Illustration: Saara Söderlund
‘I think about the pattern dream.’ (p 66)
The Song Walker it is just so good it’s breathtaking. If it doesn’t win major awards in due course, then there is something seriously wrong with the system.
Naming cats
Sandy Brownjohn, an inspirational writer on the teaching of poetry to children, prominent in the later part of the 20th century*, characterised a talent for creative thinking as ‘the ability to name cats’. My heart sings when I read that Zilla Bethell ‘walks in the hills’ and amongst her favourite things are ‘mint tea, swimming in the rain, cheesy fridge magnets, snow globes, Chopin, dancing and diphthongs.’ To me this immediately speaks of someone with what I now always think of as that ‘ability to name cats’. Not just in the lists’s contents but in its expression, this promises to be someone with a flair for idiosyncratic creativity, someone who plays with words and ideas in fresh and exciting ways. Delving into her children’s novels immediately and amply confirms this - and they are deeply affecting too.
She set off, not too long ago, with a very fine MG debut (A Whisper of Horses) and an even better second book (The Extraordinary Colours of Auden Dare), but then really hit children’s literature heights when she wrote a novel set in the country in which she was born and spent her early childhood, Papua New Guinea. The Shark Caller was undoubtedly one of the children’s novels of 2021 and I am only sorry that I didn’t read it early enough to include in my ‘Books of the Year’ post for that year.
Now, however, I am able to make amends, for her latest book is the most special of all.
Outback
This time her setting is the Australian outback. Whilst this may not exactly be Papua New Guinea, it is far closer to there than to here and Zilla Bethel obviously has a strong connection with it. She has deep respect, too, for the First Country Australians, whose home this was long before colonisation. The beliefs and traditions of these peoples play a fundamental part in her new story and that sincere respect is shown by the fact that the she sought the consent of representatives of the Alyawarre community before publishing the book. Integral to those beliefs, and right at the heart of her book, are the ‘songlines’, or ‘dreaming tracks’, musical maps that guide their people through both the physical and spiritual landscape of the outback.
Of course, the place and its indigenous culture will be far removed from the experience of most UK children, but Zillah Bethell’s handling of both is so knowledgably rich, and communicated in such skilfully vivid language, as to make both come fully alive for them.
Fugue state
The basic story is that of a young girl, the book’s narrator, who finds herself walking through the outback, carrying a strange case, and with a peculiar marble in her pocket, but without the least idea of where she is, how she got there, who she is, or even her own name. Very soon she meets a lone First Country girl, also travelling the land on foot, who is very reluctant to explain who she is or where she is going. As the two trudge ever onwards through the arid, yet surprisingly varied landscape of the Northern Territotry, with a good many incidents on the way, funny, awesome and terrifying by turns, they very gradually learn more about themselves and each other.
There are times when the metaphor of the journey in the outback landscape (externalising, as it does, the inscape of the girls’ mental one) becomes quite explicit. After watching Tarni make a fire with a steel, flint and dried grass, her lost companion says:
‘I try and ignite the dried grasses of the memories hidden away within me. Try and use the flint and steel of my mind to spark them back to life.’ (p 66)
However, for much of the book it sits as an underlying but potent presence.
If this were all there were to the book it would still be a very fine one. But this is not all there is. Not by a long walk.
Song
It is very hard to write about the later stages of this story without spoiling it for other readers - and I would certainly not wish to do that. Suffice to say that the narrative develops in a way that not only shocks and surprises but brings so many things in the preceding story into focus. However, this new focus is a strangely enigmatic one. What have so far seemed merely sights and incidents in the girls’ story suddenly shimmer as images of something much deeper. A mirage experienced at the very opening, a bird in a cage, a musical instrument locked in a case, a wild horse rescued, a night gazing at the stars, all suddenly begin to take on significance. And then there is the strange way that Chapter One is titled as ‘The End’, which strikes one as strange at the time, but gets put to the back of the mind until later in the book. Yet at the same time as everything becomes clearer, reality becomes illusive, fragile, fugative. Dry earth spawns earth magic. The physical becomes spiritual. Time becomes dreamtime.
These days the word enchanted has become rather debased, superficial in its use, but at root it means being enthralled by song. This book is enchanted and enchanting in the truest meaning of these words. At its spiritual centre is music, is the song and, towards the end of the book, there is a most beautiful, lyrical passage that honours and celebrates that song. It is deeply affecting. It is the heart of everything.
Dream Time
Just as in his book, Tyger, SF Said draws on the visionary thinking of Willian Blake, so Zillah Bethell reconnects to the earth dreaming of the First Country Australians to reawaken in us a forgotten spirituality. She and her book are helping to reweave the rainbow that two and a half centuries of materialism have unwoven. She has composed a song that guides us all, of whatever peoples, along a dreaming track; one that leads us both forwards and backwards to a journey completed and begun, under a glaring sun that reveals the beauty of our own outback, under a dark sky where stars can actually be seen.
Very soon this book will join the songline of great children’s literature that meanders its way around the world and deep into human hearts.
*Footnote
Sandy Brownjohn’s best known books are probably Does it Have to Rhyme? (1980) and What Rhymes With Secret (1982). I warmly recommend them to any primary teachers who can manage to track them down. Teaching the writing of poetry does not date.