![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
A Castle of Bone, by Penelope Farmer
Nov. 2nd, 2019 03:53 pmWhen sorting through my childhood books for things to keep, I kept this one -- which I hadn't read -- partly because the epigraphs were intriguing, and partly because the front cover didn't go with the back. (Now I have read good reviews of other Penelope Farmer books, but I hadn't then). The back cover reads "Hugh was fascinated by the cupboard as soon as he saw it in the junk shop. When it was his, his life changed entirely - he inhabited magic forests by night and witnessed astonishing happenings by day."On the front is something which, from the name, must be the castle of bone, although it could perfectly well be part of a spaceship and does not seem to be made of bone, tilting up in front of a sickly green-orange sky, impossibly spindly and possibly rotating on its axis, with searchlights coming out of it, and with a girl either screaming or yawning in the lower right. I wanted to see how the front went with the back.
From the start, the dissonance of the cover feels less like bad design than truth in advertising. The book starts with a standard 'children come upon magic item whose rules can be worked out through trial and error, then adventured with,' scenario, but from the first moment the children have no control over it -- the first line of the book is a worried question, the first description is of someone looking unlike himself. It's less that they're using the cupboard and more that they're being haunted by it, and by the time one of the children attempts to do a systematic experiment to find out how the magic functions, he's doing it in order to reassure himself that the haunting is comprehensible. The experiment doesn't work. Every night, in his dreams, he is being brought closer to the castle of bone, which appears to have nothing to do with the cupboard's function; the book's driving question is how it does, and the answer is resonant and just barely explained. Meanwhile, the book is heavy and strange; even when the children are happy it's done in such a way as to make their happiness feel odd and out of place.
The characters have so much fallen under the spell of events right from the first chapter that it almost doesn't matter who they are. The protagonist, Hugh, is artistic and loves to paint, but for the whole book he never paints anything. We see a little bit of his interactions with the other three, and now and again their personalities matter, but for the most part the book is about something which could have chosen other people to happen to -- or maybe it's more that, to the extent to which the personalities matter, they feel like part of the haunting. The author's bio at the back says that Penelope Farmer '...hates writing, yet goes mad if she does not write," which seems of a piece. (Though from what I've read, some of her books are not like this, which is probably for the best).
Also, I've always been vaguely aware that different British trees have different traditional virtues, in the way of a reader of fantasy novels does, without particularly keeping track of which is which. This is a book where you don't really need to know those things, and for the most part they don't get explained, but they loom in any case. If you are underneath a willow, you aren't having to deal with the same kinds of things as if you're standing under an oak.
From the start, the dissonance of the cover feels less like bad design than truth in advertising. The book starts with a standard 'children come upon magic item whose rules can be worked out through trial and error, then adventured with,' scenario, but from the first moment the children have no control over it -- the first line of the book is a worried question, the first description is of someone looking unlike himself. It's less that they're using the cupboard and more that they're being haunted by it, and by the time one of the children attempts to do a systematic experiment to find out how the magic functions, he's doing it in order to reassure himself that the haunting is comprehensible. The experiment doesn't work. Every night, in his dreams, he is being brought closer to the castle of bone, which appears to have nothing to do with the cupboard's function; the book's driving question is how it does, and the answer is resonant and just barely explained. Meanwhile, the book is heavy and strange; even when the children are happy it's done in such a way as to make their happiness feel odd and out of place.
The characters have so much fallen under the spell of events right from the first chapter that it almost doesn't matter who they are. The protagonist, Hugh, is artistic and loves to paint, but for the whole book he never paints anything. We see a little bit of his interactions with the other three, and now and again their personalities matter, but for the most part the book is about something which could have chosen other people to happen to -- or maybe it's more that, to the extent to which the personalities matter, they feel like part of the haunting. The author's bio at the back says that Penelope Farmer '...hates writing, yet goes mad if she does not write," which seems of a piece. (Though from what I've read, some of her books are not like this, which is probably for the best).
Also, I've always been vaguely aware that different British trees have different traditional virtues, in the way of a reader of fantasy novels does, without particularly keeping track of which is which. This is a book where you don't really need to know those things, and for the most part they don't get explained, but they loom in any case. If you are underneath a willow, you aren't having to deal with the same kinds of things as if you're standing under an oak.
