Autumn in Fairyland

Our teatime read aloud these days is The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of her own Making by Catherynne M. Valente. We are enjoying it very much. The story is engaging, the writing is very good, there is word play, and lots of imagination. At times, all of us feel extremely strongly that at some point the author read Haroun and the Sea of Stories and was heavily influenced by it. There are echoes and similarities of the Rushdie book in this one. 

But to really appreciate it, you have to listen to the language. This is from the point in the story where September (the protagonist) is having a bath in order to be able to enter Pandemonium, the capital of Fairyland. 

"Lye poured a bucketful of golden water over September's head. 'When you are born,' the golem said softly, 'your courage is new and clean. You are brave enough for anything: crawling off of staircases, saying your first words without fearing someone will think you are foolish, putting strange things in your mouth. But as you get older, your courage attracts gunk and crusty things and dirt and fear and knowing how bad things can get and what pain feels like. By the time you're half-grown, your courage barely moves at all, it's so grunged up with living. So every once in a while, you have to scrub it up and get the works going or else you'll never be brave again. Unfortunately, there are not so many facilities in your world that provide the kind of services we do. So most people go around with grimy machinery, when all it would take is a bit of spit and polish to make them paladins once more, bold knights and true.'" (p. 60)

Or this, from the chapter we read today.

" ... you have surely seen postcards and photographs of the kind of autumn I mean. The trees go all red and blazing orange and gold, and wood fires burn at night so that everything smells of crisp branches. The world rolls about delightedly in a heap of cider and candy and apples and pumpkins, and cold stars rush by through wispy, ragged clouds, past a moon like a bony knee. You have, no doubt, experienced a Halloween or two.

Autumn in Fairyland is all of that, of course. You would never feel cheated by the colors of a Fairyland forest or the morbidity of the Fairyland moon. And the Halloween masks! Oh, how they glitter, how they curl, how their beaks and jaws hook and barb! But to wander through autumn in Fairyland is to look into a murky pool, seeing only a hazy reflection of the Autumn Provinces' eternal fall. And human autumn is but a cast-off photograph of that reflecting pool, half burnt and drifting through the space between us and Fairyland.

And so I may tell you that the leaves began to turn red as Septembers and her friends rushed through the suddenly cold air on their snorting, roaring highwheels, and you might believe me. But no red you have ever seen could touch the crimson bleed of the trees in that place. No oak gone gnarled and orange with October is half as bright as the boughs that bent over September's head, dropping their hard, sweet acorn into her spinning spokes. But you must try hard as you can. Squeeze your eyes closed, as tight as you can, and think of all your favorite autumns, crisp and perfect, all bound up together like a stack of cards. That is what it is like, the awful, wonderful brightness of Fairy colors. Try to smell the hard, pale wood sending up sharp, green smoke into the afternoon. To feel the mellow, golden sun on your skin, more gentle and cozier and more golden than even the light of your favorite reading nook at the close of the day." (pp. 129-130)

It's charming. Go find a copy and read it to yourself or better, read it to some younger person in your life.

_____

And the answer to yesterday's guessing game was, of course, Ms. Frizzle of Magic School Bus fame.