Trails and Fails

[steepholm]

Tomorrow is The Changeover day!

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I can't tell you how important Mahy's book was to me when I first came across it in 1991 (seven years after it was published) - but suffice it to say that without what I learned from The Changeover I doubt I'd ever have managed to produce a publishable book of my own. It helped me triangulate my Garner and Cooper obsessions, and find an angle of approach that wasn't just a feeble echo of theirs. Where Garner wrote with fierce spareness, Mahy was linguistically munificent; where Cooper was writing about ancient places, Mahy wrote about shopping malls. And no children's writer before her had brought Wicca-style magic into a modern setting. (If you know of a counter-instance, I'd like to hear about it.) When this book was published, Buffy was only a twinkle in Joss Whedon's teenage eye...

So, I hope the movie does it justice. The trailer seems promising, and having watched some other clips on the same Youtube channel I feel confident that this is, at least, no The Seeker. I only hope it will be released in the UK, as I don't want to have to wait for the DVD.

On the other hand, for James Corden's Peter Rabbit I will happily wait until the second law of thermodynamics has rendered the universe a thin atom gruel.

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Comments

[cyphomandra]

I am very much looking forward to seeing this, especially as they've set it very deliberately in post-quake Christchurch - I'm not living there now, but I've spent 8 years there, including the quakes, and I'm glad they didn't try to write them out or vague up the setting (I've offered The Changeover for the Yuletide fanfic challenge a few years now, but haven't matched for it - I am curious as to what I'd write).

I tracked down DWJ's Changeover as a DWJ-obsessed teen and was massively disappointed by it - haven't ever given it another go.

[steepholm]

DWJ was still trying various things out at that stage, I think, and hadn't yet found her metier.

Yes, I like the fact that they've used the earthquake, even if it's non-canonical. (But earthquakes do feature creatively in Mahy's work, as I've noted elsewhere.)

[cyphomandra]

Ooh, thanks for that - a fascinating read! I can't remember reading The Librarian and the Robbers, although I remember The Great Piratical Rumbustification, but I was very small and may have either skipped it or the memories have been overwritten by something else. I like the idea of the inherent tensions in libraries.

I note your wordplay on Styx - there's actually a Styx river in Christchurch, and I used to take my dog to the Styx Mill dog park, without ever (fortunately!) encountering any gloomy ferrymen.

(I am saving the radio interview until I've seen the film myself!)

[steepholm]

Ooh, I didn't know that about the Styx! I would certainly have included it if I had.

[steepholm]

This radio interview talks interestingly (in the latter part) about the role of the earthquake in the film.