An enmeshed forest

Avebury: WordPress Free Photo Library

Darkhenge by Catherine Fisher.
Definitions, 2006 (2005).

‘No one,’ she said firmly, ‘treats me like a little girl. Not any more.’

O. On: Gorse.

Chloe, a deeply troubled teenager living in the shadow of her brother, a talented artist, is in hospital in a coma after a horse-riding accident on the Marlborough Downs. For a few months now her family are distraught, resorting to displacement activities – the father and mother being largely absent at work, and her brother Robert losing himself in his art – all observed by Mac, a concerned Catholic priest.

But then things come to a head when Rob becomes a paid volunteer on a nearby hush-hush archaeological dig and, almost simultaneously, is drawn willy-nilly into a New Age ritual at the Avebury stone circle, destined to help what seems to be a shape-shifting druid escape from a pursuer.

As we watch things play out in the mundane world of the chalk downs of southern Britain we start to become aware of a voice breaking into the narrative, the voice of somebody who ostensibly is lying in a coma, a state where archetypes and monsters freely roam; the voice in fact of a sleeping beauty surrounded by dark woods.

The Sleep of Reason (Wikipedia Commons)

Although we might assume that Rob is the principal protagonist in Darkhenge it turns out that Chloe is the real mover and shaker. In her comatose state she believes she’s being kept prisoner in a series of castles or caers (caerau in Welsh), menaced by a forest of encroaching trees. When we realise that Chloe’s name derives from Greek χλόη, meaning spring foliage or greenery, and that the place in which she’s apparently incarcerated is called Annwn, the Welsh Otherworld often located below the earth’s surface, we start to wonder whether she is actually more a willing prisoner than one forced against her will.

Meanwhile, the man whom Rob has rescued and who calls himself Vetch emerges as a figure who appears in Welsh folklore under a different name, a personage who has supped from the cauldron of inspiration and become a shape-shifting magician and poet. Who then is the secretive director of the dig excavating a Bronze Age timber circle, one which like the so-called Seahenge discovered in Norfolk in 1998, uncovers the focus of the ritual site to be a four thousand year old tree planted upside down? Rob belatedly starts to realise that he, Chloe, Father Mac and a few others have been drawn into ancient myth and that only together with Vetch, the King of Annwn, and the poet’s female adversary do they have the faintest possibility of rescuing his sister from the limbo she’s in.

Catherine Fisher is both poet and novelist, with experience of archaeology, and as might be expected her broad interests find their way into this fantasy. In her Author’s Note she acknowledges ideas from the early medieval Book of Taliesin, the folk legend of Gwion and Ceridwen, The White Goddess by Robert Graves and the speculative writing of John Matthews; and I also note deliberate parallels from various fairytales – including Jack and the Beanstalk and the Scottish chantefable of Childe Rowland – the classical legend of Persephone and Hades, and of the Siberian shaman’s spirit journey up or down the Axis Mundi or World Tree.

But she’s not merely retelling or recycling myths and fairytales: there’s far more to Darkhenge than that. This is a story of an adolescent’s growing resentment and of the harm it can and does do. It’s explicitly a tale of one young adult who’s a talented artist but who doesn’t see what’s under his nose, and of another who secretly weaves words into narratives but never voices how she feels, how she feels overlooked and dismissed:

Vetch closed the book. ‘Paintings are easy to see,’ he said after a moment. ‘Open, presented flat to the eye. Words are not easy. Words have to be discovered, deep in their pages, deciphered, translated, read. Words are symbols to be encoded, their letters trees in a forest, enmeshed, their tangled meanings never finally picked apart.’

I. Ur: Heather

Darkhenge is told with a passion that captures exactly the petulant young adult’s inchoate rage, the anger which when it erupts can give them the power to control and wreak revenge on those they both love and hate. It’s a powerful narrative to immerse oneself in.

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https://bookjotter.com/2023/02/05/are-you-looking-forward-to-reading-wales-2023/

The author and poet Catherine Fisher was born in Newport, Wales, and this YA fantasy was read for this year’s Reading Wales Month, #Dewithon23