Lucy Clough goes to stay with her Aunt Mabel in the village of Hagworthy for the summer holidays. She has fond memories of previous stays, and of the Lucy Clough goes to stay with her Aunt Mabel in the village of Hagworthy for the summer holidays. She has fond memories of previous stays, and of the friends she made back then — sisters Caroline and Louise, and a boy called Kester — but that was five years ago, and now she finds Caroline and Louise mad about horses and little else, while Kester is caught up in friction with his uncle, the village smith, who wants his nephew to take up the family trade, while grammar-school boy Kester wants more from life. The village has a new vicar, ‘Frightfully nice man — full of ideas’, one of which is to revive the old Horn Dance of Hagworthy for a fête to raise money for the church roof. Oldsters in the village don’t like the idea — the Horn Dance ties in with legends of the Wild Hunt — but who listens to oldsters? Lucy senses something brewing, too, though, and when Kester’s playful banter with the village boys starts to turn more serious — and when those boys start to get a glazed look in their eyes when they’re practising the dance — she wonders if anything can be done to save Kester from a fate he seems only too keen on provoking…
The Wild Hunt of Hagworthy shares its main themes with Penelope Lively’s previous two YA books, Astercote and The Whispering Knights: a quiet English village becomes the setting for conflict between the old ways & modernity when something sacred is treated without the proper respect. But I think Hagworthy works best of all three. Partly this is down to the characterisation being a little deeper and more realistic (there’s a teenage moodiness about Kester and Lucy, of a sort not present in characters in the previous two books), and partly because the clash between the old & new, and its manifestation in the supernatural, is handled quite subtly (for most of the book, you can’t be sure there is a supernatural element at all). As with those previous two books, once the basic idea is established — that the Horn Dance is deeply linked with the supernatural Wild Hunt, but it’s going ahead anyway — the plot pretty much comes to a standstill. But where this was frustrating in previous books, here it feels as though the story is being given time to deepen its characters and build up the tension about what’s going to happen. That holding back of the plot didn’t feel like a flaw, here.
I enjoyed Astercote and The Whispering Knights, partly because I gave them a bit leeway for being YA books from forty years ago; The Wild Hunt of Hagworthy, I enjoyed without having to give it that leeway — the characters, the setting, the slow build up to a tense and exciting conclusion, the connection with a genuinely wild and dangerous-seeming folkloric supernatural, all worked really well, for me....more
In the summer of 1972, acid-folk band Windhollow Fayre, on the back of a recent tragedy, are cloistered away by their producer/manager in an out-of-thIn the summer of 1972, acid-folk band Windhollow Fayre, on the back of a recent tragedy, are cloistered away by their producer/manager in an out-of-the-way old country house so they can concentrate on writing and rehearsing their second album. Forty-odd years later, the band members recall that now famous/infamous stay at Wylding Hall for a documentary: famous, because it produced one of the great albums of 1970s English folk-rock; infamous, because one of their members disappeared shortly after the band made their only recordings of the songs they'd been working on.
So what happened to Julian Blake, arguably Windhollow Fayre's most talented member? Only 'the girl' would know: a mysterious young woman who takes centre place on the cover of the band's Wylding Hall album, a young woman nobody remembers being there when the photo was taken. But here, for the inquisitive reader, Elizabeth Hand lays out a few hints: a roomful of dead birds, a strange local barrow-mound, photographs of an ancient folk-custom surviving long after it was considered extinct elsewhere in the country... Wylding Hall itself is a 'vasty house' — a dream-like labyrinth were you can get lost if you wander alone. Plenty of traps for the unwary, then — let alone for the likes of Julian Blake, who's actively seeking a way to bring a little magic into his already spellbinding songwriting.
Wylding Hall is about 'sacred time'. As Julian explains: ‘When you step into sacred time, you’re actually moving sideways, into a different space that’s inside the normal world.’ Creative time — the time spent writing and rehearsing an era-defining album, for instance — is one sort of 'sacred time'. As is youth — those golden summers of long ago before it all went wrong. And another, of course, is Faerie, which has been known (just ask Tam Lin) to spirit away particularly fine musicians to its own timeless realm.
Mixing real-life stories of the English folk-rock movement (in an interview over at the Coode Street Podcast, Elizabeth Hand mentions Fairport Convention and Nick Drake) with good old English weird, I knew I was going to like Wylding Hall the moment I heard about it. For me, the key story is Julian's, but as he's the only one not there to talk about it, we can only get hints. This is a limitation of the form Hand has chosen to tell her story (interview excerpts for the documentary), and it has a distancing effect, for me, where I'd like to go in deeper to the weird itself, and Blake's own experiences. But I suppose the point is the mystery — and how it ties in with the un-recapturable mysteries of creativity, and long-lost youths generally.
(For another novel about music and faerie, not to mention long-lost youths, give Grahame Joyce's Some Kind of Fairy Tale a go.) ...more
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