the publishers want to encourage young readers to turn on the TV, then this would do the job. Whether it also encourages young viewers to open the book is an interesting question.’