Finn Mac Cool!

Our books today are organically connected through the living tissue of the Silent Majority! Many of you wrote to thank me for my recent appreciation of the fiction of Rosemary Sutcliff, and a couple of you expanded those thanks by mentioning other writers who've been somewhat overlooked by the masses – including the mighty Morgan Llywelyn ('mighty' here purely in the aesthetic sense, since the lady herself would fit comfortably inside the your average bread-box).

And what better way to bridge the gap between those two authors than with the same subject matter? For in 1967 Sutcliff wrote The High Deeds of Finn Mac Cool, and in 1994 Llywelyn wrote Finn Mac Cool – two novels separated by 25 years, both dealing with the legendary Irish hero Finn Mac Cool and his band of greyhound warriors, the Fianna. Those legends have been adapted many times in Irish literature, most notably and tiresomely in Joyce's Finnegans Wake, and with good reason: Finn's story, the Fiannaidheacht in all its glory, represents the last glinting of bright sunlight on the shield-bronze of of Irish mytho-history. Almost immediately after the period of its flourishing, Christianity swept through the island like a plague, converting heroism to piety and transforming sensible, healthy polytheistic violence into a bureaucratic monotheism wrapping even more systematic violence in the cloak of hypocrisy. Cú Chulainn and his ilk withered at the first poisonous touch of the Beatitudes, and all that remained was for well-intentioned geldings to travel about the country dutifully collecting oral traditions, asking every stooped, ancient old Oisin “So tell me, what filthy, heathen tales were you foolish enough to believe, before we came?”

The story of Finn and his men is one of the best of those stories, as both Sutcliff and Llywelyn clearly saw. And both decide to retell the story in intentionally anachronistic phrasings, to put before their readers the sound and feel of vanished days. Here's Sutcliff on the grueling initiation rituals of the Fianna:

It was not easy to join the Fianna, and many tried and failed, for Finn ruled that no man should become one of the proud brotherhood without passing many tests. A warrior must be skilful as well as brave, and to prove his skill, the young man who wished to join their number must first, with only a shield and hazel rod, defend himself against nine men posted all around him while standing in a hole in the ground, so that he could not move from the hips down. If one of the spears they cast at him so much as grazed his skin or drew one drop of blood, he was not taken. Then his hair was plaited into a score of braids, and he was hunted through the woods by others of the Fianna; and if he was wounded or run down, if his spear trembled in his hand, or a single strand of hair broke loose from its braiding, or if a dry twig cracked under his running feet, he was not taken. Then he must leap over a branch set at his own height above the ground, and run under another set level with his knee, and still running he must pull a thorn out of his foot without slackening speed. If he passed all these tests, he must still know the Twelve Books of Poetry, and be able to recite long passages from them; and he must have by heart a score or more of the ancient tales in which was hidden the secret lore and the history of Erin. And if he could do all these things, he was taken.

And then a quarter of a century later, here's Llywelyn on the same subject:

He had not been a day in Tara before everyone knew he was a changed man. He radiated a white heat. If before he had been ambitious for himself and his fennidi, now he was manic, demanding more than was humanly possible even for them. He fell upon the men Goll had been satisfactorily drilling and forced them to double their exertions, driving them out of some exploding force of his own that eventually communicated itself to them until they were as frantic as he. Javelins were hurled farther that day on the Hill of Tara than any javelin had ever been hurled in Erin.

Thus began the epoch of the Fianna. During its duration, it would create imperishable legend.

Men who had been born to subjugated tribes and raised in louse-ridden, flea-infested huts stinking of urine and rotting meat would be elevated to a form of nobility, admired and emulated, entertained royally and laden with gifts of the finest craftsmanship. Every child would know their names. Every poet would celebrate their deeds. They would range the length and width of the island as Cormac Mac Airt consolidated his control, bringing all Erin under the overlordship of Tara as even his grandfather had never done.

