Margaret Mahy

by Tessa Duder

  Margaret’s abilities as a shrewd and particularly well-informed critic were also noticeable in a piece she wrote on the Harry Potter phenomenon for the Listener in 2000.

  ‘Walk into any bookshop and there they are — the Harry Potter books — three titles prominently displayed alongside adult best sellers by the likes of Tom Clancy and Wilbur Smith, and the latest chapter in the career of Hannibal Lecter. And, according to gossip, only the indignation of intellectuals prevented Harry Potter from winning last year’s Whitbread Award over the Seamus Heaney translation of Beowulf …

  ‘… in the case of the Harry Potter books these venerable oppositions (folk tale, old-fashioned school story) are given a singular spin; for Hogwarts, the school Harry Potter attends, is a magicians’ school … the traditional school morality is merged with the folk tale and the supernatural joke and, so far at least, good magic has been triumphant. The books contain a variety of traditional satisfactions, which, for all the freshness and the originality of the stories, are highly recognisable.

  ‘That being so, just why have they been so very successful? I imagine I am not the only reader astonished not so much at their success, but at the degree of it. On the one hand there is enormous pleasure in seeing good books enjoy the sort of victory achieved up to now apparently only by books such as those in the Goosebumps series. But the Harry Potter books, whether one is a fervent fan or not, are books for competent readers. They tell active, entertaining, ironical stories, using sophisticated situations and language. Such books do have their recognised place in the reading world, but, unless they have been turned into films or a TV series, booksellers don’t display them beside sure-fire bestsellers such as the latest Jackie Collins or Jeffrey Archer — so one must conclude that the Harry Potter books have become, not only stories to be read, but objects that it is desirable to possess and display …

  ‘The Harry Potters are probably successful because of the happy combination of several interacting systems. First, the strengths of the stories themselves, reinforced by the publisher’s willingness to back up its product and subsequent ardour when it came to capitalising on success. The right publicity generates a momentum that in turn fuels more ambitious publicity. Children in the playground discuss these books, and recommend them to one another. Parents and teachers begin to read and enjoy them, too …

  ‘Yet, in spite of everything, there is still something enigmatic about Harry Potter’s success. Perhaps some sort of intangible element of luck comes into the equation. Successful formulas along with lively individual variation, exciting stories, humour and strong publicity are all part of the phenomenon. But they also seem to have been the right books for the right moment. Why not? In the end one can only rejoice that good books are enjoying such success and are being read so enthusiastically. Long may it last!’

  Her own next book, published in 2000, marked the beginning of a new publishing relationship. HarperCollins UK emerged as the successful bidder in a Vanessa Hamilton auction for Margaret’s first serious novel in five years, a decidedly contemporary and teenage work set firmly in urban Christchurch. Like The Other Side of Silence, 24 Hours was shortlisted for the New Zealand Post awards, even designated an ‘Honour Book’, but was edged out as a winner, reinforcing Rose Lovell-Smith’s concern that any Margaret Mahy novel was now possibly being judged primarily against her own best work.

  For an Internet ‘teen read’ site, she wrote: ‘There is nothing directly autobiographical about this story. All the same, there have been times when I have gone out to visit friends and progressed from one party to another and have had a similar feeling of timelessness to the one that Ellis experiences along with a feeling of space and adventure. In a matter of a few hours I would experience exhilaration, join in with cheerful conversations, see people in the process of falling in love and witness great arguments and fights (I’ve never actually been a fighter myself — fighting tires me out and I’m not an efficient fighter anyway — but I have certainly seen other people have great complicated goes at one another). By the time ordinary life asserted itself once more, I would feel I had already lived for a while in some other lifetime, that I had even taken over someone else’s life. I am not recommending this sort of experience, but that in writing this particular story I was remembering the quality of it all.’

  The research for 24 Hours had been unusual and curious, including ‘some research into the work an undertaker does. I talked to undertakers and asked them a lot of questions and I read one or two books. I soon had more information than I either needed or used. On the whole, the stories I write do not involve me in a great deal of research, since I am inventing the story and can set my own rules to a considerable extent. Still, one has to make anything one writes as convincing as possible, and there are times when research is essential.’

