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rushthatspeaksThe internet has all the George Macdonald I was never able to find in my youth. Which would appear to have been a lot of it-- the man was incredibly prolific. Mari Ness's review pointed me at this one.
It's quite unusual, because it is filled with numinous but has almost nothing supernatural in it at all. There is one unequivocally magical thing, and one thing that might be but no one is sure, and the rest is just, well, the sort of atmosphere you expect from a fairy tale, and therefore it is one.
A witch of a rather scientific turn of mind obtains two infant children. The boy she raises to know nothing about darkness: he is kept asleep whenever the sun is not in the sky, all things colored black are kept away from him, and his rooms are arranged so that there aren't even any shadows. The girl is kept in an underground prison lit only by one very weak alabaster-shaded lamp, so that, the witch thinks, she will know nothing about light.
A major reason that I keep reading George Macdonald is that in a less intelligent story, she would know nothing about light. As it is, she has spent hours contemplating the single lamp she has, considering every property of it and learning how to use her eyes best to see everything in her rooms by its glow, and so she is terrified of complete and utter darkness. I find this infinitely more plausible than the alternative.
The two escape their respective boundaries and meet, of course, and the girl then proceeds to be awesome. Seriously. She is competent, intelligent, kind, fascinated by everything she sees in the world outside her prison, and not the least frightened of daylight, though she can't cope with it because it hurts her eyes and skin after years of dimness. The sequence in which she first gets out into the garden, on a moonlit night, and sees the stars and river and feels the wind for the first time, is one of the most bravura setpieces I have seen Macdonald deliver, one long outpouring of loving, rational, numinous discovery as she creates her own theory of what the lights in the sky are and how the water flows.
The boy, unfortunately, is a young arrogant twit, but at least the narrative knows it, and towards the end he is starting to know it too.
This is one of the better pieces by Macdonald I have read, and is something I had not expected from him: a fantasy without religion and without most of his usual symbolism which nevertheless delivers all his strengths in very high form, and almost none of his weaknesses. I may have to find myself a print copy.
It's quite unusual, because it is filled with numinous but has almost nothing supernatural in it at all. There is one unequivocally magical thing, and one thing that might be but no one is sure, and the rest is just, well, the sort of atmosphere you expect from a fairy tale, and therefore it is one.
A witch of a rather scientific turn of mind obtains two infant children. The boy she raises to know nothing about darkness: he is kept asleep whenever the sun is not in the sky, all things colored black are kept away from him, and his rooms are arranged so that there aren't even any shadows. The girl is kept in an underground prison lit only by one very weak alabaster-shaded lamp, so that, the witch thinks, she will know nothing about light.
A major reason that I keep reading George Macdonald is that in a less intelligent story, she would know nothing about light. As it is, she has spent hours contemplating the single lamp she has, considering every property of it and learning how to use her eyes best to see everything in her rooms by its glow, and so she is terrified of complete and utter darkness. I find this infinitely more plausible than the alternative.
The two escape their respective boundaries and meet, of course, and the girl then proceeds to be awesome. Seriously. She is competent, intelligent, kind, fascinated by everything she sees in the world outside her prison, and not the least frightened of daylight, though she can't cope with it because it hurts her eyes and skin after years of dimness. The sequence in which she first gets out into the garden, on a moonlit night, and sees the stars and river and feels the wind for the first time, is one of the most bravura setpieces I have seen Macdonald deliver, one long outpouring of loving, rational, numinous discovery as she creates her own theory of what the lights in the sky are and how the water flows.
The boy, unfortunately, is a young arrogant twit, but at least the narrative knows it, and towards the end he is starting to know it too.
This is one of the better pieces by Macdonald I have read, and is something I had not expected from him: a fantasy without religion and without most of his usual symbolism which nevertheless delivers all his strengths in very high form, and almost none of his weaknesses. I may have to find myself a print copy.
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Date: 2011-05-24 01:49 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-05-24 09:07 am (UTC)Amazing how much he wrote and published that isn't remembered. The Vicar's Daughter? The Warlock o' Glen Warlock? And somebody's put them all up on-line. Goodie.
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Date: 2011-05-24 11:26 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-05-24 12:03 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-05-24 03:56 pm (UTC)High-minded presses do occasionally reprint his fairy tales, and odd volumes do backwash into bookstores. I hope you do find it on paper.
Nine
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Date: 2011-05-24 05:54 pm (UTC)You can get fairly inexpensive used editions of his fairy tales.
The Golden Key and Other Stories (Fantasy Stories of George MacDonald)
The Wise Woman and Other Stories (Fantasy Stories of George MacDonald)
no subject
Date: 2011-05-24 08:54 pm (UTC)I love George MacDonald beyond all reason. His were some of the books I fell into to tune out everything as a child. I still remember exactly where I was sitting when I read At the Back of the North Wind, the Princess and the Goblin, and the Princess and Curdie.