There's a great glance of both writers striking a clean, epic tone, and both of them sustain it wonderfully for the lengths of their Finn books. Of course we've already covered how many other wonderful books Sutcliff wrote, and the same goes for Llewelyn: in novel after novel (most certainly including her masterpiece, The Lion of Ireland, which deserves a consideration of its own here at Stevereads, in another big post on epic historical novels), she writes strong, evocative prose designed purely to entertain. There's a thorough lack of pretension about her writing that plants her squarely in the great Irish tradition of Mary Lavin and Liam O'Flaherty – her prose doesn't, as it were, mess around: it gets down to business right there at the kitchen table; it weaves strong, simple stories by the fireside. She trusts always that she need not tell her readers that valor is better than spite, that there's a strength in virtue, and that there need be no apology for things having a beginning, a middle, and an end.

I don't know how directly Llywelyn might have been influenced by Sutcliff – certainly she had to feel a presence over her shoulder while writing Finn Mac Cool – but in any case, those old legends produced two fine books that look very good side-by-side on the shelf.

Rosemary Sutcliff!

Our books today form a little sampling of the historical novels of Rosemary Sutcliff, since a number of you wrote to ask me (privately, of course … sigh) if her fiction stands the test of time as well as her memoir Blue Remembered Hills. Several of you expressed fond memories of reading her when you were children, which is something I myself never did – so I revisited a handful of her novels to see what I could see.

It turns out they hold up quite well. In fact, they're wonderful. One of them has an afterword by the wretched Young Adult novelist Scott O'Dell in which he accidentally says something both true and powerful. Sutcliff, he tells us, “writes all out, the best she can, and mostly for herself.”

That last part is of course the key, and you can certainly feel it reading through her many novels: she passionately loves the material she's shaping – taking the early history and mythology of Britain from as many sources as she can find, mixing it all together, imagining all the stories big and small that must have filled the interstices of Britain's long abandonment by Rome and long conquest by the Saxons. She tells and re-tells all the old familiar stories of those dark ages, and she does it without an ounce of sugar-coating and without once talking down to her audience. These are perfect examples of the kind of “Young Adult” fiction I always cite as being 'all-ages' stuff; good teen readers don't want anything simplified for their benefit – they want problems, complexity, and unhappy endings, because in part they yearn for reading to hasten all the non-boring parts of adulthood. The worst YA writers pander not to teens but to their watchful, over-protective, and openly sentimentalizing parents – the best ones know they're providing an often essential counter-balance to all that.

Not that such things were on Rosemary Sutcliff's mind in the decades of her writing career, although increasingly through her writing she strikes me as the type who would have been a very tough critic as a young girl.

As some of you may recall from that earlier entry, Sutcliff suffered from a rare and nearly debilitating form a arthritis for the whole of her life, and she had no access to the state-of-the-art analgesics she'd get for such a condition today. So she had to summon an enormous force of will merely to produce her books, but it goes deeper than that: not only did her medical condition prevent her from really pursuing her first love, painting, but it also inculcated in her early on a sympathy for underdogs and an admiration for the kind of valor that presses on despite overwhelming odds. Those are some of the things that make her novels so enjoyable, time after time.

Critics have sometimes referred to our first choice among those novels, 1965's The Mark of the Horse Lord, as her best. It's the story of Phaedrus, a gladiator in Roman Britain, who's quickly tangled in a plot to usurp the throne of a Scottish kingdom and masquerade as its king. In the process – amid violent plot and counter-plot – he learns a lot about what it means to be a king, and a lot about himself. I'm not sure I agree with those critics who call this her best work – but the book is dark and brooding and not at all sugar-coated, and through it all, as through all of Sutcliff's writing, you can see the painter at work:

Sleet was still spitting down the wind, but the yellow bar of a low dawn edged the eastern sky; and as Phaedrus mounted the Crowning Stone, and with his left foot on the hide of the King Horse set his right into the deep-cut footprint that had held the right foot of every king of the Dalriadain since first they came from Erin across the Western Sea, the first sunlight struck the high snow-filled curries of distant Cruachan.

