‘I looked into my mother’s eyes. What did I see there? The delight of memories or the delight of her imaginings?’ (p 36)
What it isn’t
I do not usually review picture books. However, as David Almond is one of our most important (and brilliant) contemporary writers for young people, even the publication of a new small picture book from him is an event of considerable note. Even if this were a picture book. Which this isn’t. Or small. Which it it isn’t. Or even entirely new. Which it also isn’t.
Annie Lumsden may be a comparatively short book, but it is certainly not a small one in anything other than physical size Nor is it really a picture book, despite being full of (wonderful) pictures. At least not, that is, if you think of a picture book as something primarily for young children. Annie Lumsden is really an illustrated short story, from a master of the short story. But it is not actually a new one. It was first published in 2007, as Half a Creature from the Sea, and then again, more prominently, in 2014, in the brilliant story collection that was given that same title.
However, we live in an age when recycling is rightly considered a very good thing. When something recycled ends up being even more splendid than the original, surely that has to be even better. Exactly such is the case here, because what started as an outstanding story is now a quite ravishingly lovely single volume, enormously enhanced by illustrations that are both delightful and poignant.
So let’s just look at Annie Lumsden: The Girl from the Sea for what it is now, for what it is now is very special.
What it is
What we have enclosed between comparatively close covers is a ‘little’ book whose language is a masterclass in prose composition and whose content a rich multi-faceted exploration of life on the cusp between childhood and early adulthood. It is touching, insightful, humbling, lyrical, ethereal, mystical, baffling and enlightening. It is enigmatic; and its new title captures that enigma perfectly. Annie Lumsden is the mythic, fantastical girl from the sea. Yet the girl from the sea is Annie Lumsden; her tale rooted in the place and people of the North East coast in such a down-to-earth way that it leaves you flabbergasted at how it can be all of this at once. In other words it is so very David Almond.
The story’s central figure is a young girl who, over its course, moves through that stage of growing about which David Almond often evokes with such sympathetic potency . Of course it then becomes about all cusps, all periods of change, all necessary, but sometimes difficult, growth. But it is about many other things too. It is about a single parent family, and all single parent families. It is about the power of love that accepts unconditionally. It is about place; the Northumbrian coast and the sea; about all coasts and all seas.
‘All seas flow into each other . . . and into us.’ (p 46)
It is about places where minor artists make tourist trinkets from pebbles and shells. It is about what we learn, and when we learn it, and how.
‘Things that’d seemed fixed and hard and hopeless started to shift. Words stopped being barnacles. Numbers were no longer limpets.’ (p 58).
More than anything, though, it is about tales; tales with the quiet resonances of the traditional, of selkies.
‘In the water I am truly as I am - Annie Lumsden, seal girl, fish girl, dolphin girl, the girl who cannot crow,’ (p 23)
It is about a thin line between reality and story, so that one segues into the other, and neither the reader nor Annie quite knows which is which, until realising that both are the truth. It is about being strange and being normal, and how both of those are the same too.
‘Sometimes the best way to understand how to be human is to understand our strangeness.’ (p 58)
All of this David Almond wraps in language that continually seduces and enchants the reading ear. He has a poet’s sensitivity to language. Perhaps an orator’s too, for he knows the power of repetition,: of sounds, of words, of phrases. He also knows exactly the moment when enough is enough. No, it is not so much the language of the poet or the orator; it is the language of the world-weaver, the bard, the consummate storyteller.
Mastery of mystery
How is it possible to condense so much in a book of only sixty-odd pages, many of which are shared with extensive illustrations? Well, by being David Almond. And I should not really be surprised.
And, of course, the illustrated element is of integral importance, too. It would be quite wrong here to reserve all the praise for the writer. Beatrice Alemanga’s art work captures wonderfully many of the same telling ambiguities. Her pictures are childlike, yet sophisticated; dreamlike, yet starkly real, dusky-hued yet vivid, and, more than anything, movingly beautiful. Most importantly of all, words and pictures enhance each other and together conjure images of rich resonance.
Towards the end of the tale, one character offers an insight, and a challenge:
‘Sometimes the biggest mystery of all is how a mystery might help us solve another mystery. . . Pick the sense out of that!’ (p 58).
David Almond and Beatrice Alemagna teach us how to pick out that sense, and allow us space to do it, each in our own mysterious, strange, individual, universal way.