Novelist and Reviewer: Author: The Other Book, The Liberators. The Darkening Path Trilogy: The Broken King, vol. 1; The King's Shadow, vol. 2, and The King's Revenge, vol. 3. The Double Axe, a retelling of the Minotaur story, and The Arrow of Apollo. How To Teach Classics to Your Dog published October 2020. Wildlord, publishing October 2021.
I've written a piece for The Spectator about the declining quality of vocabulary in children's books. There wasn't space, unfortunately, to talk about the excellent writers who do stretch children these days, like Frances Hardinge, Marcus Sedgwick, Sally Gardner, F E Higgins et alia.
Puck of Pook’s Hill
by Rudyard Kipling
Philip Womack
When, as a small boy, I first heard about Rudyard Kipling’s Puck of Pook’s Hill, I wanted to read it, even before I knew what it was. I remember sensing something incantatory in its name: four satisfying monosyllables tripping off the tongue as if they’d been uttered for centuries, an enchantment which, in the right circumstances, could make extraordinary things happen. As I was to discover, Puck is a kind of spell, containing within it so many facets that I would be able to re-read it many times, revelling in its wise, mystical account of England’s complex history of war, honour, money and love. And, of course, its warm, immersive atmosphere of magic.
When I was about 10, I was particularly drawn to Puck because it was set in Sussex (‘seely Sussex’, the book has it, meaning joyful or happy). I lived and went to school in the heart of the county. Bateman’s, Rudyard Kipling’s house, was not far away, and nor was Hastings, and we would visit Chanctonbury Ring (though we never walked round it three times at midnight, for fear of summoning the devil). Despite the encroaching conglomeration of fading seaside towns, which stretched from Bognor Regis in the west to Brighton in the east, it still felt, in the late 1980s and early 90s, as if we inhabited a timeslip.
As is well known, Puck’s narrative was inspired by a friend of Kipling’s suggesting he write a Roman yarn set around Bateman’s. Less well known, perhaps, is that Kipling’s children performed a short version of Midsummer Night’s Dream in a fairy ring at the house. In this way, Shakespeare’s play interacted with the landscape, which reflects how Puck meshes reality, fiction and dream. Puck merged into my world, too. My preparatory school was situated in a Norman manor house, and even the dullest boy could imagine a knight galloping up the driveway. There was an amphitheatre: modern, of course, but to my child self it might have entertained Roman centurions. How many times, I wonder, aged eleven or so, did I slip alone onto the stone steps, the ancient barn behind me and the river Arun a few steps away, and chant words from A Midsummer Night’s Dream, hoping for a rustle of reeds, for the brown, smiling face of Puck to appear. He never did.
The children in the book, Dan and Una, are the same age as Kipling’s own were at the time of their summer performance. Reading Puck again recently, perhaps for the twentieth time, I was struck by their almost anagrammatic names - Dananduna - suggesting a deep closeness. Their names are appropriate: Dan is often a shepherd’s name in poetry, and Una is a questing Emperor’s daughter in Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene. The pastoral and the knightly have relevance to Kipling’s series of short historical narratives, which comprise a palimpsest, revealing more and more, yet hiding and eliding too, like the elusive figure of Puck himself.
Puck, who shudders at being called a fairy, has known wild magic, and every time I read his description of the “old days”, it gives me goosebumps. He tells the children:
“I’ve seen Sir Huon and a troop of his people setting off from Tintagel Castle for Hy-Brasil in the teeth of a sou’westerly gale , with the spray flying all over the Castle, and the Horses of the Hills wild with fright. Out they'd go in a lull, screaming like gulls, and back they'd be driven five good miles inland before they could come head to wind again. Butterfly-wings! It was Magic—Magic as black as Merlin could make it, and the whole sea was green fire and white foam with singing mermaids in it. And the Horses of the Hills picked their way from one wave to another by the lightning flashes!”
On re-reading it, I noted firstly Kipling’s eclectic approach to his sources, which seems of a piece with his approach to the threads of history. Sir Huon hails from a French Romance, Tintagel from the Arthurian cycle, Hy-Brasil from Celtic folklore; and what are the mermaids doing there, and why is Merlin’s magic black? Yet this only adds to the strangeness. There’s also a sense of change and fall: there is no such wildness in Puck’s homely magic, and other enchantments in the book are quiet. (A singing sword is one of the only examples of sorcery within the inset narratives). It is also significant that Puck is an observer of Sir Huon here, rather than an active participant. Robin Goodfellow, as he is also known, plays a very small part in the plot. And yet it’s Puck’s smiling face that I imagine when I remember the book. Though his primary function is to show the past to Dan and Una, he is much more than mere framing device: he is tutelary spirit, and slippery symbol of change and continuity. Puck is always saying ‘as plain as the nose on my face’: but even that is ambiguous, for Puck can shapeshift (in ‘Dymchurch Flit’, it’s broadly hinted that the labourer Tom Shoesmith is Puck in disguise).
Dan and Una are also more than ciphers, and are on the cusp of adolescence. Those who might accuse Kipling of misogyny should note that Una is the first of the pair to meet Parnesius, the Romano-British soldier whose gripping story of friendship and hardship at Hadrian’s Wall is at the centre of the book, and also that she shows him how to use her catapult, at which she is more than competent. It’s a lovely image, the little girl patiently explaining to the grizzled warrior. Dan, too, displays sparkiness, particularly in his dealings with his governess. Even so, they simply listen to the stories, which have no children in them, but are all about adults. Indeed, quite frequently their themes are so adult that Puck requests the tellers to change the subject. Time flows onwards, and the world expands.
