Like Marillier’s adult novels that I’ve read before, Wildwood Dancing is a take on fairy tales and folklore.  This one combines aspects of the twelve dancing princesses and the frog prince, as well as drawing on Romanian vampire mythology and local folklore to give it a wonderful atmosphere.  When their father becomes sick and must go away to be treated, Jena and her four sisters are left behind and Jena takes over the running of the family home.  Times are hard, but the sisters find escape in their monthly nighttime visits to the fairy kingdom in the wildwood where they are welcomed as friends to join in the revels.  Jena also finds solace in the company of Gogu, a frog with whom she is able to talk and who is her closest friend.  However, their cousin Cezar does not believe that the girls can look after themselves and imposes himself on their lives.  At the same time, he is also attempting to destroy the wildwood.  Although he claims this is for the safety of the girls and the villagers, and as revenge for the mysterious death of his older brother Costi, his motives are not all that they seem.

A fairytale adaptation is always a double edged sword because its strength is also its weakness: I already know what will happen because I already know the story.  I know that frogs kissed will turn into men, that how something is said is as important as what is said, and that you should always be careful what you wish for.  Above all, I know that things are rarely what they seem.  Anyone likely to read a book like this is probably approaching from a similar position of prior knowledge and experience, and it takes a skillfull author to manage to write a story that satisfies the fairytale conventions while escaping the trap of feeling like something that’s been read before.  Juliet Marillier is such a writer (Daughter of the Forest is one of my favourite books) but this book didn’t quite get there for me.  The story, while enjoyable enough, erred on the side of obvious, to the point of making some of the characters unreasonably dense at times in order to further the plot.  There may be a dream sequence inserted to explain this, frankly, silly behaviour, but it feels like a contrived and flimsy way of excusing the heroine’s strange refusal to act on things which the reader can see that she obviously should.

Frustrations aside, there was a lot that I really enjoyed about this novel.  I liked the Romanian setting and the way that this colours all aspects of the book, from the character names to the food to the folklore.  I also liked the way that the setting, both the time and the place of the book, made Jena’s struggles to maintain her control over the family fortunes seem very real and understandable.  All too often it is easy to dismiss fantasy heroines who are dependent on men for either their day to day existence or for rescue as weak or somehow deficient, but Jena has no choice but to cede to her cousin Cezar’s polite but forceful requests to hand over her family’s money and the running of their affairs to him.  In fact, even though it feels wrong both to Jena and the reader, it is clear that what he is doing is the right thing albeit for the wrong reasons.  I also loved the inventive descriptions of the wildwood folk and their celebrations, which were just the blend of expected fairy tale convention and authorial creativity which I have come to expect from Juliet Marillier.

On balance, this was an enjoyable but unexceptional book, though perfect for the situation in which I read it.  It was entertaining but the story was too simple and obvious for it to be truly engaging and the interesting details of time and place, while they added flavour, were not quite enough to make up for this.

Wildwood Dancing by Juliet Marillier.  Published by Tor, 2007, pp. 370.  Originally published in 2007.

The story is set in Holland in the 16oo’s, against the backdrop of the tulip boom.  The eponymous ugly stepsister is Iris, a young girl who flees from England to Haarlem with her mother, Margarethe, and silent sister Ruth.  Once there, they find the family that they expected to take them in are dead and so the family take up work as housekeepers in a painter’s studio in order to survive.  When a rich businessman comes to commission a painting of Clara, his beautiful daughter, with some of his prized tulips Margarethe sees the opportunity for advancement and acts to unite her poor family with Clara’s rich one.  But, as in all fairy tales, all is not entirely as it seems and plans go awry.

