Clannad, around 1970.

I first encountered them while watching Robin of Sherwood as that programme’s haunting opening music was by Clannad. An album by them will usually have traditional Gaelic ballads, harp-based instrumentals and more often than not some New Age tinged numbers. And I should note that Clannad has a lot of people who just can’t stand them, as this review of The Best of Clannad: In a Lifetime amply demonstrates, although another review, of their An Diolaim collection, was much more complimentary. Oh, and read our review of their very first album — it’s worth your time to do so!

Clannad are a family band composed of siblings Marie, Ciarán and Pól Brennan (who left in 1990 but returned in 2011), and their twin uncles Noel and Pádraig Duggan. Moya talks about herself and the band in her superb biography, The Other Side Of The Rainbow: The Autobiography of the voice of Clannad. Her voice is one one of the best in Irish music, as you can hear on ‘The Two Sisters’ from a concert in Köln, Germany in 1977, source also for the ‘Theme From Harry’s Game’ cut.

I would be sorely remiss not to share some of their lovely instrumentals with you, such as this pairing of ‘Fairies Hornpipe’ / ‘Off to California’ from a concert at International House in Philadelphia just after they were formed, and ‘An Gabhar Bán‘ from that Banba concert.

Like Nightnoise, Clannad suffers a somewhat tarnished reputation, but any person who likes Irish traditional music and doesn’t have a stick up their arse on the matter of ‘pure drop’ should give them a try as they are very, very good.

I’ll leave you with ‘Down By The Sally Gardens’ from a Bremen concert they did at the end of January 1980. Lovely, isn’t it?

Valente’s work spirals layer upon layer in these two cheerful-yet-serious books. The first in the series, The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland In A Ship Of Her Own Making, starts us off with a view of September, a young girl with a mole on her cheek and “very large and ungainly” feet. September, surrounded by über-kitchy yellow and pink teacups, is visited by the Green Wind on the twelfth birthday. He calls her an “ill-tempered and irascible enough child”, declares that he likes her for it, and whisks her away into a thoroughly bizarre adventure.

September could never be called a pert or perky heroine. Growing up in Omaha, Nebraska during the days of World War Two, with a mother who repairs airplane engines, has made September solid and grounded and pragmatic; she’s not terribly pretty and she’s not terribly polite–but neither is she rude, spoiled, or mean hearted. In her journeys, she deals with talking leopards and witches, a Wyverary (the child of a Wyvern and a Library) and a Marquess, and a host of other odd creatures, and is–mostly–polite without being overly submissive. She encourages herself, when faced with frightening situations, with thoughts like “Be bold. An ill-tempered child should be bold.”

The prose is also deceptively simple with a hidden punch. Valente has a way of taking accepted concepts and turning them about a few times, until the base word itself is redefined. For example, her gargoyles are far more than grim stone statues:

“At the top of the podium loomed an enormous gargoyle, its face a mass of bronze and black rock, waggling stone eyebrows and a stern metal jaw….The creature’s chest was plated in gnarled, knuckled silver, half open along a thick seam, showing a thudding, white-violet heart within.”

In the phrasing and the pacing and the various conceits, this is definitely a young adult book; and yet, adults can easily, in reading this, be drawn back into their own younger days of reading wildly implausible, enchanting tales by names like Maurice Sendak and Tove Jansson. As with many other authors of the fantastical, Valente uses the frame of “normal” life to set apart September’s special adventures; in each book, September starts out in that yellow and pink life, and at the end, returns to it with a new appreciation of the magic in her own world.

In the first book, Circumnavigated, any trace of “inner-ordinary” is rather promptly knocked out of September on her arrival in Fairyland. She is separated from her friend, the Green Wind, at the gates; dumped into an angry sea; forced to choose between multiple unpleasant options (To Lose Your Way; To Lose Your Life; To Lose Your Mind; or To Lose Your Heart–which one would you have chosen, I wonder?); faces off with a group of witches and a wairwulf; and is sent off on a basic find and retrieve quest (much more fun for her than scavenging gold on the beaches of Fairy). The quest, of course, turns out to be much more complicated than she expected, with higher stakes. By the time September goes home, she’s saved the entire of Fairyland, become very much her own person–and given away her shadow.

In the followup,  The Girl Who Fell Beneath Fairyland And Led The Revels There, September must face the consequences of her previous adventures, both in her “normal” life:

“Where once September seemed merely and quietly odd, staring out the window during Mathematics lectures and reading big colorful books under her desk during Civics, now the other children sensed something wild and foreign about her. The girls in her grade could not have said what it was about September that so enraged them….”

