Foxlight by Katya Balen

Cover: Barry Falls

‘In my dreams I believe and the dream makes me whole.’ (p 63)

New light

Over the past few years Katya Balen is the author who has given me the most reading pleasure, the most sheer unmagical magic, the magic of words and stories, the thoughts they share, the feelings they evoke. And that is real magic, the best magic.

She has already penned three breathtakingly brilliant novels, including the justly award-wining October, October. Since then she had added two outstanding titles to the Barrington Stoke catalogue, Birdsong and Nightjar, which show just how much depth of human experience can be communicated through a simply written, accessible story. So it was no wonder I could not resist jumping on the preview version of her new novel, Foxlight. Of course I have already preordered a copy of the published book from an independent bookseller, but an opportunity to avoid waiting any longer was irresistible.

To say I was not disappointed is a huge understatement. The cover by Barry Falls is a thing of stunning beauty, and so is the book.

Well begun . . .

Katya Balen does poignantly truthful and subtly thoughtful like no one else I know.

Orphans are not uncommon in children’s fiction, but here Katya Balen introduces her two, Fen and Rey, so vividly that 

any feeling of unoriginality is immediately dispelled. And she does this not with elaborate descriptions or extended exposition, but through telling moments of thought and speech, wrapped in an intoxicating  lyricism.

Take the opening:

‘It is Sunday evening and Rey and I are hiding in the coat cupboard. It smells like feet and boot polish and coat wax and the weather.’

and shortly after:

‘I sink back into the rails and let myself be swallowed by the scent of seasons.’

It is so simple, but simply ravishing. We luxuriate in the sensuous and it immediately it takes us into that cupboard with Fen. 

Magic painting

At the centre of Katya Balen’s new story are two orphaned girls.  Their characters, the colours of their lives, subtly emerge from the sweep of evocative words across her pages. It reminds me of the ‘magic painting’ books we had as children (sixpence from the low shelf  beneath the groceries in the corner shop). At home, a softly bristled brush washed plain tap water across the surface and brought up the colours hidden in the speckled coating of the blank pages.

The sisters are very close, but also respond very differently to their lives in the isolated ‘Light House’ orphanage where they have been since babies. They believe they were abandoned when very tiny, to the care of a wild fox, from where their ‘foster mother’ took them in and gave them names related to their strange  discovery. Both escape the routine of their  present lives by looking to the outside and by playing their own game of Imagine. Ray, withdrawn and often silent with anyone but her older sibling, imagines her missing mother and going off to find her. In contrast Fen, the story’s narrator, gazes into the surrounding countryside and pictures herself wild and free. Fen experiences everything with a staggering intensity,both the over-familiar confines of the Light House and the sparkling allure of the world beyond.

‘Thinking about the wildlands makes me feel like I’m alive more than any Imagine game ever could. . . . They call to me. They feel real and true. They’re where I belong. . .  They feel like they’re an extension of me, like my blood runs through the river and my bones have been built into trees and hilltops. It’s hard to explain. Even Rey doesn’t understand, and we share everything. Except this.’ (p 30)

She is a startlingly effective communicator both of her own thoughts and feelings, and those of others, most particularly her sister’s, and through her voice we gradually discover much about both girls.

Foxlight 

The catalyst for most of the action quickly comes in the appearance of a wild fox, to which Fen, hyperaware of the circumstances of their discovery as babies, immediately feels a strong connection.

‘I feel like I’m looking at something I have known forever and something I don’t know at all. It’s like a golden thread of light is spinning out from my chest and right into the eyes of this wild and beautiful creature and we are joined and connected by something fragile and strong and strange and familiar.’ (p 40)

The girls leave their home and, each for their own reasons, follow the fox to begin a long and difficult journey through the unknown countryside outside. Rey feels the fox will lead them to their lost mother, whilst Fen pursues her yearning for wildness and freedom.