Often when books choose to take an alternative perspective on a well-known story it is to show that character in a more sympathetic light, so I was surprised by the very balanced way in which Maguire presents Iris and indeed all his characters.  Iris is downgraded from ugly to merely plain, she cares for her disabled sister, tries to befriend Clara and is credited with intelligence, but she is headstrong (and not in the pretty, charming way that a lot of heroines are headstrong), sullen and uncooperative.  Maguire hasn’t made her seem nice, he has made her seem real and believeable.  Clara, the Cinderella figure, is likewise knocked down from her fairy tale princess pedestal and into the realms of mere humanity.  She is beautiful and intriguing, yet on the other hand she is fey, neurotic and unable to accept things outside of her own terms.  Where Cinderella’s beauty traditionally liberates her from a life of drudgery, Clara is very aware that she has very little control over her own fate in spite of her attractive appearance, something which makes the schemes of Margarethe, the wicked step-mother, seem more reasonable and justified and imbues her with a steely resolve that is more driven by self-preservation than cruelty.  Ruth, the second sister, is by far the most interesting character despite playing an ostensibly minor role in the story; readers of fairy tales will know never to trust appearances and Ruth does not disappoint.

The choice to place the story in the context of the tulip mania of the 1600′s, when tulips became so popular that a single bulb could sell for more than ten times the annual wage of a skilled labourer, is a clever one.  As Clara’s family soon learn to their peril, the tulips had no inherent worth and the speculation which had artifically inflated their price was all an illusion and so the setting encourages questions about true value, worth and beauty which are particularly fitting for the story.  Why should Clara be considered worth more than Iris just because she is aesthetically pleasing and Iris is plain?  Why is Clara’s father happy to use his shy daughter as promotional material for his business venture?  Is value inherent or something subjective that the beholder or buyer adds?  It definitely provides an interesting background against which to read the story of Cinderella.

Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister by Gregory Maguire.  Published by Headline Review, 2008, pp. 397.  Originally published 1999.

The characters from the fairy tales that we all know and love have been driven out of their fantasy world by a sinister unknown enemy.  Unable to return to their homes, they are now living in modern day New York City where they try to blend in under the watchful eye of Snow White.  Problems arise when Snow White’s sister, Rose Red, goes missing and her aparetment is found covered in blood.  While she works with Bigby Wolf to solve the mystery, Prince Charming is attempting to raffle off his kingdom in the old world to raise some much needed money, and evertyhing comes to a head at the traditional Remembrance Day ball.

This is a cleverly written book because, while it has a plot that is neatly tied up at the end, it also provides only tantalising hints into the wider story which surrounds the fairy tale characters.  I want to know what exactly happened to their world which made them flee to ours, and how that is going to develop.  I want to know more about the characters and their somewhat strained existence rubbing shoulders with ordinary humans.  I want to find out more about their traditions and cultures and how their fary stories continue to be played out in the real world.  .  In other words, it provided the perfect amount of story to engage and satisfy me if I only ever read Legends in Exile, but at the same time it guarantees that I’m going to want to carry on and read more of the series because I’m so fascinated with the world.

The concept is interesting (if a bit self-consciously silly at times) and it’s much grittier than I had expected from a fairy tale adapt  ation.  I loved the little details that Willingham puts in about the characters: the Beast, for example, is only handsome as long as Beauty is happy in their marriage, so he keeps reverting to his beastlike appearance every time Beauty becomes annoyed with him (which happens quite frequently).  The pictures aren’t as pretty as I tend to favour, but I think they really suit the detective noir style of the story.

This is a great beginning to what promises to be a  really interesting series, and one I’ll be continuing with soon, I think.

Fables Volume I: Legends in Exile by Bill Willingham, illustrated by Lan Medina, Mark Buckingham, Steve Leialoha and Craig Hamilton.  Published by Vertigo, 2002, pp. 128.

I was thrilled, then, to receive a free copy of Joseph Jacobs’ More English Fairy Tales, published recently by Pook Press, from the LibraryThing Early Reviewers programme.  This book is a facsimile of the original 1894 edition of the text, complete with gorgeous illustrations from John D. Batten.  It comprises an impressive eighty seven fairy tales, many of which are variations on better known versions of the stories, such as the many different versions of Cinderella which appear, and all of which are quite short in length.  All in all, it is a lovely collection to read, whether as an adult or a child.