  Then there was the tattoo, which caused some surprise, amusement and media comment. ‘It’s just a small tasteful tattoo on my shoulder. I had it done while I was working on my new book 24 Hours. The lead character, Ellis, is tattooed at one point and I wanted to know what it felt like, so I could write about it more accurately. My stories come mainly from my imagination, but I like to get things right. So I’m prepared to do a bit of research, particularly when I want my characters to have experiences I haven’t had myself. People looking at my tattoo will probably assume it’s a stick-on. But it’s the real thing. I’ve suffered for my art.’

  Car chases, however, like the one over the Port Hills vividly described in 24 Hours, were a step too far. ‘I’ve never been in a car chase,’ she reassured one interviewer. ‘But I’ve driven over those hills many, many times, sometimes quite quickly — especially when I’ve been in a hurry to catch a plane at Christchurch Airport. And, of course, I’ve watched many films with car chases.’

  24 Hours abounds, as always, in folklore references and literary allusions (the hero comes to think of himself as ‘Ellis in Wonderland’), reinforcing her insistence that no writer works in isolation. ‘There’s a romantic notion of the writer as a singular, solitary essence. But I’ve always regarded myself as part of a wider network of writing. I’ve been influenced by everything I’ve read and I enjoy making references to other books.

  ‘When I began 24 Hours I called the hero Doyle. Then I became intrigued by the Lewis Carroll parallels. In the flats of university students I’ve known there’s often been an element of Carroll-like craziness or surrealism, with odd characters coming and going at all hours. A tumbledown motel seemed quite an amenable location for my novel.’

  In 2000, too, Margaret’s developing secondary career as an essayist and speech-writer received due recognition, when Wellington’s Victoria University Press (not, significantly, either of the universities she attended) decided to publish A Dissolving Ghost — Essays and More, as part of an intermittent essay series begun with James Bertram, Ian Wedde, Bill Manhire and Greg O’Brien. Four of her major international speeches were included, along with Murray Edmond’s 1987 Landfall interview, an adult short story of the magic realism, post-modern kind (The Illustrated Traveller’s Tale) and her memorable contribution to Marilyn Duckworth’s anthology on sisters. Curiously, none of the essays was attributed to a date, place or audience, and others, such as her 1989 Signal ‘Joining the Network’ piece or the 1991 ‘Surprising Moments’ speech in Auckland or the after-dinner speech at Harvard University in 1996 were regrettably absent.

  ‘Has anyone,’ asked David Hill in his Listener review, ‘summarised Mahy’s work as well as Mahy?… I don’t think I’ve ever read a selection of explorations/explanations where the writer’s voice comes through so clearly. The rhythms and cadences of these sentences are Margaret Mahy speaking: wondering and sometimes wandering, enthusiastic and delighted, making discoveries, connecting, connecting, connecting.

  ‘So it’s not surprising that she goes on a bit. Several of these pieces are 8000–10,000 words long. Through them, Mahy whizzes like a proton in a particle accelerator, shooting off, whirling abou
t, inhabiting three places at once, disappearing then reappearing nearby. Just occasionally, you wish she’d stay still for a second, so you can get a good look at where she is. Zip — she’s onto a favourite 1910 kids’ book. Flick — she’s discussing the semantic significance of “Levin”. Ping — she’s making simultaneous reference to mini-black holes and creationist science.

  ‘Right from the Foreword, she has so much fun.’

  Reviewer Greg O’Brien, writing in New Zealand Books, was unequivocal about his enthusiasm for a volume ‘in which Mahy’s intelligence explodes in the brilliant black and white of her prose. It’s a book full of wisdom, as just about any paragraph taken at random would prove:

  ‘“We build ourselves as we grow. Our physical structure is the basis around which we extend a mental and spiritual structure, of which imagination is a vital part. Structure is the key word here, for suppose that imagination, so far from being the shapeless, vague and dreamy cloud we often feel it to be, has a potential beautiful, intricate and possibly unknowable structure of its own …”

  ‘A Dissolving Ghost hints at art’s paradoxical nature as something inherently structural yet also, by necessity, shapeless and free form.