She sticks much closer to recorded mytho-history for 1971's Tristan and Iseult, which follows the classic love story closely, with one major exception – an exception our author addresses herself, in a note that's charming both for its sincerity and its lack of apology:

In all the versions that we know, Tristan and Iseult fall in love because they accidentally drink together a love potion which was meant for Iseult and her husband, King Marc, on their wedding night. Now the story of Tristan and Iseult is Diarmid and Grania, and Deirdre and the Sons of Usna, and in neither of them is there any suggestion of a love potion. I am sure in my own mind that the medieval storytellers added it to make an excuse for Tristan and Iseult for being in love with each other when Iseult was married to somebody else. And for me, this turns something that was real and living and part of themselves into something artificial, the result of drinking a sort of magic drug.

So I have left out the love potion.

By the time of 1981's The Sword and the Circle, Sutcliff was a living legend in the writing world, somebody who had won literally generations of readers and suffered no dimming of her powers over time. The combination of all this heady acclaim is perhaps the only reason why a novelist as perceptive as she was would attempt what she does in this book: the story of King Arthur, soup to nuts. Not that unusual, you say, and you're right – when attempted by not-very-perceptive authors. The really sharp ones know they can't possibly out-do one of the greatest novels of the 20^th century, T. H. White's immortal The Once and Future King. That book came out in 1939 – Sutcliff must have read it dozens of times just like the rest of us. She must have known she couldn't match White on exactly his own turf (this is why the best subsequent Arthurian novels have come at the whole story from side-angles, and more power to them), yet that's exactly what she tries to do. Talk about underdogs! When she comes to the iconic scene where young Arthur, desperate to find a sword for his brother Kay to use in the joust, pulls a sword from what he hurriedly takes to be some kind of war monument, she gives it her most visual, evocative prose:

When he reached the garth of the abbey church he dismounted and hitched his cob to the gate and went in. The fresh snow lay among the tombstones, and in the midst of the tall black sentinel towers of the yew trees the pavilion glowed crimson as a rose at Midsummer; and the sword stood lonely in its anvil on the great stone, for even the ten knights were gone to the jousting.

Then Arthur took the sword two-handed by its quillions. There was golden writing on the stone, but he did not stop to read it. The sword seemed to thrill under his touch as a harp thrills in response to its master's hand. He felt strange, as though he were on the point of learning some truth that he had forgotten before he was born. The thin winter sunlight was so piercing-bright that he seemed to hear it; a high white music in his blood.

And it's very, very good – but those of us who've been under White's spell all this time will smile a little sadly, because there isn't really a contest with his depiction of the same moment:

There was a kind of rushing noise, and a long chord played along with it. All round the churchyard there were hundreds of old friends. They rose over the church wall all together, like the Punch and Judy ghosts of remembered days, and there were badgers and nightingales and vulgar crows and hares and wild geese and falcons and fishes and dogs and dainty unicorns and solitary wasps and corkindrills and hedgehogs and griffins and the thousand other animals he had met. They loomed round the church wall, the lovers and helpers of the Wart, and they all spoke solemnly in turn. Some of them had come from the banners in the church, where they were painted in heraldry, some from the waters and the sky and the fields about – but all, down to the smallest shrew mouse, had come to help on account of love. Wart felt his powers grow.

The Wart walked up to the great sword for the third time. He put out his right hand softly and drew it out as gently as from a scabbard.

But even so, The Sword and the Circle is sharp, pure gold – as are all Sutcliff's books. We'll get to them all in due time here, with two in particular more certain than the rest: of course we must look soon at her Trojan War book, written last in her life, Black, Ships Before Troy. And naturally, a thorough look at Eagle of the Ninth will be in order when the movie comes out and bombs at the theaters! An inanimate block of splendor like Channing Tatum was nothing Rosemary Sutcliff ever foresaw, for all her powers of imagination. We'll have to see how the two of them fare, when they finally meet.

Blue Remembered Hills!

Our book today is Blue Remembered Hills, Rosemary Sutcliff’s 1983 childhood memoir about growing up in England shortly before and during World War II, and even that brief description raises two possible strikes against it in the minds of many readers. First strike, it’s by a “children’s author” and so might be strident or unpleasantly didactic. Second strike, it’s a childhood memoir, and so might be prey to saccharine myth-making.

