Margaret Mahy

by Tessa Duder

  For the rest of the 1990s, Margaret was published mostly by Hamish Hamilton, though there was a long backlist with Dent, which still existed as part of the Orion Book Group.

  Pleased as she was to be with Hamish Hamilton, Margaret looked back nostalgically to the ‘calm’ early days with Dent. ‘Simple decisions’ seemed to have vanished. ‘The days when an author wrote one novel a year for the same publisher have gone. A lot of authors today apparently operate between several companies, no doubt playing one off against the other to a certain extent. I don’t feel at ease with this, although I seem to have wound up doing it. Even if through an agent. I miss the familial relationship I used to have [with Dent] and find it harder to come to truly fair decisions. Dent still does very well by my backlist and yet I can never quite ally myself with Dent in the simple way I used to.’

  Margaret enjoyed a long, grateful and unusually close relationship with her agent, maintained by technology and her own visits to Sussex, although Vanessa never made the journey to New Zealand. The pair talked and faxed at length over ideas and, later, editing possibilities. ‘At times I think she becomes irritated with my lack of incisiveness,’ Margaret told North & South. The fax machine was ‘a wonderful way of getting in touch with Vanessa’, but it had its disadvantages. ‘I used to send stories away by mail and they’d take five days to get there, a day or two to read, then a few days to come back. Now she can get back in touch much more quickly. There is no time for a break.’

  Published in 1992, the second Hamish Hamilton novel Underrunners earned Margaret her fifth Esther Glen Medal in New Zealand and enthusiastic reviews in Britain. Jan Mark, who had had reservations about Memory, found Underrunners ‘sympathetic, unsentimental, effortlessly funny, this is high quality Mahy’. A contemporary story about family violence and the vulnerability of children, it was, more than any other of her books to date, a Lyttelton story. The background came from a time when Margaret was doing domestic work at a home for disturbed children.

  During a promotional tour in Australia, she told an interviewer: ‘In my story there is a child who escapes from a home like that. She gets out because she knows her father is looking for her and she believes the authorities will think what a nice man he is and actually she’s scared of him — he’s quite a violent person. At the end of the story he kidnaps her and the boy through whom the story is told.

  ‘I had a version where at one stage the boy is sitting across the table from this man and the man puts a gun in his own mouth.’ (Rather than the only slightly less shocking act of pointing it at his head and ‘squinting down the barrel’.)

  ‘Emotion has carried him into this — he’s sick of himself, he’s sick of the world. And at one stage the boy says to the girl: He [her father] was going to kill himself. She says “I wish he had”.’ (The street-wise child Winola says, ‘He didn’t last time.’) ‘But in the end I think I backed off because I think I was being gratuitous, perhaps inappropriately putting the view of some aspects of the world that I have on to other people … I suppose the story of Underrunners is set up so that you think it’s ideal for this girl to be adopted by the boy’s father — that’s the boy’s idea anyway — so that she can become like his sister and be safe and away from this rather dreadful family that she has, the father in particular. But of course it doesn’t happen — it ends up with her galloping over the peninsula on a wild horse … I wanted to put her up against some fairly formidable things in her life. I didn’t want to suggest in the story that she comes out unscathed.’

  The setting for Underrunners came from Margaret’s awareness of 80 hectares of nearby waste land which people didn’t know what to do with; she later (‘as an imaginative act’, she told her doubtful lawyer) purchased the whole peninsula of Manson’s Point. She also had no idea what to do with it —‘it seemed to be a heck of a lot of money to spend on a place to walk the dog’— though before long she and the family embarked on an extensive tree-planting programme to hold back the erosion, and built a house there for the growing family of grandchildren and their parents. ‘There’s not a lot of water on it, which is partly why the ground cracks underneath and forms these tunnels or underrunners. I’d known about this for a while but somehow that word concentrated it and it seemed to me like a metaphor for a lot of things including family life which sometimes look very secure on the surface but has all sorts of mysterious tunnels underneath.’ Here is the Manson’s Point peninsula as described, with her very characteristic use of personification, in the first chapter of Underrunners:

