Margaret Mahy

by Tessa Duder

  Within a year of The Haunting of Barney Palmer, another Margaret Mahy script was being enjoyed by young television viewers in several countries. This was Strangers, a six-part story about four children who belong to a secret society and who witness a robbery of antiques. It was Margaret’s first drama written specially for the medium. Described this time as a ‘mystery thriller’, involving a typical Mahy mix of ‘spying, chases, kidnapping, the police, great danger and fire-eating’, Strangers was commissioned in 1987 by TVNZ head of drama Brian Bell and producer Chris Bailey and the 11-week shoot in Auckland was directed by Peter Sharp. This trio was largely responsible for TVNZ’s strong ‘kidult’ genre reputation built up during the 1970s and maturing with fine series by writers such as Margaret and Ken Catran during the 1980s.

  ‘Margaret’s got a beaut feel for character and New Zealand dialogue,’ Bailey told the Listener. ‘When the children start piecing things together, they find a somewhat intricate arrangement of personalities who are not quite what they seem to be.’ The enthusiastic reviews and a further major prize in New York make it even more lamentable that the political changes of the late 1980s (which resulted in cynical, ratings-driven television and a disastrous effect on locally made children’s programmes) have in effect kept writers like Margaret and Ken Catran and quality New Zealand children’s drama away from the small screen for over a decade.

  Reviews for Strangers were warm, typified by the Dominion Sunday Times’s Colleen Reilly commenting on the writer’s ‘wonderful story’, taking stock-in-trade elements of children’s books and adding to them ‘elements of magic, social comment, sexual satire and humour and easy analyses of physical and psychological disabilities’. Editing, photography, pacing and cutting — all earned high praise, along with the puzzlement of just ‘why TVNZ does “kidult” series so superbly and adult drama series so poorly’.

  Hard on the heels of Strangers came another Mahy book adapted for the small screen, this time a six-part BBC series of her 1986 book, Aliens in the Family. The story, not scripted by Margaret, was relocated to Britain and shot there with English actors. It went to air in New Zealand in September 1988. For some time after 1987 her scripting energies were employed in response to a suggestion, somewhat ahead of its time, by Yvonne Mackay that they should work together on an adult thriller on genetic engineering in the tradition of the BBC series, Edge of Darkness.

  Mackay had earlier read of an American scientist being allowed to do field tests in genetic engineering at the Wallaceville Research Station in New Zealand that he was not permitted to do in the United States; that set her thinking ‘about how an isolated free-market country such as New Zealand could be used by a big multinational company to experiment with human genes … How long will it be, she asks, until “you’ve got a child who has been completely grown from conception till birth in some sort of artificial womb”? Excited by the possibilities of the story, Mackay did further research, including exploring the ethics of exogenesis with experts at Monash University. She then planted the embryo of the story in the imagination of Mahy and waited for it to grow.’

  Margaret took up the idea with great gusto, and what emerged, Mackay told the Listener, ‘was a rather Gothic tale of intrigue about a multinational called Biobrite Corporation, which breeds perfect babies in a secret location in the South Island. When the head of the project is assassinated, agents from a rival corporation are sent to steal Typhon’s research, and the New Zealand government has to deal with the fallout.’

  In retrospect, Margaret says that the idea (that people can be manufactured) is much less fantastic now, when ‘it’s thought that cloning has apparently taken place, though people deny it’, than it was then. ‘In script conferences they accused me of being too tied to the known facts about clonings. I’d say, well I don’t think that could happen and they’d say we’ll make it happen — and in film there’s a certain amount of truth in that.’

  Made with the help of some overseas money, and starring English actors Greg Wise and Alfred Molina, Australian Sophie Lee, as well as leading local stars John Bach and Miranda Harcourt, Typhon’s People was a really successful series, Mackay recalls. ‘We shot it into four one-hour slots; the theme was right up Margaret’s alley and characters she invented were very futuristic, different, almost fantasy. Typhon himself was a man with lots of money, a voyeur of life, not a person who enters life physically himself. As someone who adores beauty, he gets the chance to create a whole series of people who are extraordinary — because he can. He’ll cross animal and plant genes if he has to — and do it in remote New Zealand, in the mountains, underground, and suddenly spring it on the world. It was quite an intellectual puzzle.’ Typhon’s People was sold to a number of countries, including Britain.

