So hopefully yesterday you spent the day in Christmas bliss. I am imaging you all waking up with that fizzy ‘ooh its Christmas’ feeling, or possibly having excited children screaming at you to wake up, then follows the present opening madness and the juggling skills of making Christmas dinner whilst stopping family members fighting or getting too drunk. I don’t imagine any of you have had a knock at the door and discovered a long lost relative you thought missing, or even possibly dead, on your doorstep saying they have been away with the fairies. Well that is pretty much what happens to the Martin family on their Christmas Day in Graham Joyce’s latest novel ‘Some Kind of Fairy Tale’ and so it seemed appropriate to share this wonderful book with you today (especially if you got book vouchers yesterday) on my favourite day of the festive season – I seriously love Boxing Day, it is like Christmas day but without the fuss.
Gollancz, hardback, 2012, fiction, 389 pages, kindly sent by the publishers
Anyway, back to ‘Some Kind of Fairy Tale’, as I mentioned above the book opens upon a pretty ordinary day for Peter Martin and his family, until his parents phone to announce that his sister Tara has turned up twenty years after she disappeared aged just fifteen. Things start to get even more strange when Peter arrives and notices that his sister doesn’t actually look any older than when she left, while his parents (and even he) have started to go grey and been aged by the years as is normal Tara herself doesn’t seem any different. Why is it and just where on earth has she been? Well, when she decides to tell her story it isn’t one that any of them could have imagined, for Tara believes she was taken away by the fairies and has only been gone for six months.
If any of you are thinking of scrolling on because I mentioned fairies and the possibility of them, fear not. What I think is one of the most accomplished things that Graham Joyce does with ‘Some Kind of Fairy Tale’ is firstly to leave enough leeway that if you believe in the possibility of fairies then you can read it with that mind-set, just as you can, if you are like Tara’s family, should you be much more sceptical about these things. Joyce also makes sure that the fairies, if that is what they are (as you are very much left to make your own mind up), are not anything like the Tinkerbelle’s you might be imagining. These are very much human like, which makes them (again if that is what they are) all the more threatening in a way and all the darker.
I think the second wonderful thing about ‘Some Kind of Fairy Tale’ is that Joyce creates a story of a family dealing with the loss, and then the sudden reappearance, of a family member and all the effects that has on them afterwards and throws in something possibly magical around the edges. I would call this a literary novel with a slightly magical twist. As we read what happens after Tara appears we also learn what happened after she disappeared in Charnwood Forest all those years ago. We have the heartbreak of the parents, Peter’s obsession in finding his sister or whoever is responsible for his disappearance and also how the Martin family decide to bury it all, Peter’s children only discovering they have an aunt after she suddenly appears. There is also a brilliant and heart rendering tale of Richie, Peter’s best friend and Tara’s boyfriend at the time, and how becoming the suspect of her possible murder at such a young age, and all those decades ago, ruined his life forever. All of this whether it is funny, heart-breaking, magical etc. is dealt with by Joyce in a really domestic and realistic way. How do a northern English family deal with a crisis, have some tea to start and try to carry on as normal.
“Tea being the drug of choice in the Martin household, Dell concocted more of it, thick and brown and sweet. After all, they’d had a bit of a shock; and whenever they had a shock or an upset or experienced a disturbance of any kind they had poured tea on it for as long as any of them could remember. The fact is they poured tea on it even when they hadn’t had a shock, and they did that six or seven times a day. But these were extra special circumstances and Peter knew he had to wait until the tea had arrived before he could begin any kind of questioning. Even when the tea did arrive, the questioning didn’t go well. Peter had hardly taken his eyes off his sister since his arrival. The same half-smile hadn’t escaped the bow of Tara’s lips since he’d walked into the room. He recognised it as a disguise of some kind, a mask; he just didn’t know quite which emotions it was intended to camouflage.”
Joyce’s writing is, I think, marvellous. There might be tales of fairies in these pages but he doesn’t mess about with his prose. It’s earthy, straight to the point, believable and you find yourself becoming one of the Martin family yourself, your opinion of her and her story changes as you see it from Peter, Richie and indeed herself. What I also think Joyce should be given a huge amount of credit for is that he always leaves the book open to the readers own interpretation, which if you think about it is a very hard thing to do, you have to supply the reader with the possibility of their being magic or fairies and yet at the same time the possibility that Tara is just mad without straying into one territory more than the other.
If you are thinking of dipping your reading toes/eyes into fantasy from literary fiction or vice versa, or more importantly if you just want a really good story, then you need to read ‘Some Kind of Fairy Tale’. I am really pleased that I ended up choosing this for one of The Readers Book Groups on a whim because I can promise you that I am going to read everything that he has written so far after reading this. I really like his prose and in a way he is doing with literary fiction and fantasy what I think Kate Atkinson and Susan Hill have done with their crime novels, merging them so they become one genre, a genre I call ‘bloody good books’.
Who else has read ‘Some Kind of Fairy Tale’ and what did you think? Now I am on a mission to read all of Joyce’s books where should I turn to next?
Savidge Reads 