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"Sorry Carlisle is a witch!"
I was talking to a Wiccan recently, and fervently recommending (as I often do) Margaret Mahy's The Changeover to her, a book I love for itself, but also regard - unless you know different? - as the very first YA supernatural romance. I would like to say, "Without The Changeover, no Buffy, Twilight, etc.", but in fact, despite its chronological priority, it doesn't seem to have been that influential, or even widely read outside the world of children's lit - where it did, however, win the Carnegie Medal. My Wiccan friend had never heard of it, for example, despite being (like Mahy herself) a former librarian (a connection I explored in this article back in 2015). Nor is she unusual in this - Wiccans in general seem weirdly unaware of it, at least in my experience.
So, of course, I bought a copy to send her as a present, and of course took the opportunity to reread the book first. I'm glad to report that it's as awesome as ever. This particular edition came with a short introduction by Elizabeth Knox. I thought it very well judged, and particularly appreciated the fact that she picked out the line "Sorry Carlisle is a witch!" for comment, because I've always privately felt that that line was extremely important to my own development as a writer. It crops up in the first chapter, in the course of a conversation between the protagonist, Laura, and her mother, Kate, as they're hurriedly doing the school run. The revelation is assessed, its likelihood or otherwise discussed, and then it subsides beneath the tide of the day's events.
Knox comments, correctly, that this is the kind of revelation that most supernatural romance protagonists would keep to themselves. I'd add that it would probably eventually be used as a climactic last line of a chapter - being far too precious a titbit to be just tossed into the middle of a hurried school-run conversation. When I first read the book, on a long train journey from Aberdeen in 1990, that was what impressed me. Here was an author who had such confidence in the fecundity of her imagination that she could afford to be generous: "realms and islands were / As plates dropped from her pocket."
There's a useful Japanese word, 余裕 (yoyuu), which can be translated variously as leeway, scope, spare capacity, with a side order of sprezzatura. I think that gets across what I mean about Mahy: she gives you a lot, but you feel there's always more where that came from. She doesn't need to hoard or ration, nor does she wish to. The rest of the book lived up to that promise, and reading it, back then, was a key to my loosening up my own style, which had grown sclerotic under the severe influence of Garneresque minimalism.
Sorry Carlisle broke that spell.
So, of course, I bought a copy to send her as a present, and of course took the opportunity to reread the book first. I'm glad to report that it's as awesome as ever. This particular edition came with a short introduction by Elizabeth Knox. I thought it very well judged, and particularly appreciated the fact that she picked out the line "Sorry Carlisle is a witch!" for comment, because I've always privately felt that that line was extremely important to my own development as a writer. It crops up in the first chapter, in the course of a conversation between the protagonist, Laura, and her mother, Kate, as they're hurriedly doing the school run. The revelation is assessed, its likelihood or otherwise discussed, and then it subsides beneath the tide of the day's events.
Knox comments, correctly, that this is the kind of revelation that most supernatural romance protagonists would keep to themselves. I'd add that it would probably eventually be used as a climactic last line of a chapter - being far too precious a titbit to be just tossed into the middle of a hurried school-run conversation. When I first read the book, on a long train journey from Aberdeen in 1990, that was what impressed me. Here was an author who had such confidence in the fecundity of her imagination that she could afford to be generous: "realms and islands were / As plates dropped from her pocket."
There's a useful Japanese word, 余裕 (yoyuu), which can be translated variously as leeway, scope, spare capacity, with a side order of sprezzatura. I think that gets across what I mean about Mahy: she gives you a lot, but you feel there's always more where that came from. She doesn't need to hoard or ration, nor does she wish to. The rest of the book lived up to that promise, and reading it, back then, was a key to my loosening up my own style, which had grown sclerotic under the severe influence of Garneresque minimalism.
Sorry Carlisle broke that spell.
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Though I was a kid observer, I was in the region where Buffy's writers and production team lived and worked, and I'm only a few years younger than they are, in turn. It's hard for me to see how Mahy would've had much direct impact on them; buying a book for offspring or a nibling doesn't necessarily mean reading the purchase oneself.
(What my former students really picked on for the diagnostic was Lowry's The Giver, which they'd been assigned sometime in grade school. Lowry and Mahy are roughly of an age. No one would've assigned Lowry to me in terms of Lowry's stature then, and I was in college as of The Giver, though I did read at least one Anastasia Krupnik title in the late '70s or early '80s.)
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I do find it interesting how it never travelled much beyond the Commonwealth, despite both it and its predecessor (The Haunting) winning the Carnegie.
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Looking at the 1980s Carnegie winners, I knew none of the writers then. My nearest library acquired a copy of Diana Wynne Jones' A Sudden Wild Magic upon release, but my first DWJ was thus hardly her strongest; in grad school I read Westall's Blitzcat because it'd turned up used somewhere, and Crossley-Holland (as translator) and Andrew Taylor. Though I did read a bit of Robin McKinley then, I'd no idea of Peter Dickinson. 1995 is when I think the internet began cracking open the idea of "word of mouth," though I had some access from 1992 on, but TIL that Pullman won the Carnegie for Northern Lights/Golden Compass. The US paperback cover of the copy I read, late 1990s, didn't mention the award!
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I am so glad he did.
The Changeover was my formative Mahy. I have actually been reminded of it listening to Stewart Farrar's The Twelve Maidens because one of the protagonists of that serial is initiated as a witch—into Alexandrian Wicca specifically—in order to give her natural sensitivity some safeguards against the black magic being practiced on the tor where her research team has been carrying out a scientific project for the government.
Did you ever get to see the film?
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That's rough. And is kind of exactly what I hoped would not happen with an adaptation of a 1984 book in the twenty-teens.
Who would you have cast instead of Timothy Spall?
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Interesting question. I do think there's a danger that the character could be camped up and given a homophobic edge in the wrong hands - Spall certainly avoided that. While I can't give you a name, though, I have seen plenty of character actors who could manage it. For some reason I'm picturing Charles Dance doing a Morningside accent?
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