"A rich, exotic beauty tinged with pathos and melancholy, relieved by sure touches of comedy."
including the trilogy West of the Moon, and Dark Angels (HarperCollins).
Her most recent book is Seven Miles of Steel Thistles (The Greystones
Press), a collection of essays on folklore and fairy tales based
on her award-winning blog of the same name.
Author photograph by Jo Cotterill
To explain the impression it made on me, here’s a bit of
personal history. I began seriously to write stories when I was ten. I’d just
finished all the Seven Chronicles of
Narnia and CS Lewis was dead, so I knew there wouldn't be an eighth. (‘The
Last Battle’ was such a betrayal. The end of Narnia? Nooooooo! And I wasn’t fooled by all that ‘heaven is
Narnia, but better’ stuff, either. There was
no better place than Narnia.)
Aged ten therefore, my first 'book' was called ‘Tales of Narnia’: fan-fic before the
term was invented. My second, a
full-length effort, was an historical novel which owed at least something to
those of Mary Renault whose ‘The Bull
From the Sea’ I had discovered in Ross-on-Wye public library. Then, aged 13
or so, I wrote another ‘book’ of short stories which I called ‘Mixed Magic’ (truly mixed: some not bad,
some terrible) mainly derived from two more beloved writers, Edith Nesbit and
Elizabeth Goudge. When I was 15 or 16 my fourth handwritten manuscript was
heavily influenced by early Alan Garner (children encounter mysterious stranger
in dripping English woods, pursued by minions of the triple Moon Goddess:
standing stones and indifferent golden-faced elves figured largely). But my
fifth effort, written in my late teens and early twenties, by which time I was beginning to find my own voice, owed a
great deal to the enchantment I found in ‘The
Three Royal Monkeys’. I called my
story 'The Magic Forest' and went on
to write a sixth full-length ms (also unpublished) before eventually getting
myself into print with ‘Troll Fell’. And I enjoyed every minute of all of it.
The quality in ‘The
Three Royal Monkeys’ which I endeavoured to reproduce in my fifth opus was
a rich, exotic beauty tinged with pathos and melancholy, relieved by sure
touches of comedy. De la Mare tells the
story of three monkey brothers who, upon their mother’s death, discover they
are heirs to a great kingdom. This is how it begins.
On the borders of the Forest of
Munza-Mulgar lived once an old grey Fruit Monkey of the name of
Mutta-Matutta. She had three sons, the
eldest Thumma, the next Thimbulla, and the youngest, who was a Nizza-neela,
Ummanodda. And they called each other
for short, Thumb, Thimble and Nod. The
rickety, tumble-down old wooden hut in which they lived had been built 319
Munza years before by a traveller, a Portugall or Portingal, lost in the forest
22,997 leagues from home.
The comic exactitude of this, and the strange names,
entranced me. After the ‘Portingal’ dies, a monkey comes to live in the hut. He
finds:
... all manner of strange and
precious stuff half buried – pots for Subbub; pestles and basins for
Manaka-cake, etc; three bags of great
beads, clear, blue and emerald; a rusty musket; nine ephelantoes’ tusks; a bag
of Margarita stones; and many other thing, besides cloth and spider-silk and
dried-up fruits and fishes. He made his
dwelling there and died there. This
Mulgar, Zebbah, was Mutta-Matutta’s great-great-great grandfather. Dead and gone were all.
But one day a royal traveller arrives, Seelem: ‘own brother
to Assasimmon, Prince of the Valley of Tishnar’, accompanied by his
servant. Seelem becomes Mutta-Matutta’s
husband. After thirteen years of marriage he leaves her to return to his
heritage in the beautiful valleys of Tishnar. Seven years later on her
deathbed, she urges her sons to follow their father.
“His country lies beyond and
beyond,” she said, “forest and river, forest, swamp and river, the mountains of
Arrakkaboa – leagues, leagues away.” And
as she paused, a feeble wind sighed through the open window, stirring the
dangling bones of the Portingal, so that with their faint clicking, they too,
seemed to echo, “leagues, leagues away.”
The rest of the book follows the brothers’ difficult and
magical journey. Nod, the youngest, is ‘a Nizza-Neela, and has magic in him’:
he is the possessor of the marvellous Wonder-Stone, which if rubbed when they
are in great danger will bring the aid of Tishnar to them.
And who is Tishnar?
There are many mysteries in this book and she is one of them, with a
whole chapter at the end dedicated to her.
She is ‘the Beautiful One of the Mountains’; ‘wind and stars, the sea
and the endless unknown’. She it is who
instils in the heart a sense of longing; she brings peace and dreams and maybe,
in her shadow form, death.
At any rate, the brothers’ journey is precipitated when Nod
accidentally sets fire to the hut. In the fairytale tradition of the foolish
yet wise younger brother, he makes many mistakes, but he is also the one who
saves his brothers from the predicaments in which they find themselves as they
trek through the deep moonlit snow of the winter forest – escaping the
flesh-eating Minnimuls, tricking the terrifying hunting-cat Immanâla, riding
striped Zevveras – the ‘Little Horses of Tishnar’ – finding friends and losing
one another, quarrelling and making up.
It’s a deeply serious quest, an epic journey with no hint of
tongue in cheek despite the fact that the protagonists are monkeys. Delicately, de la Mare explores the
transience of beauty, the poignancy of loss, the immanence of death: and his
characters blaze all the more brightly in their course across this impermanent
world. There’s a lovely chapter in which Nod meets and loses his heart to a
beautiful Water Midden (water maiden) to whom he entrusts his
Wonder-Stone. Here is the song he
overhears her singing ‘in the dark green dusk’ beside a waterfall:
Bubble, Bubble,
Swim to see
Oh, how beautiful
I be,
Fishes, fishes,
Finned and fine,
What’s your gold
Compared with mine?
Why, then, has
Wise Tishnar made
One so lovely,
One so sad?
Lone am I,
And can but make
A little song,
For singing’s sake.
If you haven’t read this book before and you’re looking for
something at least as good as ‘The Hobbit’, this is for you.