Scrapefoot the Fox

I found the selection of stories really interesting, particularly in instances where they followed a basic outline that was familiar but with some subtle differences.  The story that we all know as ‘Goldilocks and the Three Bears’ appears in this collection as the story of Scrapefoot the Fox, who undergoes similar ursine exploits culminating in his being summarily defenestrated by the irate Bears.  It makes me curious as to how this character was transformed from a male fox into the little girl Goldilocks from the tale more familiar today (apparently by way of being an old woman and then a young girl called Silver-hair, according to the appendix).  Likewise, the well known story of the Pied Piper is altered by moving the setting from Hamelyn to Newtown on the shores of the Solent.  I thought this might perhaps have been a change made by Jacobs, appropriating a foreign tale for his book of English stories, as he does warn in his introduction that ‘I do not attribute much anthropological value to tales whose origin is probably foreign‘ (p. x).  However, Jacobs’ enlightening ‘Notes and References’ section which closes the book reveals that the story aparently made its way over to England with no help from the author, prompting me to wonder once again how this change took place.  I was also delighted to stumble across an early version of what has become one of my favourite folk songs in ‘The Golden Ball’.  A girl is to be hung, but cries out to the hangman:

Stop, stop, I think I see my mother coming!
O mother, hast brought my golden ball
And come to set me free?

She then repeats this, protesting that her father has also come to save her.  However, each time the response is negative:

I’ve neither brought thy golden ball
Nor come to set thee free,
But I have come to see thee hung
Upon this gallows-tree.

Eventually her sweetheart turns up at the final moment with the promised golden ball and saves her.  I first heard this sung while sat in the garden of a pub in Warwick, and fans of the marvellous folk band Bellowhead will recognise this as the song ‘Prickle Eye Bush’, which you can see them performing in all their enthusiastic glory here (seriously, go and watch them).  Although the song tells most of the story itself, it’s still really interesting to find out where it comes from and get a bit of background.

For every old favourite, there are also plenty of new tales.  I particularly liked the Hobyahs and their exploits, a species of interfering fairy folk who were entirely new to me.  The range of different tales and styles is particularly good over the eighty seven stories and I think this would keep the interest of any reader, whether they had a specific interest in the morphology of traditional stories or not.  However, for me it is the appendix which makes this book so interesting.  Here Jacobs explains where all the tales were gathered, any history behind them and how they differ from other know variations.  He strikes the perfect balance between being a storyteller and being an academic folklorist.

It is worth passing comment on the particular edition from Pook Press, as obviously the content of the book hasn’t changed since 1894.  More English Fairy Tales has long since passed into the public domain and you can read the whole thing for free, including the illustrations, on Project Gutenburg and it is available in numerous different versions on Amazon, all of which are facsimiles of the same text and so will look exactly the same as this one.  With that in mind, it’s a shame that Pook haven’t added anything of their own to the book to induce the book shopper to buy this particular version.  It’s a perfectly pleasant little book, but an introduction either from an editor at the company or, even better, from someone who works in the field now or an author who writes modern fairy tales perhaps would have made it stand out a bit more.  Pook state that they are ‘working to republish these classic works in affordable, high quality editions, using the original text and artwork so these works can delight another generation of children’ which is an aim that I find admirable, but I think just a few paragraphs explaining why this work is special, how it fits in with their catalogue and a bit of historical context would have been great.

More English Fairy Tales by Joseph Jacobs, illustrated by John D. Batten.  Published by Pook Press, 2011, pp. 243.  Originally published in 1894.

Fairy tales and folk stories were a huge part of my childhood and have continued to be so as I’ve become older.  I had them read to me by my parents; I read them to myself; I listened to storytellers weaving their own versions of the tales sat around campfires and in tents; I watched them performed on the stage in ballets, pantomimes and plays; and I heard them sung.  The ballad of Tam Lin was a story that I first encountered through the music of Steeleye Span (a nice video set to Steeleye Span singing Tam Lin can be found here for your entertainment), which made up a fair part of my parents’ record collection.  I was entranced by the music and the stories and I haven’t stopped loving folk music or folk tales ever since then.

