Reflections (17 page)

Another thing that makes a hero is, of course, a miraculous origin. I was intrigued to find that the media do in fact treat tennis stars as heroes even in this. Large numbers of them are said to have extremely ambitious parents, so ambitious that they dedicated their child to tennis from the earliest possible age. Some are said never to have gone to school so that they could concentrate on the career their parents had chosen for them. This makes me think of that passage in H. G. Wells's
First Men in the Moon
, where the narrator discovers a society of large, intelligent lunar ants and, in the course of a tour of the anthill, comes upon numbers of juvenile ants who are obviously in acute discomfort with portions of their anatomies squeezed into strange-shaped jars. These juniors, he is told, are being shaped into the forms required of various specialist workers.

I suppose the most obvious version of this origin is the dedication of Samuel to the temple. Real life or not, tennis children are pure folklore. But those players who were not dedicated are treated as mythical too, as if they sprang forth fully formed, like Minerva from Jove's head, or simply lay about doing nothing—which equates with the folklore motif of the Bear's Son, who did nothing but lie by the hearth until heroic deeds were required. Or there are players who started poor as church mice and raised themselves to fame and wealth by tennis—which is a hundred stories from “Puss in Boots” on. These days you don't get the princess and half the kingdom, but you do get a great deal of money and attention, which is probably equivalent.

All these notions and expectations about heroes were in my mind when I wrote
The Lives of Christopher Chant.
Christopher, the future enchanter Chrestomanci, has tennis parents. In a big way. Both his mother and his father wish to shape him into a different kind of star, but they are each so concerned with their separate ambitions for him that they entirely neglect the welfare of Christopher himself. This much comes from real life: Christopher was based on the son of ambitious parents I know, a poor boy who eventually committed suicide, being unable to stand the pressure they put on him. Christopher's version of suicide is to scramble about in the spirit void of the Place Between and keep on losing lives—luckily he has nine. But he is also the other kind of hero, the Bear's Son, in that he seems totally incapable of working magic and therefore incapable of fulfilling his parents' ambitions for him. Significantly, it is Christopher's father who had caused this incapacity. I made the lifting of this inhibition by Dr. Pawson as funny as I could. There seemed no better way to express the sheer joy of release.

But before this, Christopher has fallen under the sway of his dreadful uncle and become a deeply flawed hero. It is not just that he has been conned into criminal activity. The uncle, and the governess who is his accomplice, have dug their way into Christopher's private worlds where he travels in spirit—in other words, they have got at the center of his personality, where Christopher's own imagination had been freely at work—and perverted this for their own ends. In a way, this uncle and governess stand for Christopher's actual parents and what
they
have done. The governess, in addition, makes sure Christopher has no confidence in himself. For a while, Christopher holds to his central being because he has met the Goddess, who is a child and, like himself, dedicated—in this case to be the personification of the Goddess in an actual temple. Christopher strongly identifies with her, rightly: not only is she an even more extreme case of tennis child than he is, she is also standing for the powerful, submerged female part of himself. But there comes a point when even the Goddess lets him down. This happens when a person is rendered so unhappy that they lose touch with their inner self. This, I suspect, is the point where the boy Christopher was based on killed himself. But Christopher is a hero. At this point he has to raise his game or lose—so he raises his game and, in doing so, realizes that his confidence has been undermined. Now he is ready to fight and win.

He has to do this twice. Once he knows he has to, he can defeat his uncle quite easily in physical terms, but before that he has to cope with what has been done to him internally, by uncle and governess and parents. So he has to set out into the hidden worlds again, to the world he has been unable to enter before, and there, with help from his other half, the Goddess, to face down the fearsome Dright. Here he at least comes off best. He does not kill the Dright—he loses another life to him, in fact, for the kind of damage the Dright stands for lasts for the rest of your life. But Christopher does defeat him and gains a little understanding. Then he can come back into his own world and defeat his uncle.

I mentioned earlier that my book
Black Maria
was not published when it was written. It was written rather before
The Lives of Christopher Chant
and concerns itself with the same complex of ideas, except that it has a female hero, Mig, and the part that is played by the Goddess as Christopher's hidden half is here played by Mig's brother, Chris. Because it was written fairly early on, at the time I was finding a new freedom to write from a female point of view, it concerns itself with the way the traditional female role affects a female hero.

But it was not my publishers who decided to leave this book till later—though they often do. For instance,
Dogsbody
was written a year after
Power of Three
and my publishers insisted on reversing them, and the same happened with
Fire and Hemlock
and
Archer's Goon
, which were in fact written almost side by side. No.
I
suppressed
Black Maria
. I felt it was too frightening. A friend of mine who writes horror comics agreed. There was nothing, he said, that inspired him with more fear and horror than a polite tea party given by a dear old lady—an ordinary old lady, not a witch. And Aunt Maria is a powerful and unscrupulous witch, tea parties and all. She takes the place of the ambitious parents in
The Lives of Christopher Chant
, for she is secretly grooming Mig to follow her as the sorcerous queen of a small seaside community. Aunt Maria embodies a certain type of female, dominating by pretending to be an invalid and by barefaced manipulation, dividing things into men's business and women's business, and pretending to worry. In her world, it's a woman's place to seem to worry. This is where I got frightened. In a nightmare way, strength becomes weakness and, vice versa, right becomes wrong, and most other values are skewed too.

But Aunt Maria was based on a real person—in fact, there seem to be rather a lot of her; my editor met five women exactly like Aunt Maria on her way down the street after finishing the book—and I thought, People have to cope with her every day. Let's show them a hero coping with her.

