Margaret Mahy

by Tessa Duder

  She would like to cut down her travelling, to write a bit less and to read a great deal more. For her, reading has never been something done for relaxation at the end of the day, but an intellectual, consciously creative act. ‘Reading gives you a subtle range of interpretive capacities; it seems to me that if you live with books, you live with real life as opposed to the relatively primitive approach of those who discard books for “reality”. Books themselves are not sacred objects, but what they’ve got in them can become so.’

  Concerned friends, hearing of occasional bouts of indifferent health in recent winters —‘the asthmatic hay fever thing is very tiring’— are assured that it is nothing: oh, the voice will always be croaky. Her storytelling passion and inventiveness remain as fierce and compulsive as ever. A 2000 profile stated: ‘She can‘t envisage a time when she’ll retire from writing, it’s too big a part of her. But she says, “I‘d like to go back to a more playful phase. Writing can become a terribly serious business when it’s your means of making a living. But that’s eased off now.”’

  The need for stories in the troubled, post-9/11 age, she believes, is greater than ever. Her essential optimism allows her to regard the future without too much gloom. ‘I think the world is alarming because it’s always been alarming, but the alarm shifts and changes and sometimes we concluded wrongfully that we overcame alarming things — but they come up again because of human limitations. One of the alarming things is that people use stories and believe in them and use them passionately in very destructive ways. So I’m not suggesting for a moment that all stories work desirably on the lives of people — stories that demonstrate a return to less complicated and less destructive lives would be a very good thing, but of course a bit of an over-simplification. While I’m an enthusiast about stories, I don’t think I’ve ever suggested that stories have a necessary morality about them, but I suggest they are a necessary way that people structure their experience. When you think of the wide variety of possibilities that get offered to people through education and so on, people often structure some story about them. Of course, some people structure their stories about things that other people disapprove of a great deal — so I don’t want to sound as if I’m saying that it’s a story, so it must be good.

  ‘I don’t think there’s been a time in history when there’s been more impulse towards good; a lot of people want to do good. I also think that when you listen to the news, disaster after disaster, despite the tremendous number of people who’ve done good — it’s just that good news radio is not all that interesting. There’s something within human beings that responds to alarm rather than to serenity — they are trying to live their lives by serenity, do good and kind things, but they don’t want to listen to good news. For example, people working for Greenpeace, who struggle to express positive and good messages and make people aware of the dangers, don’t get the attention they deserve or the good responses from those that they help.’

  She is not easily alarmed or repelled by horror stories, ghost stories or action movies. ‘I’ve read lots and lots of horror stories. Bridget and I used to watch the Friday night horrors together, and I’ve got quite a few horror films on video. I think it’s possible you can exhaust your power to be frightened, though I suppose a realistic story in which people domestically do very cruel things to one another would probably shock me a great deal. I don’t believe in ghosts or vampires or anything like but I do believe that people … can do horrible things to one another. I’ve never had a ghost experience but spoken to people who have — yes, people I respect have told me about supernatural experiences. I like the symbolism of human experience — the spiritual meaning, say, of Cape Reinga — of course I’m prepared to give it some sort of symbolic respect, but I haven’t had that sort of experience myself.

  ‘I don’t think I believe in afterlife, but I do believe that the energy that a person represents goes back into the world and takes on other forms; I don’t think death is the end. Human beings are creatures that form a continuation that goes on, in some way we find it very hard to tie it down as something that’s familiar to us. The emergence of a particular baby we know whose personality is uniquely theirs — over and beyond the energy of conception, there’s some sort of flow of energy, which you could call spiritual, that a person generates during their life, some of which is innate and some which is chosen. That whole thing about environment and inheritance and free will represents some sort of mysterious energy which we don’t really understand.