In the ballad, Tam Lin is a young man who lives in the forest of Carterhaugh and takes either a possession or the virginity of any girl who passes through.  When Janet is caught by him plucking a rose there, she insists that she owns Carterhaugh as her father has given it to her.  When she returns home, as is the way in folk tales, she soon discovers she is pregnant, but will only say that the father is an elf and will not reveal who he is.  She goes back to Tam Lin who forbids her to terminate the pregnancy and tells her that he is in fact a human but was claimed by the Fairy Queen after he fell from his horse.  Every seven years the fairy court pays a tithe to hell and he fears that this year he will be part of the sacrifice and only Janet can save him.  That Halloween, Janet waits at the crossroads and watches as a procession of fairies ride past until finally Tam Lin comes by on a white horse.  Janet pulls him from his mount and must keep hold of him as the Fairy Queen transforms him into a succession of different creatures in order to attempt to make Janet let go.  Eventually, he is turned into a burning brand, upon which Janet plunges him into the well and he turns back into a man, she wraps him in her green mantle and he is hers.

The story is one that I’ve always found fascinating, not least because it features a woman rescuing her captured lover for a change, and so I was thrilled to learn that Pamela Dean had written a novel based on the ballad, also called Tam Lin. In Dean’s take on the story, Janet is an English student just starting out at Blackstock College.  There she not only has to deal with the usual teenage anxieties of studying, getting along with her roommates and discovering sex, but also more mysterious concerns.  What exactly is it about the strange and aloof Classics department that makes them stand apart from everyone else?  Who is the ghost that haunts their dorm room throwing old books out of the window, and why did she kill herself?  Who are the Classics boys who talk in verse and seem to have known each other forever and what makes them so different?

The more I think about this book, the more profoundly it irritates me.  This is a book which has 33 five star reviews out of 48 on Amazon and is about a topic I love (clearly I’ve missed something), so I started reading with high hopes, turning the pages in eager anticipation of spotting a clever, subtle reference to the ballad.  And I waited, and waited and waited.  With the exception of a rather painfully direct midnight Halloween procession on horseback from the Classics department part way through the book, it isn’t until the final fifty pages (a hundred if I’m feeling generous) that the story of the ballad really starts to play a part; in a book which is supposedly based on the ballad, I expected it to have a little more influence than that.  For that matter, I’m not sure why an author would spend so long creating a world which is totally different from that of the ballad only to insert large chunks of the original storyline exactly as they happen rather than subtly adapting it.  This would have been less of an issue had it not been for the fact that, by the time the book finally got to this point, I couldn’t bring myself to care as the story beforehand had been so lacklustre.

Without the prevailing influence of the ballad of Tam Lin, Dean’s Tam Lin is mostly just a story of university life.  We watch Janet study for exams, spend time in the library and go to classes all of which I unfortunately found rather dull.  The characters were so very pretentious that I couldn’t sympathise with any of them and the relationships between them all felt shallow and unreal.  There isn’t even any romance or desperation in Janet’s decision to pull Tom Lane (get it?) off his horse and save him (yes, it happens as obviously as that).  As these relationships are the driving force behind the book I didn’t find much to enjoy, I’m afraid.  In addition to the mundane university story, Dean has added a few of her own supernatural subplots, none of which tie in with the original ballad and none of which were explained to my satisfaction by the time the end of the novel rolled tediously round.  It was a huge disappointment.

Not only did the characters have unbelievable relationships, they also had unbelievable conversations with one another.  It seems that they hardly ever opened their mouths without uttering a line or five of a famous poem or making a clever literary, grammatical or historical pun and at times they speak more or less entirely in quotations from other works.  Picked at random, here’s a typical interchange between two characters:

“Will you talk sense for once!” said Janet, losing all patience.

“Sir,” said Robin, in an uncanny imitation of the Korean actor who had played Hamlet a year ago, “I cannot.  Cannot what, my lord?” he apostrophized himself sharply, as Rosencrantz had spoken to Hamlet.  “Make you a wholesome answer,” he said mournfully, as Hamlet.  “My wit’s diseased.”  He reverted to his own expression, and looked hopefully at Janet.

