The Nargun and the Stars

nce in a great while a story will hit you so hard that you never forget the first hearing of it. When I was a child, that lovely shock came from a magical BBC radio adaptation of John Masefield's The Box of Delights (Macmillan); when I was an undergraduate, from a book called The Fellowship of the Ring (Houghton), written most astonishingly by the jovial chap who taught us Anglo-Saxon Literature. Out of all the years since, only two other books have instantly sandbagged me in quite the same way: Alan Garner's The Owl Service (Collins) and Patricia Wrightson's The Nargun and the Stars (Atheneum/McElderry).

Now that Patricia Wrightson has deservedly won the Hans Christian Andersen Medal, perhaps our label-besotted society will take a second look at her books. For twelve years I've shared the bafflement of her publisher — who is also my own — over the low American sales not only of The Nargun and the Stars but of the haunting trio of fantasies that followed it: The Ice Is Coming, The Dark Bright Water, and Journey Behind the Wind (all Atheneum/McElderry). The first even had to go out of print, but it has been reprinted, thank goodness, this fall.

The Nargun and the Stars is a wonderful book, with a hypnotic sense of place. Patricia Wrightson is deeply Australian, and she makes her fantasies out of the relationships and conflicts between ordinary, everyday human beings and the folk-spirits of the first Australians, the Aborigines — "not the ritual figures of the creative myths but the gnomes and heroes and monsters of Australia." The real and the magical are interwoven, in the powerful landscape of that astonishing continent; these are fantasies not of good and evil but of unjudging, unjudged creatures who are, above all, old.

Simon Brent's parents die. He is sent to live with two distant, aging cousins, Charlie and Edie Waters, on their five-thousand-acre sheep run, Wongadilla. He's too shy and gruff to call them Charlie and Edie, yet. They're patient and gentle, and they let him learn the place for himself: the lonely house among the hills and ridges, the green swamp below, and the high dark gully above. Ancient creatures live in those hills: the mischievous Potkoorok in the swamp, the ethereal Turongs rustling in the trees. They show themselves to Simon, and he nurses his private, amazing discovery of them — only to find, quite soon, that Edie and Charlie have shared the secret since they, too, were young. Charlie smiles at him. "‘You're all right, then. That's about what Edie and I always reckoned.'"

But something else also shows itself to Simon: the Nargun, a powerful, dreadful rock that is more than a rock, which has been sleeping in the wild places of Australia since time began and is now, very gradually, on the move. It has reached Wongadilla, and in its slow mind are the ancient longings and formless rage that can drive it, sometimes, to kill. Simon narrowly escapes it, and a sheep lies dead instead. Since the Nargun cannot be destroyed, the story of the book is the story of how — by the ingenuity of the old creatures, and the wit and courage of a man, a woman, and a boy — it is driven away.

The satisfying turns of that story, which I don't propose to reveal, are clear and simple but at the same time full of the kind of unconscious metaphor that marks all true fantasy writing. The roaring yellow bulldozer which erupts into Wongadilla, shattering its silence and stripping its trees, becomes also in a most unpredictable manner the means by which the land and its people are saved from the Nargun. Yet one is left with a lingering resentment of the world of bulldozers, and an irrational sympathy for the timeless Nargun, which Simon shares. "That granite face turned to the sky seemed to bear all age, all emptiness, all evil and good; without hope or despair; with rocklike patience. [Simon] was shaken by a sudden storm of pity and fear."

Patricia Wrightson makes her world startlingly vivid. When Simon first comes to Wongadilla, we feel his uneasiness as the car's engine stops and he is enveloped in the huge silence of the land, "waiting, coiled like a spring between earth and sky." The bleat of a sheep, the laugh of a kookaburra, the scratching crash of possums jumping on the roof — they all make the reader jump as nervously as Simon jumps. And an unexpected image can make a sentence glow, as when one is suddenly inside Simon's surprised head, with "questions and alarms rolling about in his mind like marbles," or listening on a windy day to sounds which "were blown away and came sweeping back like sheets on a clothesline."

Above all, Patricia Wrightson is a marvellous storyteller. The most remarkable quality of this remarkable book is its wire-tight suspense; the Nargun is so ancient and immutable a monster, how can its implacable advance ever be checked? Listen to this, as Simon and Charlie are driven home by darkness, having tried once more and failed:

It had grown so dark that the stars hung close and brilliant. They fumbled through the gate to the back door, and Charlie pulled it open on yellow light, warmth, and Edie's face turned to them from the stove. Simon had one foot in the door when the night reached out and held them frozen. Sudden and savage came the Nargun's cry, bellowing down from the mountain, full of all time and the darkness behind the stars. It held them at the door while it rang between mountains and died away. Charlie pushed Simon inside and shut the door.
"We made it angry," whispered Simon.

That's the kind of passage that makes for immensely satisfying reading aloud. "Don't stop there!" the children cry, in an anguish of suspense. It ranks with another section in which Charlie and Edie, after the first encounter with the Nargun, sit up all night, watchful, listening. "Peering through dark windows into darkness, they saw nothing. Only once, strained wires creaked when something heavy leaned against the gate." Perhaps the reading aloud should not be done at night.

But under whatever circumstances, this book should be read. It is fantasy of a very uncommon kind: accessible yet profound, immensely readable yet graced with the rhythms and images of poetry in its distinguished prose. It's the kind of story which children seize upon when young and never, thereafter, let go. The copy on my desk is one I've stolen from my son's book shelves; the flyleaf tells me I gave it to him on his tenth birthday. He's twenty now and away at college — but unless I want trouble when he next comes home, I'd better be darn sure I put The Nargun and the Stars back where it belongs.

Author of The Grey King (Atheneum/McElderry), which won the 1975 Newbery Medal, Susan Cooper has written many highly acclaimed books for young people, including The Dark Is Rising (Atheneum/McElderry), winner of the Boston Globe–Horn Book Award for fiction. She is currently writing a television version of the play Foxfire. Atheneum/McElderry is publishing her latest book, The Selkie Girl, this fall.