…and in Fairyland itself, once she finally manages to return (on her thirteenth birthday, as the first visit came on her twelfth):

“Nothing had a shadow. Not the trees, not the grass, not the pretty green chests of the other birds still watching her, wondering what was the matter….A glass leaf fell and drifted slowly to earth, casting no dark shape beneath it.”

Shadows are disappearing throughout Fairyland, and September is quick-witted enough to figure out that she herself started the entire mess when she gave away her shadow; of course that sets her onto another mad Quest, this one rather more personal than the one in the first book. She’s caused this trouble, and she must clear it up herself.

Within a few pages of entering Fairyland, September is faced with another four-way choice, this time between The Sibyl of Comfort, of Comeuppance, of Cruel-But-True, and of Complexity. In her encounter with her chosen Sibyl are some eminently quotable lines:

“Work is not always a hard thing that looms over your years. Sometimes, work is the gift of the world to the wanting.”

“Most folk have three faces–the face they get when they’re children, the face they own when they’re grown, and the face they’ve earned when they’re old.”

September goes on from there to the Underworld, more determined than ever to return matters to rights. She quickly meets up with the Shadows of the wyverary and the Marid she traveled with in the first book, and must struggle with her instincts as to whether they can be trusted. They’re so much like her old friends, and yet–as shadows tend to be–so very different. The entire time they travel together, the shadows try to convince her that it’s a wonderful thing for shadows to be free from their erstwhile hosts; September, of course, tries to convince the shadows of the exact opposite.

This second book has darker elements than the first; there is a mysterious, horrid Alleyman roaming about, who steals shadows from the surface world. Even denizens of the Underworld are afraid of him, and rightfully so. He’s a dreadfully spooky character.

Undercurrents seep through from the war in the real world–September’s father is a soldier; when September disappeared, her mother had just come out of the house in tears. Was he lost in action? Increasingly ominous references to September’s father are slipped throughout to keep this question in the reader’s mind. It’s an engaging tale for a young adult; a fantastically complex story from an adult perspective.

The most remarkable thing to me about these two books, however, isn’t the strong, unique characters or the delightfully implausible layering of the plot; it’s that the books  are written in a madcap omniscient style that by all rights should not work–but does. It’s more than easy to fall into the moment and accept the dizzyingly frequent changes in camera view as a matter of course. Done poorly, this technique is a lead brick that keeps the story from going anywhere at all; done well, it’s very nearly invisible. Valente, of course, goes the latter road, and creates a shining gold and gemstone laden bridge into her fantastical, bizarre, wonderful version of Fairyland.

Valente’s earned a permanent place on my shelves, and I plan on filling said shelves up with more of her work very, very soon. I strongly recommend you do the same.

Valente’s truly stunning Web site can be explored here; her musical ally S.J. Tucker is over thisaway; and her publisher is here.

This is not their first collaborative take on Appalachian folk — that would have been the superb Seven Wild Sisters, of which our reviewer said ‘The language of the tale, moving seamlessly between first and third person narrative, adds to its authenticity. Nothing scintillates or coruscates. Nobody spends much time thinking about their inner self or the true nature of reality. There are no fancy or false notes here, just a straightforward this-happened-that-happened presentation of the facts. This simple conversational tone, which presents a fairy attack in the same tone as a schoolgirl prank, makes the magic of the story both inescapable and acceptable.’

The Cats of Tanglewood Forest started life as something rather different, as it is an expansion of an illustrated children’s book, A Circle of Cats. Again, a few words from our reviewer: ‘A Circle of Cats is intended to be the prequel to the de Lint/Vess collaboration Seven Wild Sisters… …It is a bewitching little book, much bigger inside than out, and a wonderful collaboration between two enormous talents. There’s a place of honor on my bookshelves for this one … when I can finally stop going back to it every little bit and actually bring myself to put it away.’

So this is really the third work in a series of hopefully ongoing books by these two talented individuals, as it’s really a completely different work from A Circle of Cats even though it started out there. The story follows that of the first telling in that work as tells the story of Lillian Kindred, a spirited orphan living on a farm at the edge of a forest with her beloved aunt. Out in the Tanglewood Forest, which she believes (correctly as it turns out) is full of all things magical, Lillian is bitten by a snake but saved from death by the magic of the feral cats she has befriended, who turn her into a kitten. A very cute kitten.