  There, almost under his feet … lay the great rambling house where the Featherstonehaugh family had once lived. Beyond the house and its well-grown trees, Gideon Bay nudged a sly elbow of water and mud into the land, and on the other side of that rippling muscle of water lay a long, brown, barren, brooding peninsula, a giant, diving towards the mouth of the bay, aiming at the open sea beyond. Tris always looked for this uncouth figure, back humped, shoulders twisted with inhuman muscles, steep sides eroded into ribs. The outstretched arms were welded into one powerful arm, but the weak fingerless hands dissolved into the sea. There, between those hands, you could see, if you knew where to look for it, a little grey box. The diving man was desperately holding treasure above the water, and looked, from where Tris stood, as if he were losing his grasp on it. The treasure that appeared to be sliding down a slope into the water was Tris’s house.

  Two picture books and the rollicking comic novella, The Greatest Show Off Earth, appeared in 1994, but this was also the year when two major television projects came to fruition. The four one-hour episodes of Typhon’s People finally went to air in September 1994, followed by animated versions of four of Margaret’s most popular stories: The Boy with Two Shadows, The Witch in the Cherry Tree, Keeping House and The Three Legged Cat. This quartet followed an earlier film of The Great White Man-Eating Shark, produced in 1991 by Wellington’s Gnome Productions; after a well-received screening as a cinema short in New Zealand, it had won several awards in film festivals in New York, Ottawa and Birmingham. Requiring no fewer than 3400 drawings to faithfully reflect the book’s tone and original illustrations, and with voice-overs by leading Wellington actor Ray Henwood, Shark cost $107,000. This was low-budget by world standards, but it was judged a high-quality product.

  Work on the further four Mahy stories began in 1993. With a total budget of $500,000 projected, including $250,000 funding from New Zealand On Air and $150,000 from the New Zealand Film Commission, it was, according to producer Shaun Bell, the largest initiative of its kind to be undertaken in New Zealand, with markets expected in the United States, Britain, Canada and Europe.

  Despite their eight-minute length, these four videos took around 23 people from Gnome and TOONZ Animation in Auckland — background and character artists, animation camera operators and sound engineers — some 11 months to produce. Some 3800 finished pieces of artwork were required for each story. For the director Euan Frizzell, the artistic challenge was to flesh out the illustrator’s images to correspond to the narration. ‘It’s similar to directing an actor, in that the performance must be convincing … Mahy’s sound, dramatic sense of structure makes her stories easy to translate into a film medium. She takes an ordinary problem, adds an imaginative element and comes up with an enchanting mix. It’s satisfying for a director to deal with stories like that.’

  Margaret’s next major novel, The Other Side of Silence, appeared in 1995. Rose Lovell-Smith, commenting on the judges’ decision to shortlist the novel but not award it the 1997 Esther Glen Medal nor the New Zealand Post senior fiction prize, would later write, ‘perhaps by now it is hard for judges to keep assessing Mahy fairly. The temptation to judge her against the standard of her own best work must be very strong.’ First readings can be deceptive, and may result in a real failure to do a book justice, ‘especially likely, of course, if an author has changed ground or shifted focus and so does not meet established expectations’. As one British journalist wrote in 1995, reviewin
g The Other Side of Silence, ‘In a brilliant series of novels from The Haunting to Memory, Mahy seemed always to be pushing to the limits what could be dared and what could be achieved in the young adult novel. Later books, such as Dangerous Spaces, Underrunners and now The Other Side of Silence, seem to have retreated in age level and ambition from the high water mark of the starkly uncompromising Memory.’ Margaret herself recognised that with Memory she had reached a plateau and, until The Other Side of Silence in 1995, had stayed there for quite a while.