“Oh, go away!” said Janet.  “You’re enough to try the patience of a saint.  Leave me alone.  I’ll see you at supper. Don’t say it!” she added furiously, as Robin seemed about to add some of Hamlet’s observations about Polonius and the worms, which would, to a grasshopper mind like his, have been amply suggested by the word “supper”.

“I shan’t say it,” said Robin, getting up off the bed and bowing to her.  “Nobody is dead yet.”  He turned with considerable aplomb and shut the door with a dignified click that spoke volumes more than Thomas’s slam.

“We’re all mad here,” said Janet after a moment, and turned resolutely back to Pope.  (p. 329)

Not only does making your eighteen year old characters speak like this make any form of realism impossible, it’s also incredibly abrasive.  There were times when I wanted to strangle the next person to say “I cry you mercy” instead of just apologising.

Now, I’m all in favour of making clever literary allusions and judicious use of intertextuality: Chaucer and Shakespeare both did it to great effect, so it’s hard to argue that one.  Dean, however, is not a Chaucer or a Shakespeare.  They wrote works that are brilliant in their own right and the allusions and quotations to other texts serve to illuminate and expand upon the message of their own writing, whereas in this book the clever lines from other people are a substitute for the text doing anything clever itself.  In fact, there’s no space for any original intelligence, so full is this book of thoughts, ideas and words borrowed from other sources.  I felt that it uses other people’s brilliance to disguise its own lack thereof, and also as a way for the author to show of how many famous books she’s read.  It all came across as rather self-indulgent and didn’t sit well with me.

It’s going to come as no surprise that this book will be searching for a new home soon.  Why is it always the books with the prettiest cover art that are the most disappointing this year?

Tam Lin by Pamela Dean.  Published by Tor, 1992, pp. 468.  Originally published in 1990.

Author: Neil Gaiman

Published: Headline Review, 2005, pp. 214.  Originally published 1999.

Genre: Fantasy

Blurb: In the sleepy English countryside at the dawn of the Victorian era, life moves at a leisurely pace in the tiny town of Wall.  Young Tristran Thorn has lost his heart to the beautiful Victoria Forester, but Victoria is as cold and distant as the star she and Tristran see fall from the sky one evening.  For the prize of Victoria’s hand, Tristran vows to retrieve the star for his beloved.  It is an oath that sends the lovelorn swain over the town’s ancient wall and into a world that is dangerous and strange beyond imagining…

When, where and why: I picked this book up from, surprise surprise, a charity shop.  I loved the film of the book and so thought it would be interesting to read the original work.  I chose it to read because I finished my previous book while I was in the office and this one just happened to be lurking there and looked short enough that it wouldn’t divert me too long from the older books languishing on my shelves that I’m meant to be reading.

What I thought: Although I liked this book, I think I would have enjoyed it a great deal more if I hadn’t seen the film beforehand.  While both stories follow the same narrative trajectory, the details are nearly always different and I think I’m going to have to commit the sacrilege of saying that I actually preferred the film, which maximises the drama of the story at the expense of some of its subtleties.  I was also extremely disappointed that some of my favourite characters in the film weren’t in the book at all.

That said, this is my fault for seeing the film first not an inherent fault of the book, and I did enjoy Stardust.  Neil Gaiman’s prose is wonderful to read, both highly descriptive and very appropriate to the fairy tale genre in which he is writing.  I liked the fact that he makes use of lots of the traditional tropes from folk tales, such as things coming in threes, the power of names, question and answer games and the importance of not straying from the path.  There is magic, adventure and whimsy, all reported with the author’s tongue placed firmly in his cheek.

I think that ultimately having seen the film spoiled this book for me, but that doesn’t mean that it isn’t a good read, I just didn’t enjoy it as much as I could have done.

Where this book goes: This book is staying and joining my ever-increasing fantasy collection.

Tea talk: I anticipated this book being a quick read and it ended up being so quick that I read it from cover to cover on the train home, so no tea for me.