(Digression: Tanglewood Forest is a character here as the first words here demonstrate: ‘Once there was a forest of hickory and beech, sprucy-pine, birch and oak.It was called the Tanglewood Forest. Standing at the edge of a farmer’s pasture, it seemed to go on forever, uphill and down’ Like Robert Holdstock’s Ryhope Wood, it’s one of the great forests of myth and story.)

Now Lillian must set out on a journey that will lead her through lands of beings friendly and unfriendly, cooperative and hostile. From the seemingly harmless Old Mother Possum to the quite fearsome Bear People, from the Apple Tree Man (one of my favorite characters in Seven Wild Sisters) to Mr. Fox (not the nasty version found in English folklore!), her journey back to be a human is complicated. Really complicated. And maybe, just maybe, she’ll understand that there are far worse things than being a feline creature.

And it interests me that the Charleses collectively create a story that neither could create separately. It has the possibility of becoming a true classic that older kids and adults alike read generations from now, and I can imagine a storyteller deep in the Blue Mountains taking this story and adding parts of it to her collection of stories told on a night by the fire as she plays her fiddle.

If you love this story, and I know you will, you should read Seven Wild Sisters as well. It is collected in Tapping the Dream Tree, a superb collection of de Lint’s Newford stories. Alas, it does not have the accompanying Vess art which you’ll only find in the original Subterranean edition and that edition will cost you dearly.

The three novellas lined up for inspection today all venture into that sort of some-man’s-land territory, albeit in different ways. From a famous author stepping into the shoes of another famous author to a tale of small-town horror in a place that should be normal, all three take the reader to places that are simultaneously old hat and slightly off kilter.

The Guiding Nose of Ulfant Banderoz, by Dan Simmons, is the easiest of the three to approach. It’s a straight homage, an attempt by Simmons to pay homage to one of the authors who inspired him by playing in that author’s sandbox. In this case, the author is Jack Vance, the sandbox is The Dying Earth, and the over-the-top rococo nature of the setting would seem to be right in Simmons’ Hyperion-infused wheelhouse. The plot is Vancean enough – when a powerful wizard dies, another wizard braves perils magical and otherwise to find his hidden library. But Simmons never quite nails Vance’s voice, substituting in snarkiness for the master’s trademark arch understatement. In a couple of places he flat-out goes overboard with the cutesy, and the end result is jarring. And oddest of all, Simmons adds an odd streak of sentimentality that Cugel the Clever almost certainly would have used to rob everyone involved blind.

From the decadence of the Dying Earth to decadence of another kind, there’s Daniel Abraham’s Balfour and Meriwether in the Case of the Harrowmoor Dogs. It’s as much a meditation on the deals constantly made with the devil in order to keep the lights on as it is a two-fisted tale of adventure about the monstrous dog-ants that have honeycombed the deep earth with their tunnels for presumably nefarious purposes. In this one, the third story featuring Balfour and Meriwether, the pair is sent off to investigate possible leaks of information coming from a war hero now caged in a sanitarium in a countryside. Of course, the “leaks” are images from his dreams about the monster ants, which Her Majesty’s government has quite possibly known about for some time now, and the man himself is locked away for reasons having nothing to do with his sanity or his service. Abraham makes deliberate parallels here between the unsavory deals nations cut to preserve their status and citizenry, and the unsavory deals individuals cut with their consciences to keep on doing what they do. By the end of the story, one of those doesn’t hold any longer; it will be interesting, in subsequent tales, to see if the other follows suit.

The last entry of the three is deceptively modern and deceptively mundane. It Sustains, by Mark Morris, with a striking cover by Deena Warner, is the story of a teenage boy who, after his mother is murdered, moves to a new town with his grieving father and promptly gets in way over his head. Where the story shines is when Morris conflates the normal trouble an emotionally damaged new kid might get into – falling in with a bad crowd, getting into fights, problems at school – with the supernatural menace that seems to be behind every corner and shadow in the town. If there’s a weakness here, it’s that the ending comes too soon, cutting short the delicious tension of the situation 15 year old Adam finds himself sinking into. The reader’s left wanting more – more of the town, more of the reason for Adam’s travails, more of his noble, weak father who ambles off stage far too easily.

In the end, semi-familiar literary terrain can harm as much as it helps, or vice versa. Morris takes brilliant advantage of what the reader’s expecting to invoke dread by only partially delivering it, while Simmons, by covering well-trod ground, comes out the loser in comparison to the one who had gone before. And as for Abraham, the map is less important to him than the destination.