  ‘Philip Pullman’s daemons [in the His Dark Materials trilogy], the twin souls, forms of energy and perception over and above the individual person — that was a very good idea, as a coming of age, with truthful resonances about a way of finding out about yourself. I don’t think death is utter, except because of human limitation that familiar progress has been interrupted and something else has taken over. Existence is just hugely mysterious — of matter, of consciousness and all the various sorts of awareness and everything we’ve got which is so intricate and so wonderful, and also mysterious because it’s got its limitation. Although human beings have understandings about themselves and their situations, so far as we know no other species has, and in the end somehow or other we have to cope with those limitations. Some people cope by denying that they exist at all, but it doesn’t seem to me that they do cope with the idea that we’re not an infinite species and that we do use all sorts of things like symbolism and metaphor and things beyond language in order to make some sort of contract or entry into the mysteriousness that surrounds us.’

  Margaret has never ruled out the possibility that an adult novel could be an interesting challenge. ‘People say to me, of course, you’ve moved on to older books because your children have got older. I wouldn’t want to cut that out as an influence, but I tend to react against it a bit. People see anyone who writes for children as writing out of a response to their own children, rather than writing out of a response to a particular set of reading experiences children’s books give. Or, of course, out of a response to the author’s own childhood. Which often tends to be the dominating thing.’ But she always hastens that she would not write an adult novel ‘because I think I’d be doing a superior thing, but because I’d be able to make use of a different range of experiences and language and everything like that. Maybe sometime in the next twenty years, sooner if I have the time, but I rather suspect I won’t have the time.’

  Queried about the shining characteristic of her language, the sparkling dialogue, the quirky metaphors, that unrivalled zest and energy which Julia Eccleshare says has the unusual quality of actually charging up the reader, Margaret says, ‘Well, if that’s true I suppose it comes from a response to the world, wanting metaphors to be fresh, but also wanting them to come out fairly readily from an individual way of looking at the world. The extent to which you’re successful you don’t really know about until the reader comes back; the reader completes what the writer began. As a reader, as I’ve got older, I find it harder to make those connections. It’s harder for me to be taken by surprise.’

  So-called ‘good writing’, she thinks, is both a gift and something that can be learned. ‘If it was some sort of gift I wouldn’t have bothered to learn it, I suppose, and you never learn enough, you never learn it to the extent that you are totally satisfied.’ Writers she particularly admires among a wide range of favourites are not unexpectedly Angela Carter, Russell Hoban, Charles Dickens, ‘for their caricatures, their jokes, their seriousness’.

  Everything in the course of ordinary days seen, heard, touched, tasted, smelled and felt is possible grist to her inexhaustible storyteller’s mill. ‘Yesterday, for instance, I was in a car park and found myself in a knot of cars — a situation where one car couldn’t move until another car moved but that other car couldn’t move until a third car moved, and so on. I found I was automatically imagining a story for very young children about a series of people, all anxious to get home by a certain time. I began telling myself
this story and explaining that the green car couldn’t move until the red car moved, and the red car couldn’t move until the blue car moved … and then I realised that, in real life I was confronted with something even more remarkable. The five cars in the complicated knot (including my own) were all silver — a fashionable colour it seems. Memories of previously existing stores and picture book illustration had somehow taken over the way I was considering a real life situation. Since then I have thought of this knot of silver cars in the supermarket parking lot and have imagined the owners getting out of their cars to argue with each other, and then getting back into the wrong cars and driving away. The possibilities seem endless. Of course I like to think of my stories as original, but I know they are part of a network of stories which support one another as they are linked in a reader’s mind.’

  But the possibilities are not only direct personal experience. ‘Writers are very treacherous people; they will readily take over other people’s stories. They can move in quite cunningly and take possession of other people’s experiences, and then they transform them in certain ways …

  ‘Certainly in a lot of cases, writers bear witness by breaking the peace. I myself am not an abrasive or peace-breaking writer, though I think that some of the ideas I speak about are quite challenging and question peace to a certain extent. For instance, I often assert, in The Tricksters… that the peace should be broken provided we reassemble it in a better form … a lot of writers, because of ego or other grandiose reasons, sometimes think they are the ones chosen to tell the stories. To think you are the one at the expense of other people may be dangerous, but I think there are those moments where it’s not self-assertion but just perception of the naked power of the self.’

