Memory, by Margaret Mahy

[landingtree]

There are Margaret Mahy novels and stories I've read over and over again, but they must amount to well under half what she wrote. I've never read her systematically; this book's been untouched on my shelf for years. It's the first of her books I've read as an adult which I didn't read as a child, and it feels strange by virtue of that, full of half-echoes, but not the remembered kind. Someone who imagines herself marked with images of moons; a young man is most himself while tap-dancing; wildness as dangerous, entangled with desire, imagined as a world thronged with pathways to follow; I've read all those things in her books before. But I don't expect the young man to get drunk. I don't expect him to wander through a city late at night. He, Jonny, sets out to find the only person who can help him satisfy himself about the details of his sister's death, the memory of which he thinks he may have partly invented; finds instead, by discontinuous chance, an old woman named Sophie who mistakes him for someone long gone, and whose Alzheimers makes her solitary life a sparking cascade of habits and old memories, very much herself and yet not her old self in the way she will offer biscuits to guests every five minutes, and bustle about the kitchen doing precisely nothing, remembering what busting is supposed to feel like but not its content. Jonny's care for her is difficult and necessary, but she is always a person, not an object of pity only. And it begins to look as though she's going to give him the direction he desperately needs, but this isn't a book which rounds things off; it begins with untenable situations which are negative, and ends with untenable situations which are positive and look like leading somewhere.

The book is beautifully shaped around memory and mismemory of all kinds: beloved memories that harm and fool, true memories returned to or made false by the speaking of them, memories on the tip of the tongue.

Comments

[rushthatspeaks]

I envy the larger amount of Margaret Mahy your part of the world has access to; a couple of her books were published in the U.S., but mostly it's 'does the library have imports', a question to which the answer is frequently no. This is definitely one of the things ebooks have changed for the better, but I do still prefer print when I can get it. The time I went to Australia I returned with a suitcase full of Margo Lanagan, but should I ever make it back there or to New Zealand I think a suitcase full of Mahy is next on my list.

[landingtree]

Margaret Mahy is a fortunate local writer to have! I thought of her for so long as just one of those writers whose books float around the place, and only fairly recently noticed how very good she is. Which leaves me with happily much of her unread and at hand.

(It's always pleasant to read a book by a writer I liked when I was young enough to be functionally a different person, and go, "Oh, this is still there! Or even more so!" Most notably, so far, with The Spellcoats).

While I'm reading a book, I don't notice whether it's print or e-ink, really -- except perhaps if the book is a massive object and I'm pleased it's a kindle I'm holding over my head instead. But everything around the edges of the reading, I prefer print. I am wedded to bookshelves with too many books on, and the pleasure of finally finding something in a second hand shop, and the handing of a physical object round whatever subset of the family want it. And whenever I'm choosing a next book to read, it's a shelf I'm looking at, so that many good things stay unread on my kindle awaiting some long plane or bus trip.

Margo Lanagan, how excellent to have a suitcase full of! I hope you do get you Mahy suitcase.