  Margaret told the Listener: ‘It’s a very complicated story, because it works in two different ways. It’s making a reference to current advances in technology and yet, basically, it’s still the Frankenstein story. It links into the sort of speculative story of the past, as well as making comments about the possibilities of the future.’ She had read Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time and partly understood it, largely because she listened to the tape while driving round Christchurch. Was she personally opposed to genetic engineering? Not per se, she said, ‘in an answer which ranged over Marie Curie’s discovery of radium, the patenting of bulls in Holland and the dangers of commercial sponsorship of scientific research in universities’, though she did worry about ‘the irresponsible use of the techniques and the reduction in biodiversity as species are replaced by more “desirable” ones. “I think that’s much more alarming than Frankenstein lumbering out of the cave. Some of these ideas were in the script, but they made it too long.” She pauses. “Sometimes, when people ask me a question, I give great long answers. You can see what a disadvantage that is in a television script.”’

  Margaret Mahy was not, in writer Noel O’Hare’s judgement, a natural TV writer. Her mind was too subtle and playful to turn itself easily to a medium that worked in broad brushstrokes. Yet she took a real delight in television and film, and according to Mackay, owned enough videos to start a rental shop, including such titles as Robocop and The Terminator. Margaret admitted to owning ‘quite a lot of violent videos … but the violence is of a particular sort — not that anyone who’s opposed to violence would find my arguments particularly convincing’. She did not worry too much about the violence in science-fiction horror stories, although she occasionally enjoyed the mock violence of the WWF Superstars of Wrestling. ‘It was very funny. Every match had a story of its own. I suppose basically there was a feeling that nobody got hurt, which is something you don’t necessarily find watching Olympic boxing.’

  As well as her first trip to Japan (a three-week tour visiting Tokyo, Sendai and Hokkaido), 1989 brought the publication of The Great White Man-Eating Shark, one of four picture books to appear that year and often singled out as one of her favourites to read aloud.

  She chose a special occasion to talk extensively — and hilariously — about the genesis of this gloriously wicked story of a plain but sharkish boy called Norvin: the prestigious 1989 May Hill Arbuthnot Lecture presented on 23 April at the University of Pittsburgh. Her address was subsequently printed in a collection of these prestigious Arbuthnot lectures and reprinted twice, in A Dissolving Ghost and the updated, third edition of Canadian Sheila Egoff’s classic 1969 collection of essays on children’s literature, Only Connect.

  The Arbuthnot, presented annually by a distinguished author, critic, librarian, historian or teacher of children’s literature, was instituted in 1969. Margaret, at her most exuberant, ranged over the sharkish Norvin, a searching examination of Noel Streatfeild’s Ballet Shoes and her own novel Memory, the relationship between fact and fiction, and her background as the different bookish child who grew into a ‘dis-located’ writer. The opening few minutes provided a fascinating glimpse into how yet another childhood memory combined with an adult experience to produce
a story.