Mig has to grope her way through Auntie's moral miasma. At first, like Christopher Chant, she succumbs—at least to the propaganda about her role, and can do nothing but write her real opinions in her journal. She leaves the active male role to her brother, Chris. Chris is forced by the same propaganda into a near-parody of an aggressive adolescent boy—and some of the things he says made me scream with laughter while I wrote them—until Aunt Maria, having driven him too far, blandly turns him into a wolf. This leaves Mig in the position of the lonely folktale princess who
has
to turn her brothers back into human form. Mig has to overcome real terror
and
the sort of intellectual sloth induced by the role Aunt Maria has thrust upon her. But she does it, and raises her game. Here she, like Christopher Chant, finds that she has to call on something buried and hidden, in this case a man. A man called Antony Green has been buried alive, on Aunt Maria's orders, twenty years before. He is even more than the sleeping, buried part of Mig herself: he is the buried part of the whole community, their life of the imagination, without which no one's intelligence can work well enough to see through Aunt Maria's moral miasma. Mig, in raising her game, has sensed that there is something
other
and better, and this is what she has to go for.

This sense of something other and better is what heroes give us a glimpse of when they raise their game. And this is why we need heroes. Younger children seem to understand this fairly readily, I think, because when you are nine or ten your life is lived at a high emotional pitch that is itself only a step from the heroic mode. Take a look at any school playground and you'll see what I mean.

My youngest goddaughter, at the age of eight, was always very fierce when she came across injustice. On one occasion, she saw a large bully in the playground beating up a younger, and disabled, child. She suddenly became a knight errant and, although much younger and slighter than the bully, she launched herself at him with such ferocity that she took him by surprise and knocked him down. Then she hammered his head on the playground. The bully naturally told the teachers that he had been attacked without provocation, and my goddaughter was punished. She was undaunted. She told me afterward that she had been quite right to attack. “It was so
unfair
!” she proclaimed. “It made me angry.” She was terribly unhappy, but she was glowing with her deed too. She was in touch with the other and better, all right—she was Boadicea, Brunhilde, Britomart, you name it.

When this girl reached puberty, she lost touch a little with her heroic sense. As a teenager or young adult, your emotions may be at an even higher pitch, but the onset of the additional emotions to do with sex sort of scramble the other feelings and you become a rather frantic muddle for a while. This is when people need a hero to follow. Everyone that age has a fierce pride and doesn't want to be a
failure
, and a hero gives you this sense of something other and better, so that you can keep your head above the frantic muddle. What you look for is a sort of blueprint of how to manage.

Then, with the aid of whatever blueprint they choose, people school themselves out of the emotion—and often out of the pride that went with it. They become ashamed of the whole lot, including heroes. I think this is a pity. But I take comfort from the way people of
all
ages will follow a tennis match breathlessly—even if they're not actually interested in the game. We all need an ideal. And we all have times when we need to raise our game. Heroes make us know that this is possible.

 

Lecture Two: Negatives and Positives in Children's Literature

 

In her second talk in Australia, Diana develops her ideas on fantasy and the imagination. This talk was later published in issue 25 of
Focus
, the writers' magazine of the British Science Fiction Society, in December 1993/January 1994.

 

T
here is one bizarre and creepy fact about my books which never gets onto the backs of jackets or into reviews—that is that they come true. This usually happens after I have written them. For instance, I now live in the house in
The Ogre Downstairs
. When I wrote the book, I was living in Oxford in a house that was the reverse of that one in every way—for instance, it had a flat roof that was soluble in water—and I had no thoughts of moving to Bristol, where I now live. Sometimes, however, the book comes true while I am actually writing it, and this can be quite upsetting.
Fire and Hemlock
was one of those. One of the many things that happened while I was writing it was that an eccentric bachelor friend from Sussex University, who stayed with us while he was lecturing in Bristol, insisted on my driving him to some stone circles in our neighborhood. There, he began having mystic experiences, while I kept getting hung up astride the electric fences that crisscrossed the site. My outcries, he said, were disturbing the vibes, so he sent me to the local pub to wait for him. As soon as I got there, the landlady and the other customers began talking about these same stone circles and related the local story about their origins. This story is called “The Wicked Wedding”: the bride, who is an evil woman, chooses a young man to marry, but at the wedding, the devil comes, kills the young bridegroom, and marries the lady himself. This is the story behind
Fire and Hemlock
and, believe it or not, I had never heard it before—I thought I'd made it up. Well, after various other strange experiences, my eccentric friend went back to Sussex and I finished the book. I then started, immediately, to write
Archer's Goon
. Just picked up a fresh block of paper and began. Now those of you who have read this book will know that it hinges on a man called Quentin Sykes discovering a newborn baby in the snow. I had just started the second draft of this book when my eccentric Sussex friend went for a walk in the middle of a winter's night and discovered a baby. He found it a very moving experience—but I felt acutely responsible. It is all very well my books coming true on me—it is a risk I take—but when this starts rubbing off on other people it is no joke. The trouble is, a book demands that certain incidents are present in it, and to deny this is to spoil the book. So I thought deeply about the matter. And though I realized I could do nothing about parts of my books coming true—that really is beyond my control—there are things very much in my control over which I feel a very strong sense of responsibility indeed. It is this sense of
responsibility
that I want to talk about.

Soon after
Archer's Goon
was published, I was invited to a fantasy convention in London. Here I was approached by a prolific and original writer of adult fantasy—a Canadian—who told me that he would not be writing the books he did had he not read my books when he was an adolescent. I was stunned—he has the most stunning blue eyes!—not only by the eyes but simply by that fact. It was hard to handle. Something I wrote had got so deeply into someone else's imagination as to become part of his adult personality and to influence his career. I wasn't actually able to look at this matter calmly until last year, when my American publishers sent me his latest book as a gift. This book had a postscript in which he declared that this particular book would not have been written had he not chanced to read, as a child, that chapter of
The Wind in the Willows
called “The Piper at the Gates of Dawn.”