These apprehensions increase when the reader learns that in childhood Sutcliffe was diagnosed with a rare form of juvenile arthritis – one immediately fears the appearance (let alone repeated use) of the word ‘plucky.’

But readers should cast aside such worries – and readers who are actually familiar with Sutcliff’s books won’t have worried in the first place. This is a flat-out fantastic author who never put pen to paper without rigorously exercising the result into something eminently worth reading. Her “children’s” books are for any reader childlike enough to favor clear, strong prose, well-drawn characters, and rousing, memorable plots.  And Blue Remembered Hills is nothing less than enchanting.

Sutcliff’s physical affliction, and the fact her father, a life-long naval man, was usually away from home, threw her into great dependence on her mother, by far the most remarkable character in this book. She’s a kind, strong-willed woman, and she and her daughter are often at loggerheads in the book (and there are consequences of outright, unreasonable defiance: this was back when parents were still allowed to slap their children if their children staged screaming, stomping, crying, manipulative fake-hysterics in public). And yet the book is over-brimming with daughterly affection – Mrs. Sutcliff could scarcely have dreamt of a more touching partial biography, even once she knew she had a writer for a daughter.

It being a childhood memoir and thus intimately concerned with loss, Blue Remembered Hills has quite a few other touching parts, and all of them are rendered with the same lyrical prose line and lack of sanctimony that characterizes her novels. One story about a stint in convalescent care seems to float and ramble – until the final two-tap punch is expertly delivered:

As before, there was a spell in the nursing-home for me, to shut off one chapter from the next, or maybe to make a kind of bridge between them. It was a big nursing-home in Hampstead. I don’t remember a thing about the treatment I underwent there; I only know that I was there for six weeks, and that during that time two things happened. One day, one of the nurses, in their free time and bless their kind young hearts, took me to see Queen Mary’s Dolls’ House; and one night there were strange noises and much coming and going in the eight-bed ward, and I was scared and could not sleep, and the woman in the next bed told me stories and talked to me softly all night long, so that I should not know that at the far end of the ward an older woman was dying and dying hard.

And even that most shopworn of childhood traumas, the death of a beloved pet, is rescued by dint of the author’s sheer craft. Here it isn’t the final coda but instead a great little juxtaposition, one perfect little ‘childlike’ line inserted quietly amidst all the practical, physical (and lovely) description:

The boy from a nearby farm who occasionally did some gardening for us, our veteran of the leeks and white alyssum having long since retired, dug him a grave alongside [earlier dog] Don’s, just outside the gate into the wood, and we put his collar on, that he might not run stray and nameless among the stars, and wrapped him in his blanket, like Sir John Moore, and put his beloved blue rubber ball in with him. And when the boy had shovelled back the earth and gone away, and we were left standing over the new grave, my mother read bits of the Burial Service over him, and pushed little wild daffodil bulbs from the bank into the soft earth, ready for the spring. It was Hallowe’en, with a cold grey mist dripping from among the trees. And all the while we both cried with quite desolation, the tears trickling down our noses, for Mike who had come to us at six weeks old and been a part of us ever since.

The reader gets the impression that the Sutcliffs were a family fond of a nicely-done anecdote or quip, and all of them are here, carefully preserved, in Blue Remembered Hills, which covers the years from the author’s childhood until the start of her publishing career. That start comes when an early manuscript is bought (for the princely sum of 50 pounds), and there’s much family pride on the occasion, with a perfect quip to hint at the greater fame to come:

My father made no attempt to be humble at all. If he had not been such a quiet man, I would have said that he crowed.

In old age, he invented a joke. ‘Once, Rosemary Sutcliff used to be my daughter; but I’m Rosemary Sutcliff’s father now.’

Several of Rosemary Sutcliff’s novels have recently been given spiffy re-issues in the United States, and her ‘profile’ is about to get an added boost, since Eagle of the Ninth is about to be released as a big-budget movie staring that prime slab of beef, Channing Tatum. Even given the extra attention, it’s unlikely Blue Remembered Hills will be re-issued, but it’s well worth reading just the same. It  will touch your heart, and as Rosemary Sutcliff herself would have said, there’s nothing wrong with that, from time to time.