The stream of consciousness we experience from narrator Fen is a superb example of life lived moment to moment, acutely aware and responding intensely. And yet hers is not always pure mindfulness, her moment is sometimes a ‘real’ and sometimes a constructed one, an imagined one, and her moments are influenced by the interplay of thought, feeling and experience.When she dreams of wildness and freedom, she experiences life in the Light House as dull, restrictive, yet when she is actually in the wilds, cold and hungry, she thinks of it in terms of warmth and comfort.  Through this wonderful writing, we are alive with her. Katya Balen’s is the magic of bringing us into another’s moment, sharing both Fen’s own  shifting perceptions and, through her, Rey’s

If this is a magic painting book, then it is not really like the ones of my childhood, for, when Katya Balen sweeps her watery brush over the pages again, then the colours blur and change, pastels become acids, tints become tones, only to transition again and again.

Songlines 

As the girls’ journey and the story progresses, the world in which they travel becomes stranger, provokes questions, causes unease. This strange, disturbing nature becomes gradually more apparent. Although the girls are totally credible and the countryside through which they travel is evoked with vivid realism, full of beauty and wonder, as well as of hardship and danger, there is something approaching surreal about the landscape. It is, on a deeper level, a kind of dreamscape; their journey a very English equivalent of the First Nation Australian ‘Song Walking’*. Although the girls come to believe that there were ‘wilders’ living/working here some time ago, the countryside is totally bereft of other people. Indeed apart from a handful of fellow orphans and the foster mother, back in the Light House, plus a single older male neighbour, there are no other human figures at all this geographically wide ranging landscape. In fact the only sign of human presence is a series of now neglected travellers’ huts or bothies, spread out along a mysterious route, with mouldering books and rusting tins of food left inside each. Were these where the elusive wilders stayed when they were here before? 

This is inscape as well as landscape, both a real journey and a metaphorical one, conjured with this author’s trademark sensitivity and subtlety.

Simply wonderful 

In my quest for quality MG and early YA literature, I have recently read a remarkable number of outstanding Barrington Stoke titles. This leads me to think that many writers, whatever their young audience, could learn a very great deal from the writing discipline necessary to produce accessible text.  However, this is a lesson that Katya Balen does not need. Even at the much longer length here, she captures many of the same authorial qualities. Her writing is superficially simple and direct. Yet it is richly communicative, sumptuously evocative, even, sometimes, seductively beautiful, but without every being heavy or inaccessible. Chapters are short too, which only adds to the readability, but, equally, it builds super-effectively both the emotional punch of her narrative and the credibility of her young protagonist’s voice.

Imagine 

An iterative theme at the centre of this book is that of imagining, imagining that gives hope and provokes action, but also imagining that frustrates and misleads. The girls have to learn the difference. I suppose it is a dilemma caught in the well-known lines of what is usually called the ‘serenity prayer’**. 

Imagination is a vital quality to be nurtured in young readers, not least because they need to be able to imagine a different future for the world (the wild world) if they are to play a part in changing things for the better. But this dilemma is a very real one for them, especially since many of those things most desperately in need of change, are the very ones that some adults are telling them can’t, and indeed sometimes shouldn’t, be changed. Foxlight cannot solve the problem, but it will help. 

Wilder still and wilder

It is in the wild lands that Fen and Rey find themselves and their story, that they learn to stop imagining the unhelpful things and begin imagining the right ones. They do not find everything and they do not understand very much, but they are on a path that will take them onward.  If this part of their story is about finding home, and it certainly is, then it also remains very much a story about rewilding too. This is the imagining the girls grow into, the story that will be theirs in the future, a complicated, difficult story about both people and a wilder world. But it is one in which they will be eager to help change things for the better. Let it be so for the readers of this fine and important book too.

‘Your story is not the one you tell yourself but something that shifts and shapes itself around a beautiful terrifying mess of lives and people and how I should never have been searching for just one arrow-straight path because that’s not what a story is and stories loop and turn and curve and twist but there is always something that stays the same. Something that guides you through the chaos.’ (p 196)

In Foxlight, Katya Balen helps leads us to and through the beautiful, terrifying mess, and guides towards that thing that always stays the same.

‘She sent a single firebright fox into the misty night. And then she waited. She waited for us.’ (p 151)

Notes:

*As is so magnificently explored in The Song Walker by Zillah Bethell; a book which I think has many fascinating parallels with this one, and is, in its own, different way, equally special

** The ‘serenity prayer’:

Grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, 
the courage to change the things I can, 
and the wisdom to know the difference