  ‘Mahy’s tone and manner in the book are, generally, speculative … Needless to say, [she] is frequently, brilliantly funny and has an ever-vigilant eye and ear for the right word or phrase which, just once in a while, can open up elusive areas of experience like a magic key. She can be magnificently incisive and impassioned at the same time … she tackles with humility and aplomb such big themes as faith, loss, memory and truth … Unfailingly, she avoids the essayist’s trap of staring admiringly into their own mirror and the pitfall essay-writing novelists often fall into of sounding like they are grooming themselves for their imminent Booker Prize acceptance speech.

  ‘Mahy is certainly scholarly in the thoroughness of her attentions, but mercifully she doesn’t conform to Anne Carson’s definition of a scholar as “someone who takes a position … who knows how to limit himself to the matter at hand”. Mahy is a thinker of the perambulatory, discursive kind. With the intelligence (as well as the personable nature and poise) of a cat in a tree, she leaps from branch to branch.

  ‘My only reservation is that I wanted the book to be bigger. As it is, it certainly doesn’t feel like it has exhausted or defined the outer boundaries of Mahy’s creative territory — in fact the book sticks pretty much to Mainstream Mahy: her unfailingly wise utterances about story, character, language and the imaginative life. The points she makes are crucial — but now that she has made them, she should be encouraged to range more freely in whatever direction she feels inclined.

  ‘At the conclusion of A Dissolving Ghost I found myself making a list of the essay topics I would like Mahy to get on with: pirates, the regional landscape, the body in children’s literature, the use of trees, the art of librarianship, snow, Christchurch, the South Island, the mass media.

  ‘In fact, all the above subjects do surface in the assembled essays. But maybe if the audience wasn’t sitting so expectantly in front of her — as they were on the occasion of so many of the pieces in this book — then we would see Mahy stretching out more.

  ‘“We build ourselves as we grow.” Mahy as a writer is still, happily, in a state of construction, building and growing a body of work of paramount importance to both children and adults. She is one of the line of New Zealand geniuses that also includes Janet Frame, Rita Angus, Katherine Mansfield and Frances Hodgkins. She is a makar, in the truest sense. A person of vision. A gem.’

  Early in 2001 the Children’s Literature Foundation, organisers of the Storylines Festival, decided to nominate Margaret for the world’s most prestigious prize for children’s writers, the Hans Christian Andersen Award, often known as the ‘Little Nobel’. This had not happened before because nomination required membership of the organising body, the Swiss-based International Board on Books for Young People (IBBY). For a volunteer organisation this came at a hefty price — around $3,700 annually to join IBBY, and about $1,500 to cover nomination fees and preparation, packaging and posting of nine sets of the required books and documentation.

  In 2001, however, a consortium of Margaret’s New Zealand publishers (HarperCollins, Penguin and Scholastic), plus the New Zealand Book Council, the New Zealand Reading Association and two anonymous donors was put together, beginning an ongoing and increasingly involved membership of IBBY, which is the only global children’s literature organisation. International president Dr Peter Schneck, from Austria, visited Auckland for the 2004 Storylines Festival and in 2007 the foundation will be hosting International Children’s Book Day. Because of Margaret, New Zealand’s status in the organisation was assured from the start.

  The 2002 Hans Christian Andersen Award went to British writer Aidan Chambers, and the 2004 award to Irish writer Martin Waddell, but the foundation is committed to a third nomination for 2006. It is aware that Margaret’s nomination might never overcome a possible Eurocentric and American leaning, but there are still major benefits from the IBBY involvement in general exposure of New Zealand children’s writing generally, and Margaret specifically, on the world stage.

