You may have seen the recent Facebook meme sweeping the newsfeeds of the over-educated/underemployed set: 15 Books in 15 minutes. Basically, one names the first 15 books that spring to mind, with the idea that those are the most influential and important to the individual in question.
After mentally scrolling through the recently-read (like
2666, which is every bit as good as all the
slavering reviews would have you believe) and the big name (Proust, Joyce, Nabokov), I realized that a lot of the books that I remember best and think about most often are the ones I read between ages 8 to 14. I know there’s a whole cult of grown-up YA enthusiasts out there, and blogger Lizzie Skurnick has a
book coming out about rereading preteen girl classics. But worried that revisiting my childhood novels would ruin my foggy memories, I generally avoided the kids’ section at the Carnegie Public in favor of trying, yet again, to slog through
Infinite Jest.
My particular poison was always of the historical-fantasy-adventure variety. First came the Narnia books (the Christian overtones of which totally escaped me as a child), then an intense devotion to Lloyd Alexander’s
Prydain Chronicles. I didn’t just like them; I believed them. Eventually I knew I would be able to figure out some sort of spell or portal to get myself into those magical kingdoms. Life in the suburbs of Raleigh (which was all I knew existed) was just too unbearably boring. I was in a constant state of anticipation, just waiting until Aslan showed up to offer me a lift on his big golden haunches. Reading Philip Pullman’s
His Dark Materials trilogy last winter, I was actually glad they hadn’t been published yet when I was 12 because I know I would have been obsessed with them to the point of despair – a fated and passionate-yet-chaste romance always sealed the deal for me; I would have been in love with Will 4-eva.
After Alex posted her 15 books (which are pretty similar to mine anyway – all through middle and high school we would trade books or read them at the same time so as to have someone intelligent to discuss them with), and I became lost in my reverie of YA favorites, one title in particular drifted into my brain and wouldn’t let go until I marched into the brightly-painted children’s area of the library, checked it out, and read it nonstop that night.
I remember seeing the eerie black cover in the Douglas Elementary library and being too scared to check it out in second grade; I don’t think I worked up the nerve until probably fourth (sadly I can't find an image of the spooky original cover). I read it so many times those last two years that I considered stealing it when I left for middle school. Even though I hadn’t thought of it in ages, as soon as the idea hit me I remembered the author’s name and oddly-spelled title down to the letter:
The Perilous Gard by Elizabeth Marie Pope.
Pope was of that particularly well-heeled variety of children’s authors; she was in the class of 1940 at Bryn Mawr and went on to get a Ph.D. in English Literature from Johns Hopkins.
The Perilous Gard is set in 1558, just before Elizabeth I came to power, and full of the nerdy sort of historical detail only a particularly scholarly author would include. I thought I had caught an error at one point; a character refers to the “fields of corn” behind the castle. Ha, thought I, they totally did not know about maize in England until the 1600s! Of course a minimal amount of research proved me wrong; corn is a generic term for any grain in British English (our corn, maize, is called sweetcorn).
Much like
Mists of Avalon by Marion Zimmer Bradley (whom Pope presumably knew to some extent, as they were both founding members of the Society for Creative Anachronism),
The Perilous Gard concerns the conflict between Christianity and older pagan belief. Kate, the main character, is a smart and practical girl who regards the old stories as superstition at first. Unlike MZB’s hippied-out Powerful Mystic Moon Womyn vision, though, in Pope’s book the Christians are the good guys. The narrative is based on the Scottish ballad Tam Lin, and the Fairy People are scary as hell.
Not that you are going to rush out and purchase this book or anything, but I still don’t want to spoil all the plot details – suffice it to say that the main character, Kate, is trying to save her friend Christopher from the Fairy People, who are going to burn him alive as a sacrifice on All Hallow’s Eve. She ends up living among them as a servant in their lair of tunnels deep underground while scheming how to free them both.