  Imagination, she says, is clearly a creative force for good, ‘but we can’t pretend that only good people have imagination. There is plenty of evidence of nasty people having imaginative power and using it in horrifying ways. There’s a character who crops up from time to time in my books — the older brother of the three brothers in The Tricksters, for instance, is rather demonic. He’s a very frustrated character, because, no matter how crowded the world is with wonderful things, it’s never going to be wonderful enough for him. He wants continuously to be the transforming magician, the persona at the heart of everything; his ego is such that there is never enough fulfilment. He always feels something beyond; he feels he deserves more … These characters feel the world owes them something. Their discontent is one of the things wickedness comes from.

  ‘There is a character in a fantasy I once wrote who stands in his inherited kingdom but despises it because it’s just not enough; he doesn’t want to be just king — he wants to be something more marvellous still. He has, in effect, an insatiable imaginative demand which makes him wicked, it makes him a dangerous person to be around partly because he gets particularly jealous when he sees somebody who seems to have access to the power or insight he covets.’

  Every family, she believes, has its storytellers, ‘some more professional than others, perhaps, but if listening to stories is a human function so is telling them, and children are often more thrilled by family stories than they are by the most polished stories in books. “Tell me about when I was little and was tossed by the cow …” the child demands. “Tell me about the time I rode my tricycle to the shops and got lost.” They listen intently as these pieces of their identity are rescued from the past and part of their lives is restored to them. For the most part parents, telling these stories, give them some sort of shape and drama. It is an essential human thing to do.’

  Questioned by one interviewer about specific messages that she wanted to convey through her stories, Margaret replied: ‘I suppose I have some main themes about the capacity of any individual to be transformed by poetry, art, or imagination. Ordinary people have as much access to the power of imagination, transformation, as the “extraordinary” people, writers or artists, who make quite a big statement about their transformation. I don’t think that in terms of any sort of morality; I do have a very high opinion of people who, for one reason or another, manage to get the better of an incident from which they have suffered, and move on into a position of forgiveness — either forgiving other people or forgiving the world or forgiving themselves. I think that’s a very fruitful state to be in — to be the person who offers true forgiveness. If you do find you can’t be as perfect as you want to be, what you do is to acknowledge your own imperfections and laugh about it to some extent; but the important thing is: don’t let it turn into any sort of revulsion towards yourself or to the world.

  ‘It’s a hard thing to ask, but in many of the stories I’ve written there is a moment where a person has a chance to discharge resentment and overcome it … We should do our best to be right according to what has been given to us, but we shouldn’t agonise over being wrong past a certain point — just forgive yourself or try to do better if you think you’ve really done wrong. However, I don’t see any point in punishing yourself; that’s where I think a lot of useless guilt comes from. There’s a point in life where guilt may have a creative function, because it actually makes you behave differently and work better as a human being. But when you’ve passed this certain point, guilt tends to be self-indulgent; people who go back and feel uselessly guilty for past events that they can’t change don’t do anything constructive at all, either for themselves or for anybody else.’

  She sees her writing as an act of subversion, although what really interests her is the tension between order and anarchy, and that ‘so much thought is directed towards imposing order. But once one has pinned down some sort of ideal in a framework of words, then some of the anarchy of the original idea escapes — energy has escaped. That’s why I tend to give very long answers to questions — as I answer, all sorts of things seem to me to be escaping, so I rush round like a sheepdog trying to herd it all in to make it reasonably complete. The exercise of being truthful is so complicated and wearying and in the end sometimes so inadequate and unsatisfactory that it fragments and drifts away round the edges as mine is doing right now …’

  Childhood, she says, was for her ‘a time of receiving extremely concentrated bursts of information; the extent to which you spend the rest of your life deciphering that is a matter of personal choice — consciously or unconsciously. I’ve chosen to spend my time disentangling that and simultaneously writing about it quite seriously while joking about it. I like to think I write the sort of story someone can begin to enjoy in childhood and can continue enjoying in a variety of ways as they get older.’