  ‘Two years ago it happened. I found myself in a motel swimming pool in New Mexico. I like swimming. I swim quite purposefully and I had the swimming pool almost to myself — not quite, however. At the shallow end of the pool stood a young man and woman passionately, indeed it sometimes seemed permanently, embraced. I didn’t mind this while I was swimming away from them, but as I swam towards them I found myself filled with the embarrassment of someone who is intruding into a private space, a space which one has no right to violate. My shyness, my wish not to intrude upon this couple, alternated with something less charitable, self-righteous indignation. After all this was not a private space; it was a motel swimming pool and I was swimming backwards and forwards, which everyone knows is the proper thing to do in a swimming pool. Why should I be the one to feel intrusive and guilty? I felt like this swimming away from them. Then swimming towards them I began to think — ah, but am I jealous of their youth and passion and so on, (kicking regularly, surging to the other end of the pool). Yet who wants to be bothered with self-analysis when you are trying to shoot through the water like a silver arrow? As I swam backwards and forwards I began to dream of dressing up as a shark, and gliding, up the pool towards them. I could see myself soundless, menacing, and ruthless, my skin set with sharp close-set denticles, my silent crescent snarl filled with rows and rows of teeth. The lovers would suddenly see my dorsal fin approaching. They would leap out of the water screaming. I would have the whole pool to myself, free to be a silver arrow to my heart’s content. It would all be my space, and deservedly so.

  ‘After I left the pool, I found myself haunted, not by the lovers themselves but by the one who had wanted all the space in the swimming pool. This person usurping the primitive power of the shark, the fin cutting through the water, the huge mouthful of teeth rising up over the back of the boat — this temporary villain I had contemplated becoming, in order to have all the swimming pool to myself. It had in some ways been a tempting and empowering persona, and one I recognised, although I had never met it in that shape before. My temporary shark began to make other sharkish connections. Sharks have been part of my life for a long time. Though shark attacks are almost unknown in New Zealand, we all know the sharks are there. Parents sometimes warn their children, “Don’t go out deep! There might be sharks!” Of course the children already know. Sharks!

  ‘Once, dramatically, I saw a shark caught on a hand line pulled up and left to die on the sand. It was only a small one, but it was a genuine shark. I stood over it watching it drown in the sunny air of a remote North Island beach. When it began to rot away, someone threw it back into the deep water where smaller fish flickered around it for a while eating what was left, but even then its bones still glimmered mysteriously through the water if you knew where to look. It was the year I turned five. It was also the year I learned to swim. I couldn’t write much in those days, but was already a slave to fiction. I talked aloud, waving sticks in the air, conducting unseen orchestras of stories remembered, recreated and invented, stories which I inhabited by temporarily becoming what I was inventing. That shark and the mystery and menace of the glimmering bones and what might have happened (that it might have been my bones glimmering there, I suppose) were part of those stories in those days. I was certainly part of the first nightmare I can ever remember having: that my little sister vanished under the water and after a second or two her sunbonnet came floating to the top. We were living in a caravan in those days. I woke up in the top bunk crying, and bewildered to find that something which only a moment before had seemed utterly real had dissolved into nothing. I think it was the same shark, flesh on its bones once more, that came out of the part to inhabit me and swim up and down the motel swimming pool. It’s just as well I didn’t have my shark suit with me.

  ‘I like to swim in deep water. I like to be where I can’t feel the bottom and I have always liked that from the time I was very small, but there is always the fear of the shark sneaking up from down below grabbing your foot. After you’ve been frightened of it for a while, you begin to tell stories about it, to take it over … and in odd moments of life when you have a little go at being the shark yourself, you recognise something true in what you are doing …’

  ‘As I thought about my temporary sharkness, it suggested a simple story which I found entertaining to write. There are a lot of different sorts of sharks, many of them quite harmless but I wanted to evoke the most sinister of all, the great white man-eating shark … Like most stories I write, I intended it primarily as a story to be told aloud, but it has been produced as a picture book, and tells the story of the villain, a plain boy who happens to be a very good actor and who dressed up as a great white man-eating shark, frightening other swimmers out of the sea so that he could have it all to himself. He acted the part so well that a female shark fell in love with him and proposed something approximating marriage. He fled from her in terror. His duplicity was revealed, and he was too scared to go swimming for a long time after. This is obviously didactic (but, I hope ironically didactic) and seems far from true, since we all know that in real life firstly people do not dress up as sharks, and that the figurative sharks often go undetected because they don’t allow people to see their dorsal fins. But in another way I have told the children all the truth I know from personal experience. Kurt Vonnegut says in the introduction to Mother Night “We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful of what we pretend to be.” That turned out to be the hidden truth of my New Mexico swimming pool experience, but would that have been its hidden truth if I hadn’t already read books like Mother Night, or if I didn’t already know in a personal way that we become what we pretend to be … But the story of the shark is a joke and that is how I expect it to be enjoyed, as a joke and only a joke. It is only in the context of this occasion that I am bothering to tell about the experience compacted in it, offering it as a joke at my own expense and also a part of a network, to a child who may one day read Mother Night or other books whose titles I can’t guess at, and appreciate the truths in those books because they already know them. My own experience was real, funny, momentarily sinister and salutary, all at once, but someone else in that swimming pool on that day might have seen a different, a more anguished truth, might have realised that the lovers were saying goodbye, or that they were meeting after a long separation, or that they were honeymooners, or that the thought of being together without touching was unbearable to them. A thousand other stories were potentially there in the swimming pool with me, but my story was about the person who turned into a shark.’