  The book began as a novel for people of about 15; that she was ‘encouraged to bring it down a bit’ reinforces the unease and ambivalence about the young adult genre, and the constant urging by cautious publishers, and not only to Margaret, to write for the more traditional and predictable market of ‘children’ between, say, eight and 12. But this ‘traditional Gothic story’, as Margaret describes it, and the only one of her novels told in the first person, is still a disturbing read in which the characters are taken right to the brink: the elderly Miss Credence is one of her most sinister creations. Consider what Margaret herself has called an ‘absolutely ferocious moment in the story’, one she remembers writing ‘and thinking, although it’s so casual, the implication of the years that had gone before is horrific’. Miss Credence, the bitter daughter of a famous professor who has kept her own mute, illegitimate daughter chained and locked in a tower since birth, tells the elective mute, the distraught Hero,

  ‘I thought of killing her when she was born … all I would have had to do was to hold a pillow over her face for a few minutes, and it would have changed everything. I could have planted her out under one of the trees and no one would ever have known. But there you are. I was sentimental. I didn’t do it. Well, not very often and never enough to kill her. Only now and then, to stop her crying. And so she lived.’

  After a harrowing climax, Miss Credence lives on too, in hospital and utter silence, having, in volcanic anger, trashed the sitting room full of memorabilia of her father’s powerful presence and shot herself (but not comprehensively enough) in the head with his gun. Hero, the child for whom silence was a weapon, her way of being famous in a famous, talkative, gifted family, now chooses to talk. Wiser than her ambitious mother, she destroys both the manuscript and the electronic version of her story of the dramatic events at Squintum House.

  ‘If things were fair, all stories would be anonymous. I don’t mean that the storyteller wouldn’t get paid for telling. But there would be no names on the covers of books, or interviews on television … just the story itself, climbing walls, sliding from tree to tree, and stealing secretly through the forests of the world, real, but more than real. Set free from the faults that go with its author’s name. Made true! But of course things aren’t fair. They never have been.’

  Margaret speculates that, before she burned her book, setting that lion free, Hero ‘had actually seen the lion. Now she and the story were, at some level, one and the same thing. Through writing and reading she had reached a point where she would never need to make up a story again, because she was now at one with the platonic form with which we continually dance, inventing one another as we whirl. Have I invented stories or have the stories invented me?’

  The kernel of the story was reading an article by Russ Rhymer in the New Yorker about Genie, a closet child who had been kept tied to a bed in an upstairs room, until her mother, leaving home, took the almost completely mute child to Welfare. ‘She had had an unimaginable life for about twelve years — I think she could say about three words. One of the interesting things which happened was that there was a great argument among academic people about who was going to study her.’

  Margaret has described The Other Side of Silence as ‘a movement forward’, and its many deliberate references to other books as ‘a dangerous thing to do’. Embarking on ‘a story whose time had come’, hearing later of Morris Gleitzman’s Blabbermouth, the Jodie Foster film Nell, Jill Paton Walsh’s novel Knowledge of Angels (to which she might also have added the New Zealand film The Piano), she was aware of the many influences at work: Genie’s story, Gothic horror stories, anecdotes of the strange house in the wood, the child kept in solitary confinement in the locked room upstairs, Jane Eyre.

  These became mixed in ‘with my own beginnings … the childhood memories of picking my way from one tree to another along the lines of wattles and pines that defined the boundaries of my father’s timber yard, talking to imaginary animals, but of course really talking to myself … I seemed to have acknowledged, at last, that puddle-drinking child I had been ashamed of for so many years, but I changed her into the cloudy, mysterious heroine who had also been with me for a long time. There they are, both of them in The Other of Silence, and along with the heroine’s Mowgliish preoccupation goes an adult acknowledgement of what a wolf child like Mowgli, a human brought up with human language, might really have been like … the underlying story — the deep story — was never mine in the first place, but existed like some platonic form.’