So this is where I get to my actual point: what makes this book a kids’ book? Because it is fucking dark – literally, too, ha! When Kate first joins the other human servants, she is led to a pitch-black cave chamber and thinks the snorting and flopping sounds she hears are made by sleeping pigs. It turns out the three other women are just drugged into a complete stupor 24/7. The Green Lady (the Fairy Queen, basically) tries to get Kate to accept the narcotic potion, too, warning her ominously that it will make “the weight” easier to bear.
Later, looking up at the rock ceiling of the servants’ chamber (which “hung in great laps and folds and waves and pendulous bulges of stone”), Kate experiences her first attack of the weight:
And then suddenly all she knew of the place as it really was came rushing over her. The earth and the stone; the blind passages worming their way under the ground; the slippery paths with the slime under foot; the cold air and the darkness; and always, everywhere, pressing about pit and cavern and passage, the incalculable weight of the rock. Her breath was coming quickly now, in light shallow gasps, as if she had no room to draw it. The fear that the cave roof was bulging and collapsing had been a fear of appearances, something she could argue away. The agonized horror she felt now was of the reality of the Hill itself – the tons and tons of actual earth and stone lying above her, closing down on her, shutting her in. It was like some suffocating dream of being buried alive; or rather it was like the moment of awakening from that dream to find that it was true.I don’t know about you but that’s one of the best descriptions of intense depression I think I’ve ever read (except instead of rock, of course, it’s Life in general that’s the weight). Her fairy-boss is somewhat sympathetic and entreats her again to let the Lady take away the weight. “ ‘It will return…at its own time.’”
Yet this book is considered appropriate for children despite its heavy themes (don’t forget that whole human sacrifice element). What then are the requirements of YA lit compared to grown up books? No sex, nothing too violent, clear language with no stylistic trickery a la our dear departed DFW. Protagonists who are children or adolescents (although certainly “real” books can have young central characters). Most importantly, perhaps, is an unambiguous moral tone, Good vs. Evil. We can’t be confusing our young ‘uns with mixed messages about right and wrong, and that sort of reductiveness is the real reason (in my view) that most kids’ books don’t qualify as Great Literature, no matter how classic.
But reading this book as an adult, I think the Good vs. Evil battle is more complex and subtle than I grasped in fourth grade, although I apparently grasped
something that made me latch on to the memory of reading it for over ten years. The struggle is, on the surface, that whole pagan vs. Christian thing. But Christianity only ever helps Kate in the most practical, least spiritual ways possible. At a crucial moment, the Green Lady tries one final time to lull her into senselessness with an incantation. Kate maintains her presence of mind by squeezing a metal cross necklace so tightly that her clenched hand fills with blood. The real victory is her intelligence and logic prevailing over the mysticism and eerie beauty of the Fairy Folk. In the end, the Fairy Folk even become slightly sympathetic; there’s a sense that they are doomed to retreat further into the mythical realm and eventually die out altogether. It’s really kind of sad, especially since some of them actually had begun to show her kindness. But there’s an air of historical inevitability to the conclusion. Logic just wins out in the end.
I guess that’s sort of what happened to me, too. At some point, probably much later than is normal or healthy, I realized that no closet door was going to transport me to Narnia, and that Taran and Eilonwy were just characters invented by some old dude. Around the same time I realized that reading fantasy books was totally lame, socially speaking. After that it was all
Catcher in the Rye and
Catch-22 and etc (although I do have to wonder why dystopian novels like
1984 and
Brave New World get a free pass instead of being tarred with the genre brush). And I’m pretty fine with that, although if I am missing out on some awesome fantasy books for grownups, by all means let me know. I kind of doubt it-- though I have recently discovered that
fantasy art calendars are hilariously amazing. For some reason, fantasy stories just seem to work better when they have the streamlined language and morals (and no tacky sex, ugh) of children’s books. I’m not necessarily sure I’m any smarter now than I was at age 12 anyway. It’s hard to say whether I would have enjoyed
The Perilous Gard as much if I didn’t already have that strong nostalgic pull. I do know that if I have kids, this will definitely be on their bookshelf.