Puck is not simply about Sussex. The stories range widely over time and space: there is Weland, a proud Norse god worshipped with human sacrifice; Hugh, a godly Saxon novice and Richard, a doughty Norman knight; Parnesius, who hails from the Isle of Wight, where he was looked after by a Numidian nursemaid, and who later commands battalions of Scythians. He worships Mithras, and strikes up a faintly homoerotic friendship with another soldier. Puck’s narrative climax is given to Kadmiel, a Jew. There are also Picts, Vikings (“Winged Hats”), visits to Aquae Sulis for the waters, and a dangerous expedition to Africa with a Chinese man who knows the secrets of navigation. Even ‘Hal o the Draft’, set in the early modern period, concerns the smuggling escapades of the Sussex villagers, suggesting a wider scope than the Weald and the Downs. All of this, says Kipling, made England: fractured, disparate, yet comprising a whole.
The most striking thing, though, is Puck’s elegiac strain. I now sense its melancholies and joys, its craft and elisions in ways not available to me as a child. Richard promises the Saxon Lady Aelueva that he will not enter her Hall until she gives him permission. On re-reading it, when she eventually lets him in, a tear came to my eye. In another story, Richard and Hugh, aged and weary, voyage to Africa to forget their troubles. It’s hardly the stuff of standard children’s adventures.
The fate of the gold that Richard and Hugh gain on their adventure is emblematic of the book: they don’t use the treasure. Instead it sits, hidden, in Richard’s manor for years, until it’s discovered in the time of King John. Kadmiel, at great personal cost, finds it and hurls it into the sea, so that the King, denied a loan for which the gold would provide security, is forced to sign Magna Carta, and so instigate England’s liberties. Kipling gave this vital action to a marginalised person, and it’s interesting also that this complex plot about abstract financial matters hinges on something being hidden. What’s not there resonates as deeply, if not more, as what is: history happens in the gaps.
The golden thread running through these fragmented stories is an immense generosity and humanity. Loyalty is prized above all else, even when it can cause trouble with your superiors. The Saxons and the Normans come together, with both sides keeping their word; mercy is shown to the treacherous, and though the truly wicked (of which there are very few) receive their comeuppance, their punishments stem from pragmatism.
Kipling is often derided as a jingoistic poster boy for Empire’s worst excesses: but in the Parnesius stories, the Roman empire is on its last legs. There’s no sense that this is necessarily bad. Walls are built, destroyed and rebuilt, and that is the way of history. Dan and Una will grow up, and play their parts in a century that, though it will be vastly different from anything that had gone before, will still hold onto that golden thread.
It’s never quite clear whether all the memorable people that Dan and Una meet are ghosts, or phantoms created by Puck, or whether they too have timeslipped from their proper zones, and will be magicked back by Oak, Ash, and Thorn, having forgotten everything they’d seen. Questions of the paradoxes of time travel didn’t bother Kipling. But what bothered me as a child, and still bothers me, is that Dan and Una, that indivisible pair, forget what they’ve heard as soon as they’ve heard it. Away vanish the glorious stories, blown by a fall of leaves, only so that adults won’t think they are mad. Poor Dan and Una.
I didn’t think it was a good explanation then, and I still don’t. I do, now, see the aptness of the leaves, and the glancing reference to Homer’s generations of men, as many as the leaves on the trees. The irony is, of course, that we the readers know the stories, and experience in our minds what Dan and Una saw, heard and felt. Children (and grown ups, too), will, I hope, read and remember these glittering stories, with their fine-grained ironies and deep-running passions, always.
I've reviewed five children's books for Literary Review's July issue.
Wished by Lissa Evans
Small! by Hannah Moffat
Hedgewitch by Skye McKenna
Escape to the River Sea by Emma Carroll
The Imagination Chamber by Philip Pullman.
Dark Peak by Marcus Sedgwick
The Chime Seekers by Ross Montgomery
The Red Gloves and Other Stories by Catherine Fisher
Utterly Dark and the Face of the Deep by Philip Reeve
Sisters of the Lost Marsh by Lucy Strange
The Shadows of Rookhaven by Padraig Kenny
Fireborn by Aisling Fowler.
Pickled Pepper in Crouch End is a lovely independent bookshop, with a knowledgeable and friendly bookseller in charge. You can order The Arrow of Apollo from them via email. Their site is here: https://www.pickledpepperbooks.co.uk/
And it was great to see Waterstones Gower Street again - I had forgotten how large and extensive their children's department is. The picture above was taken there - a whopping great pile of copies to sign. Hooray!
When the World Was Ours by Liz Kessler
What We're Scared of by Keren David
Two Terrible Vikings by Francesca Simon.
The Monsters of Rookhaven by Padraig Kenny
The Midnight Guardians by Ross Montgomery
Voyage of the Sparrowhawk by Natasha Farrant
I, Ada by Julia Gray
The Midnight Swan by Catherine Fisher
The Haunting of Aveline Jones by Phil Hickes
The Great Godden by Meg Rosoff
You can read the review here, but do get the December/January issue - a bumper double one.
One other small item of news: I received the CD audioboook of How to Teach Classics to Your Dog. I always enjoy the physical versions, rather than the digital ones - somehow it makes a more satisfying experience to load the CDs into the machine. My lurcher, obviously, is already listening...
