Reviews: (by author)

Dutton, John. St. Giles's Fair. Samara Press, Tarago New South Wales, 2000. 303 pages. ISBN 0957755600.

This complex tale, the first book in the new Dreamguard Trilogy from Australia, describes the journeys of John, Charles, and the magic cat Murgatroyd, as they first try to avoid capture from the witch Megan and later try to rescue children from her evil, illusory world. The book begins with the enchantment and kidnapping of the boys' mother, a separation that apparently makes them more vulnerable to capture by Megan, who keeps children in her television and feeds off their fresh young emotions. When the children are nothing more than dried-up husks (read: adults), the children are freed to live hideous lives in offices and the suburbs. Murgatroyd, the cat who was once a Prince of Darkness but was banished, is sent to befriend and betray the boys into Megan's power. Instead, he finds himself genuinely beginning to like and admire the children - he is caught between his desire to help them and his desire to avoid the eternal torture that Megan would inflict on him as an unfaithful servant.

Murgatroyd never really resolves this conflict. Instead, he sets up a trap for the boys at St. Giles's Fair - at the same time that he makes it at least possible for them to escape. Escape they do, but only because they split into child-selves and adult-selves in a Hall of Mirrors and then travel through time in a carnival ride, accompanied by Murgatroyd, who has split into a good self and an evil self, and by a group of unfortunate people who were on the same carnival ride. Their first foray, into the Mesozoic Era, nets them a stegosaurus friend, a new and unpleasant understanding of human nature, and a fierce cold hard will to survive. Further journeys through time take them to Label Land, where everything is labeled with the appropriate category, but nothing is individualized. (A "Quarryman," for instance, returns every night to a house labeled as a certain kind of housing and in it he will find a "Wife" and "Children" - but the "Wife" and "Child" will not be the same ones he returned to the night before. Not that it makes any difference, because all "Quarrymen," "Wives" and "Children" are the same in Label Land.) They also find themselves in Funworld, where the poor sell their body parts for air to breathe, while the rich enjoy the dubious privilege of eating through two heads, hearing with two ears, having multiple arms and legs, and so forth.

At last John, Charles, and Murgatroyd return to their home time and attack Megan. (Their adult selves, with typically adult selfishness, nearly decide not to bother, but are convinced in the end by Murgatroyd and by their own senses that each of them is missing some important part of himself.) Destroying Megan is no easy task - the evil cat is set against them, the children in her seductive television world don't particularly want to leave, and Megan herself is more powerful than they had realized.

This is a rich and sophisticated book, part fantasy and part science fiction, and certainly not for the Harry Potter crowd. It is beautifully written, with complex and well-drawn characterizations (particularly Murgatroyd in the time before he is split into good and evil selves) and deeply imagined, vividly realized alternative worlds. It also draws on sophisticated ideas of mathematics, time, and human nature. Despite the age of the protagonists (7 and 9 when the book begins), it is not a book for young children, but for teenagers and up - I could certainly recommend it to adults with a taste for fantasy or science fiction, or indeed with a taste for complicated mainstream fiction. This is a deep, powerfully philosophical and intelligent book - a virtue that is also, perhaps, a bit of a flaw. At least to my mind, this book seemed to be deeply and powerfully aware of itself as philosophical and intelligent. The book could have used a bit more lightness of touch, a bit more humor. This seemed to me particularly evident after the boys are split into child- and adult-selves. The reader follows the adults and feels the lack of the children's warmth and spontaneity just as strongly as the characters themselves do. I found that my own urgency to recover the children was stronger than that of John and Charles. Young adult readers, famous for their willingness to take themselves very seriously, may not feel this sense of heaviness that I did. In fact, they would likely understand that the gravity of this book's ideas required this depth and seriousness. I would absolutely recommend this book to young adult and adult readers alike and very much look forward to remaining books in the trilogy.

Recommended reading level: Age 13 and up.

Reviewed by Jamie Madden

 

Dutton, John. Tiger's Island. Samara Press, Tarago New South Wales, 2000. 247 pages softcover. ISBN 0957755619.

John and Charles, the protagonists of St. Giles's Fair, return in this second of three volumes. In the first book, they were split into adult- and child-selves, and the adults had to rescue the children from the seductive false world of a witch. In this book, the now-whole boys fall prey to a trap even more clever. The twisted wizard and word-master who imprisoned their mother in the first volume has now tempted the boys, along with Susan, a character new to this volume, with presents that give them tremendous power to do good. But the gifts work only in the Land of Dreams. And so the children are drawn by their own better natures to abandon the real world, easing the pains of those who live within dreams. "Is suffering any the less suffering," asks Charles, "for being in a dream?"

But if they remain in the dream, the children will be unable to free their mother. And so the dreamguards of the children, the powerful animal-helpers of their dreams (who are also the stuffed animals in the real world) embark on a mission to try to save the children from themselves. The animals do so even in the knowledge that returning to the real world will allow the children to grow up and eventually forget the animals who saved them. Both the courage and the unselfishness of the animals are tested, and children and animals alike must give up a blissful present for a future that is certain to hold loss. This is, indeed, a novel about growing up.

But it is not truly a novel that is neatly summed up in a retelling of the plot. The book unfolds through a labyrinth of stories, stories within stories, stories within dreams within stories, as well as joke, poems, proverbs. Stories are left half-told, hinted at but untold, and somehow, never truly finished. Despite the Shakespearean double wedding at the end, this is not a book that is completed in any sense. It is a book that suggests the ways in which stories remain always incomplete, forever waiting to be told again and so merely held in abeyance. It shares the richly poetic and magical soul of the first volume, with its same evocative prose and beautifully imagined settings. In fact, I found this book to be even more skillfully done than the first volume. It has symbols that manage to resist becoming symbolism, a sense of seriousness that manages to avoid become dull, and a lightness of touch that seems to proceed from making stuffed animals (even extraordinarily unusual stuffed animals) the main actors on this novel's magnificent stage.

Recommended reading level: Age 13 and up.

Reviewed by Jamie Madden

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