  In New Zealand Books, Rose Lovell-Smith carefully and usefully assessed not only the novel itself but its place in Margaret’s output and career. She admitted her initial reaction: ‘that Mahy had run out of ideas and was starting to recycle material’. The mysterious old house, the house always under repair, the large, talkative family, the flamboyant older sister, the black-cloaked old woman, the capable but insensitive mother, even those old pirates and memory itself (to which could well be added the secretive, observant teenage girl who is industriously writing her own book, who will be a writer) — all had appeared at least once before — so that ‘the reader is invited into a delusion that Mahy has started to repeat herself, that she’s rehashing old themes: in short that she’s lost the old magic’.

  But ‘being invited so to think, the reader is as securely in the grip of the old witch as ever. The intentions of this book are self-reflective, even backwards-looking. A second, and related, point is that this book goes further into a pattern — already recognisable in earlier books for older children — of play with a Christchurch setting, play with things that might be known to readers (or guessed by them) about Mahy’s own life story. Ideas are raised about famous mothers; mothers who wield power through words, stories, and books’ evasive or missing fathers; daughters who want to be special or different; mothers who lovingly keep their daughters in cages; and mothers’ memories of younger selves — those heavenly creatures who once wanted so much to fly like birds.’

  The main theme of Hero as ‘another daughter-victim’ is explored through her beginning to believe ‘partly from watching her mother Annie and partly from learning the story of Miss Credence and her famous father — that fame is always something which the famous steal from those around them …’ (a recurrent Mahy concern). ‘Mahy would probably prefer it that all stories were indeed anonymous, so that people would not read her books (as I’ve just read this one) with an eye to her private and professional life and how they might be being mythologised in a book. But self-reference and a local setting both direct the reader towards precisely this kind of reading. Yet Mahy is also pointing out, modestly, that a story is always a gift — partly from “real life”, partly from the literary and dream worlds of “true life”. It is not something she creates single-handed. She is merely the noisy one, it seems, among other gifted children who choose, as this book hints, not to lift up public voices and break their private silence.’

  The Other Side of Silence, Lovell-Smith concluded, ‘may be less compelling than some of her earlier books for young adults or older children precisely to the extent that it is more interesting as a mother’s, and a mature artist’s, reflection on a noisy life’s work’.

  The next major novel, 24 Hours, would not appear for another five years. This was partly because Margaret was spending more time with her growing grandchildren, especially Penny’s family of five, four girls and a boy, living in the new house on nearby Manson’s Point. Added to the daily writing routine, the sp
eeches and letters, were such grandmotherly duties as taking children to and from school, driving them to after-school lessons in Christchurch, going for walks with the black standard poodle (first Cello and then, and currently, Baxter) sessions of reading, dancing, drawing and singing —‘unrepentantly’— those old George Formby and Arthur Askey songs of her youth, storytelling (‘Tell me a story with your mouth!’ she was once ordered), family meals and games.

  Margaret is unequivocal about her grandmotherly role and the time she is prepared to devote to it: ‘I, myself, want to be an active part of the lives of my grandchildren. I want to be part of their daily scenery and want them to be part of mine. I want them to remember me bending over their cots, mumbling as I change their napkins. I want to praise their advances into the world, applaud their first words, tell them stories and listen to them when they begin to tell their own. I want to pin pictures especially drawn for me on my walls. Of course there are elements of unconscious egotism in all this, for one’s family represents part of self, but self successfully set free from self — detached, launched and independently at large in the word. And there are other possibilities implicit in the relationship — chances that I think my own grandparents must have totally missed out on … my days are often built around their necessities, but not in any self-sacrificing way. They are moving into a wide life from which I am currently retiring, and my retreat (I hope) somehow supports their advance. Any mention of retreat sounds negative, but this is not the case … For I may be stepping back, but my advancing grandchildren are not the only ones involved in self-exploration and growth. I find their presence in my everyday life part of a continuous process of realignment with the world at large. Apparently eternal verities are regularly revealed as much more relative and hesitant than one had supposed them to be. The world is flux, flow and fruitfully fermenting doubt.’