configured family is on stronger footing. As C.W.Sullivan suggests, ‘without the
traditional Welsh materials, A String in the Harp would be just another adolescent
problem novel; the traditional materials make it a novel about understanding on many
levels, levels which would not be present without those traditional materials.’ (Sullivan
1986:37)
Possibly the most subtle and complex use of mythological elements in a modern
setting has been by Alan Garner, who had used the device of an intrusive other world in
The Weirdstone of Brisingamen (1960), The Moon of Gomrath (1963), and Elidor (1965),
before writing The Owl Service (1967). Based on Welsh mythology and also set in modern
Wales, in Llanymawddwy, a valley near Aberystwyth, this book would also fit Sullivan’s
description of just another adolescent problem novel without the fantasy.
Alison, Gwyn and Roger brought together by circumstance are fated to live out the
triangle myth of Lleu Llaw Gyffes in the Fourth Branch of The Mabinogion. As Neil Philip
states in A Fine Anger. ‘As often in Garner’s writing, children must learn to cope with
their parents’ failure to confront their problems’ (Philip 1981: 67). Philip sees Garner’s
use of the myth as a symbolic alternative to the weighty pages of psychological analysis
which would be necessary to straighten out the complex relationships among children
and adults in the book. As Garner has said:
A prime material of art is paradox, in that paradox links two valid yet mutually
exclusive systems that we need if we are to comprehend reality: paradox links
intuitive and analytical thought. Paradox, the integration of the nonrational and
logic, engages both emotion and intellect...and, for me, literature is justified only so
long as it keeps a sense of paradox central to its form.
Garner 1983:5Reality needs a touch of the fantastic.
Throughout the domestic fantasy books which deal with the older child, choices are
made, and one of the most difficult confronts Winnie Foster at the age of eleven in a
book by an American author with an American setting, Tuck Everlasting (1975) by
Natalie Babbitt: she has the choice of living forever in the company of an enchanting
young man, or of remaining ordinary. The story is set in 1880 in New England; the Tuck
family drank from a spring, which Winnie has also discovered, eighty-seven years before
and have not aged a day since. They kidnap Winnie to stop her from drinking or telling
anyone, and then set about to convince her about the importance and necessity of death.
Winnie makes her decision: when she returns home with a bottle of water from the
spring, instead of drinking it and gaining eternal life, she pours it on a toad. When the
Tucks return eighty years later, they find Winnie’s gravemarker and the toad—which
continues to live after being run over by a car.
In domestic fantasy, then, some of the books, such as Earthfasts and the Paddington
series retain the magic, in others the magic is undone, sometimes remembered, as in
Mary Poppins, sometimes forgotten, as in Puck of Pook’s Hill. But it remains as a
possibility in everyday life, a chance of escape, a method of coping with or transforming
the everyday world. In domestic fantasy, both the tensions and the possibilities of
children’s fiction, the benefits of imaginary toads, are at their most potent.
298 TYPES AND GENRES