  The unexpected element of The Great White Man-Eating Shark, she said in a paper on ‘incongruity, uncertainty and superiority’ in humour in 1996, ‘is not so much the final appearance of the real shark (a climax which theoretically should be, and generally is, anticipated even by very young children), but the fact that the shark turns out a female shark who, along with everyone else, fails to penetrate Norvin’s disguise and makes ruthless and inappropriate romantic overtures. This leads to incongruity over and above expectation and, to a degree, at the expense of the traditional climax, so that knowing something of the probable climax ahead of time and then it present heightened with an unexpected modification should theoretically make the story funnier, since you have one tension in terms of an anticipated resolution crossed with a different tension between the expected ending and its modification. Of course this sort of speculation ruins the story, but you are here to have it ruined on your behalf.’

  The following year, at another North American children’s literature celebration, this time in Vancouver, Margaret shared the platform with her eminent American publisher Margaret McElderry, Canada’s much-loved children’s author Janet Lunn and Britain’s award-winning illustrator Shirley Hughes. Between them, they represented 120 years of devoted experience to books for the young. Mahy’s novels, it was stated, were among the finest anywhere being written for teenagers, although McElderry didn’t down-play the problems inherent in th
e young adult genre, with even Margaret’s novels not doing as well as they should in an unpredictable market.

  If, from the mid-1980s, Margaret had been accepting an increasing number of invitations to such international events, this activity was not at the expense of her personal commitment to New Zealand readers, either at children’s literature seminars, in schools or in interviews, such as writer/director Keith Hunter’s for a major TV documentary in 1987 and Sue Kedgley’s for Our Own Country, an important and frank 1989 book that placed Margaret in an A-team of eight New Zealand women writers.

  In 1990 she was chosen by North & South magazine as the only woman of four ‘Living Treasure’ writers, along with playwright Roger Hall, poet Allen Curnow and novelist and broadcaster Ian Cross, who were asked to share ‘their vision of the nation and the 90s’. ‘“I make my stories out of what New Zealand has offered me. And what New Zealand offered me as I was growing up was an enormous concentration of English imagery. It’s a paradox, but it’s the New Zealand paradox.”

  ‘When she was growing up, anything made in New Zealand was supposed to be second rate … Growing up in the 40s and 50s, when we thought we had everything right, and now finding we didn’t leaves Mahy with mixed feelings …“We are living in times when the New Zealand dream is not only under threat, but can be shown to be fallible … Somehow or other an ideal that looked as if it was working during the 40s and 50s has become increasingly inoperable. Institutions, including government, have come so much more hard-nosed and pragmatic to the extent that the ideal seems to have gone.

  ‘“Where once one felt a degree of certainty and optimism, one feels much more anxiety and uncertainty now. But despite all the changes, one doesn’t feel that we’re any closer to achieving the millennium than we were 20 years ago.”

  ‘Perhaps not, but Margaret Mahy is making her contribution towards it. She takes a moral stance, in her words, in favour of goodness and kindness. She uses humour as her weapon.