Illusrrated: Jackie Morris
‘. . . Something had begun to change in him. He had started to see that everyone and everything had a story, was a story, and that he could tell them.’ (p 310)
The next big thing
Nicola Davies’ The Song That Sings Us gained deservedly lavish praise and will I am sure become even more popular now that it is available in paperback. Now she has written a follow-up (in terms of its storyline, a prequel) and it is another very fine book indeed. It is all the more securely convincing this time for being couched in the past tense. Its rich, complex world building is strange and wonderful, yet filled with many of the issues of our own times. And the author’s deep love for the natural world shines through it all. With, once again, cover and chapter heads by the wondrous Jackie Morris, this is also another beautiful volume.
Ancient and modern
It is rare, these days, to find excitingly original and inventive fantasy for young readers. So many orphaned children have already discovered they have magical powers, so many portals have led into other worlds, so many schools have trained apprentice witches and wizards, so many dragons have hatched and imprinted on humans, so many doggerel prophecies have been fulfilled, so many worlds saved from unspeakable evil. It is a very long, but also very familiar list. Some authors have reworked and refreshed such themes magnificently, a rare few have actually created startlingly new worlds, but in too many instances these fantasy ‘tropes’ have been allowed to degenerate into rather tired clichés. Not here though. Skrimsli is the real deal. It stands head and shoulders above the current crowd. Fresh and imaginative, ancient and modern, it is ‘high’ fantasy with a vast sweep and scope, treating of warring nations and political greed, universal themes. However, it is simultaneously a sensitive and intimate story of individuals, both human and animal. And it is compellingly told.
Thinking animal
Another very difficult thing for writers to do convincingly is to give thoughts and language to ‘real’ animals, as opposed to treating animals as human characters, as, say, Kieran Larwood does so entertainingly. It is easy to rob living creatures of their dignity, to make them objects of ridicule or blur real understanding of their thoughts and needs through totally inappropriate anthropomorphism. However, Nicola Davies builds on a deep understanding of nature and its living creatures. On top of this, she cleverly creates a fantasy where some humans are ‘listeners’ and can establish mind-to-mind connection with animals. A few particularly sensitive and intelligent animals consequently learn to understand a range of human words. Through this credible writerly invention, we are able to enter the imagined thoughts and feelings of animals without them seeming to lose their natural form or characteristics. We still believe in them as animals.It is something very special. A new magic. Authorial magic. Animal magic that brings us closer to recognising the integrity and beauty of real animals, their right to existence on their own terms, not ours, their ineffable value to our world. At the same time she makes them very potent and compelling characters, integral to her narrative. Like her protagonist, Nicola Davies’ book is ‘a wild thing bound in words’. (p 392)
Good and evil
Consequently, her story is built around characters that engage deeply. There is Owl, the strange boy with the owl face, so often called ‘freak’ by other humans, but proving quite remarkable in his relationship with and commitment to his animal friends. He is a quite brilliant example of the importance of diversity and inclusion, recognising the potential of all. There are two young women, each, in different ways, with remarkable love for horses, and, ultimately (and very movingly) for each other. There is a rebel ‘pirate’ captain and her crew. There are a bear, a dog, an eagle, a sturgeon, representing the diverse wonders of nature’s creatures. All are brought to vivid life and play key roles, engaging both the hearts and minds of readers in this terrific story. But at its very centre is a tiger, the eponymous Skrimsli. S. F. Said recently wrote a magnificent novel about a ‘tyger’, and now here is another tiger, different bur equally magnificent. Within his fantasy world, this tiger is real, rather than just a symbol of ‘fearful symmetry’, although Skrimsli is that as well.
There are, of course, chillingly evil characters too, as befits high fantasy: a cruel, mind-controlling circus owner and his disturbed son, a legitimate ruler’s usurping brother, and, most disturbing of all, two ghastly acrobat-assassins, vile enough to precipitate gut-churning loathing. Eventually, however, all become subsumed in one overarching enemy, the terrible army of ‘Automators’.
Finding purpose
The emotional journey on which we are taken along with Owl and Skrimsli is remarkably powerful and intensely involving. Skrimsli grows from ‘runt’ cub to devoted friend, from cowed circus performer to a creature that discover his own strength and power. (‘You are not prey,’). And then, in one of the book’s most remarkable passages, he falls in love with something totally astonishing, a huge sailing ship, and a life on the ocean. Owl, whose early love and care started Skimsli’s remarkable development, himself grows from distraught ‘freak’ into a true keeper of the forest. At heart, they both seek and find purpose and identity, their true selves.
Their story
The multi-perspective writing, recounting the interleaved tales of several of the major protagonist, moves the complex narrative on compellingly. This is storytelling and tension building of the highest order. Around one third of the way through is a heart-stopping climax that would be worthy of the end of many a fine book. Assasination in the circus ring, involving a heart-wrenching moral dilemma, is swept away in a flood of disaster. But this is not the end of this particular tale, not by such a long way. This skilled author continues to twist and turn her plot, with excitement and jeopardy piling ever on top of each other. Of course, like the best epic quests, there are periods of release and recovery too, as when Owl finds his ‘Rivendell’ with a family of poor but skilled mind-listeners. But overall the story builds and grips, even as it explores and develops its characters and relationships and works towards its remarkable outcomes.
Images
As if all of this was not enough, the whole tale is replete with parallels to our own world. There are issues of deforestation, military might, craze for power and commercial greed. It abounds in powerful metaphor, that could almost be called poetic. Here, amongst other telling images, are the whole world of natural wonder seen in the depth of an elephant’s eye, an encroaching railway that is both territorial aggrandisement and man’s intrusion into nature. Foremost, is a cruel circus that in time morphs into something akin to the bloodthirsty spectacle of a Roman amphitheatre. It speaks with devastating potency of man’s vile attempts to dominate and belittle wild creatures.
Our story
This book engenders that complete reader saturation that characterises only the very greatest of fantasy epics. Although it is very different indeed from either, think The Lord of the Rings or Watership Down in terms of total absorption in the world and compulsive narrative of an epic book. And through it all runs the power of story. Owl returns home to find his forest sad and broken, but he has learned how to begin to heal it. He tells the people there:
‘You are in this . . . broken forest because you stopped listening to stories. Stories show you what you can be if you are brave enough.. . . Tonight we can choose to make a new story, together, and to stop living inside this old, sad tale.’ (p 381)
Our world is, in large parts, one such sad tale. Nicola Davies’ Skrimsli is one such new story. And it is a hopeful one. At its end are seedlings in deforested ground. There are seas of grass and water - and of love. And ahead is the place where the sky and ocean meet.
It is a book that will appeal to many age groups. It will feed hopeful imagination with activism and grow hopeful activism through imagination. It is undoubtedly one of my Books of the Year.