Faerie friend’s breakthrough

It’s a great pleasure to count Clarissa Pattern among my friends. Not that we’ve actually met or anything. I mean, not met in the old-fashioned sense of being in the same place at the same time and, say, shaking hands or having a conversation face to face. Instead, we’ve met and conversed on-line, Facebooking and messengering (not to be confused with mere messaging) in this Facebook age.

It worked too. We read each other’s writings. Multiple times, as we submitted successive drafts to each other. Reading and re-reading the same material slightly modified may sound deadly dull, but it’s wonderful to see how writing evolves and takes more consistency over time.

More wonderful still, though, is when a friend like Clarissa breaks through and gets a book out there. Well, many of us can get a book out. What makes hers a breakthrough is that it’s more than a book, it’s a good book.

Clarissa Pattern with her book
Airy Nothing

Now I’m not a Young Adult (the capital letters are de rigueur, as we literary people like to say). An adult, for sure, since I reckon 68 qualifies for the word. But young would be pushing it, unless being seventeen four times over counts.

Even so, I’ve read plenty of Young Adult books since becoming an old adult (no caps, notice – none are needed for such as reach these ages). 

Actually, re-reading those words, I probably haven’t read above a dozen. They just feel like plenty. More than plenty, indeed. In some cases, just one is more than plenty and more than I can stomach.

A lot of them follow an old, banal track. A teenager lives in a world inhabited by all sorts of fantastical creatures, some of them evil and horrific, others good but not always effectual. Writers of YA fiction, as we like to call it in the trade, tend to be equal-opportunity creatives these days, offering the main role pretty much as often (in my experience) to a girl as to a boy. As often as not, he or she has a quest to undertake, usually involving finding something – a gem, a mirror, a sword – or destroying something – a ring, a horn, a sword.  They generally undertake the quest unaided, since the forces of good aren’t that forceful, or the evil lord – or lady, see comment about equal opportunities above – has often neutralised their power in some diabolical way.

This means it’s clear from the outset that the quest is hopeless. There’s no way our hero can pull it off. Which is unfortunate because if the quest fails, the whole world will be (delete as applicable):

• plunged into perpetual darkness
• consumed by fire
• devastated by pestilence
• all of the above

Which is why it’s so extraordinary that, against all the odds, and to everyone surprise bar the reader’s, the hero does, after all, pull it off triumphantly.

Immensely tedious. Unoriginal. Predictable. Turgid. Painful to finish.

Not so Clarissa’s Airy Nothing (see my review here; the book’s available on Amazon). First of all, there’s the setting. That’s London in late Elizabethan times, with Shakespeare going great guns at the Globe Theatre. Her descriptions of the city, and she’s obviously done her research though without chucking it in your face, bring the place disconcertingly to life. I swear I thought I could smell the filth in the streets, hear the noise and share the characters’ apprehension about the likely criminal intent of many of the people around them.

And who were the characters? The main one is John. That, you’ll note, is a male name. Clarissa uses male pronouns for him too. But John belongs to the in-between, and he’s certainly in between genders. Which works out well when, eventually, he turns up at the Globe Theatre and finds himself enrolled among the actors there. This was a time when women were forbidden to appear on public stages, so theatre directors like Shakespeare used boys to play women. And in his other, and greater, role as playwright, Shakespeare often has women disguise themselves as men. 

Boys playing women playing men. It’s a perfect environment for John, with his fluidity in gender.

As it’s a perfect environment in its ambivalence between what’s real and what’s conjured. We believe in the play while we watch it, and return with a bump to a different reality when it ends. As John lives between two worlds, since he’s one of those rare people who can see the faerie world as well as the real one. That other world is fickle and its help unreliable, but when he has it, whether to assist him achieve tasks or simply revealing what lies behind the surface of everyday reality, it’s invaluable.

There is a quest, but it isn’t the corny one of so many YA stories. He’s looking for the faerie queen. Does he find her? From my reading of the book, I think he does, but just as John is an ambivalent character, so Clarissa lets ambivalence drift subtly like a mist through the book, so nothing is cut and dried or simple. You’ll have to read it to decide for yourself.

In parallel with the quest is the friendship that develops between John and the street vagabond and petty thief he meets in London, Jack. A friendship that develops into more than that as the novel advances. So you increasingly wonder whether the two will finally achieve a love that gives them contentment or not – again you’ll have to read it to find out.

A far better book than many of the Young Adult novels I’ve read. This old adult certainly enjoyed it. And the pleasure was all the greater for knowing that it was the work of someone who’s become a good friend over the years.

Even though I’ve never met her. Well, not in the everyday world. We speak only in the faerie world of the internet.