  To the question ‘What is your favourite book that you have written?’, one of the three questions invariably fired at authors in classrooms (the others are ‘How many books have you written?’ and ‘Where do you get your ideas from?’), Margaret has always replied that it is the one not yet written, the exhilarating, perfect story that is in her head, because no story ever turns out to be as good as she first imagined it would be. ‘I always start writing a story with a lot of optimism; that this time I have a really good idea. Then towards the end I start to lose confidence.

  ‘As both reader and writer I expect to be changed by a story. Somewhere there is a wonderful story, a platonic form of a story which, as I read it will complete me. It will become an indissoluble part of me forever, and yet as I read it again and again will always surprise or deepen me or change me in some way. I may not ever quite find that story, but I can discern its presence in other stories. That is one of the main reasons I read. In a way I hope to write it, and though it is not a realistic expectation, it is real enough to be a starting place for whatever I write. All the time I look for signs that the story is passing by, not only in books, but in the shadows of clouds or words overheard in the street. It leaves clues, omens, promises in the stains on a kitchen bench, in letters from children, in the entrails of mice the cats leave on the new rug, the way in which the old volcanic cone in which I live has been invaded by water and become a harbour
, in lotteries and rocking horses. And of course it leaves its traces in stories by other people, and it makes lots of jokes to distract me.’

  To summarise the work of a writer of such accomplishment, variety and range is testing. If there is one author ‘whose work belies the old critical adage that children’s literature cannot sustain serious critical examination’, it is Margaret Mahy, ‘something of a phenomenon in New Zealand and international publishing’, according to leading British academic Peter Hunt. ‘It can be very persuasively argued that although Mahy seems to use conventional forms, her work is resolutely postmodern, frequently (or perhaps pervasively) feminist, and continually deals in margins and eccentricities, mirroring the conflicting expansions of adolescence.’ Her writing is ‘prolific and erratic … genuinely child-centred … [and] contains highly suggestive, interwoven levels of complexity that are increasingly regarded as a challenge to serious critics’.

  The first specialist in children’s literature appointed to a professor ship at a British university, Peter Hunt includes Margaret in a stellar list of 38 great 19th- and 20th-century children’s writers in English, from Lewis Carroll to Kipling to Beatrix Potter to Dr Seuss to Philip Pullman. Apart from Margaret, the only other ‘colonial’ is the Australian Patricia Wrightson, born in 1921. Hunt cites a characteristic passage which has been declared by Jack Lasenby, among many others, as one of the most memorable, poetic and vivid of Margaret’s many images: the naked Angela, wakeful on a hot summer night in a bedroom ‘infected with disturbing silver’, drawn to the window in the opening chapter of The Catalogue of the Universe.

  As she stood, simply feeling grateful, [Angela] heard for the third time, beyond all doubt, a sound outside, a sound so soft that it would have been possible to think it out of existence again, except that this time she really knew she had heard it, a sound as gentle as a hand brushing down a velvet curtain. It made her curious but it did not alarm her, for she was used to many different sounds in the night, living as she did up above the city, in a wild place close under the sky. She went to her window and looked out, and there in the bright moonlight she saw her mother Dido in the centre of the square of grass half-contained in the right angle made by their odd home (a home that had never quite got as far as being a proper house). It took a moment to realise what Dido was doing, but that rhythmic and dreamy sway was familiar — Dido was scything the grass by moonlight. Angela could see the entranced, semi-circular swing of her shoulders, heard the whisper of the keen steel and the sigh of long grass bowing down before her. Everything around her was drenched in a light so clear and so intense it seemed as if it must have more substance than ordinary light. It was the very light of visions and prophecies.