  In recognition of her growing reputation as an essayist, Margaret was appointed judge of Landfall’s 2002 essay competition. Her judge’s report was in itself a meaty mini-essay on the art of essay writing:

  ‘There is something both necessary yet fundamentally unfair about competitions. They work so well in some ways. They focus attention on areas that might otherwise be overlooked or even ignored, and there is value in comparing one contender with another, even if, at the same time, one knows that true comparison is often impossible. Some of these essays just ought not to be compared with others. Their intentions are entirely different. Some give lucid accounts of people and events. They do not intend to define or speculate. Their value lies in what they record, which sounds rather flat except when the record also elucidates, as it often does. However the basis of other essays is speculation — an attempt to put both the writer and reader in charge of feelings that have, until writing or reading the essay, been obstinately obscure. The essayist directs speculations not only to the outside world but back into a puzzled self, and the essay becomes the means by which the writer achieves inner power of some area of his or her own thoughts that possibly had been rather nebulous until then.

  ‘The finalists for the Landfall competition seem to divide into two approximate categories. There are essays in which some sort of direct account of an event or a person is given, then there are essays that are concerned with the deciphering of some human enigma.

  ‘Any judge has personal vulnerability when it comes to judging. Personally I value the straightforward accounts that add to one’s understanding and general knowledge, but at the same time I can be most deeply touched by those essays that draw one into more mysterious mediations on human beings and their troubled discernment. These essays, when well written, can command more intensity than the objective account. Of course from a reader’s point of view, both the account and the speculation, serving (as they do) different purposes, can be equally valuable. As a judge, however, one finds oneself shuffling backwards and forwards, frowning and mumbling, and trying to evaluate elements that probably should not be compared in the first place. Some of the essays are appropriately objective, yet, unfairly enough, I am aware as I write this that objectivity and accuracy sound flat words of praise when compared with the more passionate responses one has to the more passionate essays. And, at the same time, part of what makes the passion most potent is a recognisable accuracy of observation … something with which the reader needs to concert before branching out to consider new and possibly startling possibilities …

  ‘Having emphasised the differences in intention that haunt the various essays submitted for this competition, one must pay necessary tribute to the form that unites them — a form that creates an accessible space in which a specialised meditation may take pla
ce. The essay form demands less of a reader’s valuable reading time than does a novel, but may be equally rich in ideas. Indeed the relative brevity of some essays intensifies their focus and brings a precise enlightenment initially, one imagines, to the writer but in due course to the reader as well.’

  Two sharply contrasting books appeared in 2002, the seriously spooky ghost story Alchemy, and the comic picture book Dashing Dog, about a dog ‘who spends a lot of his time looking like a long legged sheep’. Any newcomer to Mahy’s work would be astonished to be told they came from the same pen.

  Dashing Dog, with its 16 patter song-style verses packed with alliteration and off-the-wall rhymes requiring a nimble tongue and supple lips, began life as an idea about a dog’s adventures to be told in pictures with a text of just three words. ‘“Good dog”, it would say, while the pictures showed the dog as beautifully groomed though a trifle bewildered. The next few pictures would all have the caption “Bad dog” as the dog had a variety of linked and destructive adventures.

  ‘But in my story the dog hero would finally perform an act of traditional heroism, totally destroying what was left of his grooming but causing the unseen narrator to exclaim “Good dog!” once more. I liked the idea of the very simple text, and even said the illustrator could have most of any money the publisher was prepared to pay, which I think is proof of deep sincerity. However, the publisher and my agent both said that these simple captions were not what I did best and that I should tell the story in a fuller form. I agreed to do so … and was interested, when I came to actually write this fuller version to find that it presented itself, not only in a rhyming form but complete with verbal convolutions and tongue twisters that, once considered, became somehow necessary, and which meant that the final book would be a long way removed from what I had had in mind in the first place.’ As Margaret herself has said, ‘The voice of the poem is not what I had in mind in the first place, indeed it was what I was trying to avoid, the writer’s voice tending to push in before the parent’s, but there it is. Somehow my particular voice insists on games with alliterations and rhymes even when that is not my intention. My voice, though acrobatic at times, will remain a reasonably classical one for all that.’