16. Nina Beachcroft (1977), A Visit to Folly Castle

[strange_complex]

This was an example of what some people (including someone else who read it) call a 'book ghost' - i.e. a book you read as a child, and of which you later forget the title and author's name, but which never entirely leaves you, haunting you with key scenes and characters that you can't quite place. Since the last such book to float up from the depths of my childhood memory turned out to be Charmed Life by Diana Wynne Jones, and prompted a massive love affair with her many books when I re-read it, I took myself seriously when I kept having persistent flash-backs to a mysterious castle full of strange people, and a vision of a far-off magical land inside a glass marble. Thankfully, in this Google- and eBay-sponsored age, it was the work of about ten seconds to track those memories down to a specific title, and bag my own copy of it.

Having re-read it, I can see why it appealed to my childhood self. It's about an ordinary girl called Emma who one day steps through a hole in a fence to find herself in a huge garden, face-to-face with a strange and intriguing girl called Cassandra. Cassandra (who prefers to be known as Sandra) is lonely and desperate to make friends - but her family turn out to be sinister, dangerous and not entirely human. Despite the friendship which has grown between them, in the end it proves impossible for the two girls to be part of one another's worlds. Sandra's family disappear as suddenly as they had arrived - leaving nothing behind but the marble I'd remembered in the first place.

It's perhaps not as great a work of children's literature as I'd hoped, and certainly not up to DWJ standards. But it's definitely worth reading. It does some nice things with the genres of magic, science fiction and Greek mythology (specifically the Atlantis story), and addresses social gulfs in much the same way as Brideshead Revisited does. I suspect it may also be the origin of my habit of capitalising Hokey Concepts in my writing today, since Sandra has quite a lot to say about True Friends who Never Let You Down. And I'm certain it was where I first learnt the term 'folly' in the sense of a whimsical and functionless building.

The odds are that if you like children's fantasy literature, you've already read this. But if you haven't, it's worth a go.

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Comments

[strange-complex.livejournal.com]

Aw, how sweet - a tale worthy of J.R. Hartley himself! I bet she has met scant few people who have actually read his books, too. I trust you expressed delight and enthusiasm for it! ;-)