The Laily Worm
‘I was but seven year
auld
When my mither she
did dee;
My father married the
ae warst woman
The warld did ever
see.
‘For she has made me
the laily worm,
That lies at the fit
o’ the tree,
An, my sister Masery
she’s made
The machrel of the sea.’
From the snake in the garden of Eden, via St. George,
Theseus and Grendel to Carroll’s Jabberwock, C. S. Lewis’s comical Eustace and
Ursula LeGuin’s Earthsea, dragons have been one of storytelling’s favourite devices
with which to explore preoccupations about evil, power, the nature of knowledge and the various forms of beastliness lurking beneath our humanity.
There may be some writers who have never wanted to write
about a dragon; I am not one of them. I have my own dragon egg incubating,
although its hatching date is some years hence. To keep my imagination warm, I like to fuel it with interesting dragon stories. When a friend told me that Geraldine
McCaughrean had written a novel for adults about a dragon, and then kindly lent
me his copy, it went to the top of my reading pile.
McCaughrean is a writer’s writer. Her prose is elegant,
powerful, witty; and this book must surely be amongst her most accomplished. Fire’s
Astonishment, published in 1990 by Seeker & Warburg, was McCaughrean’s second adult novel. It’s a
fable, a fairytale – in the best sense of that word – set in a feudal,
monk-riddled England. It draws on history, mythology, religion, but most of
all, upon McCaughrean’s own gently acid and surgically precise observations about
human nature and relationships.
Leo, lord of a small manor near the sea, returns home
after a visit to court to find his two adolescent children have disappeared.
Their stepmother, the triumphantly pregnant Gywne, recounts the spiritual
visitation that led Leo’s son, Elshender, to renounce the world for a monkish
life. His daughter, Frideswide, is also missing, reportedly shipped to France
as bride to a nobleman.
Now, Leo is a fool – a man more good than bad, but weak and
easily led. The reader knows at once that the Welsh-sounding Gywne is to blame;
and when rumours arise of a dragon at nearby Worm’s Head, we rightly suspect
witchery. The son has been transformed by his stepmother into a beast; and his
bethrothed, the dark-haired Elfleda, is shamed and abandoned.
But Gywne’s plan to supplant her husband with her lover and ensure that his bastard child will inherit the manor runs
afoul of another simple man – a slightly clever and much better man: Anselm,
Leo’s younger brother. Anselm, nearly as large and fleshy as the dragon that was once his nephew, has loved the much younger Elfleda as long as
he can remember. If this book has a hero, it is Anselm; if a heroine, Elfleda.
Anselm proposes, and Elfleda accepts with the desperation of
the virgin eager to rid herself of her maidenhead and the associated risk
of becoming a human sacrifice to the monster dining off the local peasants’ cattle.
Poor Elshender, trapped in his beastliness, stalks Elfleda and sends her near
witless into his uncle’s arms.
Largely, this is a book about sex. About the beast in all of
us; about the human desire to be
something more than the sum of our bodily functions. It examines the gross
temporalness of our bodies; looks with wit and compassion at the poignancy of our frailty and ugliness – and
contrasts the two paths sought as remedy for this earthly, and earthy, state: good and evil.
His man’s rational
passion had hankered after Elfleda. Now his unmaterable, mountainous animal
heat shackled him to her territory. He marked it, he patrolled it, he held it,
and it held him, for a day and a half. When it snowed, the silent cold wiped
out all smells and froze the sweat under his scales. The desire in his loins
shrank. he thought to set himself on a path away from any place he knew:
somewhere empty and open, where hunger would be the only instinct. He rolled
wistfully in the snow, his body dissolving into a comfortable numbness and his
mind made free to think again. To be a dragon was merely to be seen by human
eyes and called a dragon. Away from eyes and away from impulses, Elshender
could patrol some empty hinterland, no more loathsome to the things he killed
than he had been when he hunted on horseback.
Elshender is a victim, but he is no elegant, heroic youth.
Before his transformation, he was a gangling adolescent given to whoring with
the local servant girls. His desire for Elfleda is wholly selfish: it is about
lust, ownership and status.
One of McCaughrean’s touches of genius in this book is that her
dragon presents us with a portrait – in wide screen, high-resolution – of our
own human unloveliness and the claustrophobic torment we sometimes feel trapped
within our own ungainly flesh:
…Elshender woke up,
dreaming of his father, and turned over. The great weight of his body almost
crushed the air out of his lungs. He flung his hips back into their first
position, and waited for the feeling of panic to subside.
…Elshender the boy had
been thin and over-long in the back, his thighs hardly thicker than his calves,
his eyes astigmatic and pale, his arms no stronger than he needed to throw dice
or whirl the occasional jessy. He loved that inadequate body now: like
Narcissus by his pool, he doted on its remembered image. He saw all its
virtues, as if through the eyes of an enamoured woman.
Here, Elfleda tries to convince her new husband, Anselm, of
the dragon’s existence:
‘Its leg touched me!
Then it raised itself up – not in a squat but right up on its back feet. Its
belly was the colour of tripe. I could see its lights pumping and bulging
through its skin . . . It was such a . . . meaty
animal, ‘Selm! I mean – what do I mean? – I suppose I thought the dragon of the
Last days would be vaster, or standing in the sky with stars for eyes, you
know? It was the difference between the Golden Calf of the Israelites and an
ordinary cow standing there in the garden.’
Beyond the elegance and power of the
McCaughrean’s prose,
the thing that remains with me most strongly upon reading Fire’s Astonishment
is the largeness of the characterisation. Not one among the cast of characters,
even the most evil, is given less than their due. Portraits are drawn with
intelligence and humanity. Each of these characters will stay with you long
after the book has been returned to the shelf (or, in my case, its rightful
owner).
Find a copy of Fire’s Astonishment; read it. And hope that
McCaughrean will give us another adult novel before many more years pass.
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But this isn't a book 'like' Kes. In fact, it's not a book like any other I've ever read. It is a series of memories, not related chronologically, interspersed with accounts of sessions with a psychiatrist/psychologist whom Chris saw ten or so years ago, when he was suffering from a crippling episode of repression. I don't know how he managed to write in so much detail about these sessions - how did he remember everything they talked about? Or is it an approximation of what they said - a way of exploring his inner being, rather than an accurate representation of what was said? Whatever - these sections cast a light on his
