A lack of magic in the wilderness

CHILDREN'S FICTION: EILEEN BATTERSBYreviews Wildwood By Colin Meloy, illustrated by Carson Ellis Canongate, 541pp. £10

LIFE IS ORDINARY. Well, perhaps not completely ordinary. Prue’s parents don’t appear to be all that worried at the notion of their 12-year-old daughter taking Mac, her infant brother, out in a wagon attached to the back of her bike. Trusting, yes, if also dangerous and stupid, far too stupid even for the Simpsons – Marge would never countenance it. Yet the incident is also true to the barely developed characters in a yarn that reads as if enthusiasm encouraged more haste, less thought.

Colin Meloy, lead singer (with the indie band The Decemberists) turned novelist, establishes from the opening sequences in this very long book that the vegetarian Prue is tough, single-minded and a righteous pain with attitude, judging by her smart answers. Her parents are simply dim beyond belief.

That said, little is new about this sketchy adventure based on two parallel worlds. Prue sets out on a bike that we are pointedly told is “single speed” yet looks more like a racer. “The wagon bounced noisily behind her . . . Prue nearly upsetting Mac’s wagon with every hurdled curb and missed rain puddle”. One might fear for the baby being tossed about in the little wagon, but suddenly a murder of crows appears, diving down from the sky to snatch the baby, then flying away. The shocked Prue wails briefly, then sets off in pursuit.

This doesn’t last very long. She heads for home, meeting a schoolmate, “the easily intimidated Curtis”, en route, and dismisses his interest in her distress. Not surprisingly, Prue manages to fool her parents into thinking that the baby is already asleep. Her ridiculous mother doesn’t think of checking her child, and so Prue, a heroine who never manages to engage our sympathy, is left to plan a rescue.

Meloy leaves little or nothing to the imagination. By page 13 he has already introduced the Impassable Wilderness, the dark-green patch at the centre of the surrounding countryside on maps depicting Portland, Oregon. This detail immediately places the setting in context. In real life, Forest Park is a vast wooded area, extending to more than 2,000 hectares, on the outskirts of the city. It is as if Meloy is making up the story and offering it on the first draft: the prose is haphazard and clunky, devoid of magic, while the dialogue has a sitcom snappiness.

One of the major plot devices is clearly based on a pressing environmental issue that is threatening the real Forest Park: an invasive ivy, comparable in its vigour to the wild rhododendron in Ireland, is suffocating all the other natural flora.

It is unlikely that Meloy intended his tale to be read only in Oregon, but it is touched by in-jokes, and the reader can’t ignore the glibness of tone. Just in case there is any confusion about what has happened, Meloy spells it out: “Prue felt like someone had bored a hole in her stomach the size of a basketball. Her brother was gone, literally captured by birds and carried to a remote untouchable wilderness, and who knew what they would do to him there. And it was all her fault . . . Mac would not be returning . . . How would she tell her parents? They would be devastated . . . Prue would be punished . . . She’d lost Mac, her parents’ only son. Her brother. If a week of no television was standard punishment for missing a couple of curfews, she couldn’t imagine what it was for losing baby brothers . . . ‘Get a grip, Prue!’ she said aloud.”

Prue goes directly to the forbidden wilderness. Even here, Meloy’s flat, casual style of writing fails to find a different gear. Many critics dismiss JK Rowling as a limited stylist, and it is true that her prose is at best workmanlike, but she knows how to sustain a narrative and to introduce digression. Unlike the great Tolkien, Meloy has no concept of the heroic. In fairness to Wildwood, it is far closer to the Chronicles of Narnia than it is to the sophisticated density of Middle-earth.

Meloy’s wilderness is in a state of upheaval as the Dowager Governess, crazed by the death of her child, plans indiscriminate revenge. Closely modelled on the White Witch in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (1950), Meloy’s dowager casts a spell on Curtis, who, in tailing Prue, encounters the deranged anti-heroine.

The dowager is portrayed as a blatant liar, and this is strong stuff in a story intended for nine-year-olds. Much has been made of the rather stilted and stylised illustrations that accompany the text, yet they too lack magic. The battle scenes are dull and there are relatively few set pieces, although there is a clever rat and a witty pairing of a hare and a lazy fox.

But ultimately it is the randomness of this book, its half-hearted nods to CS Lewis, to the brothers Grimm, to the classics, to Disney, that will set the teeth of any self-respecting fantasy fan on edge. Forest Park, strange and mysterious and so close to a modern city, is the kind of place that inspires stories. But Meloy, for all his ambition, is pitting himself against gifted storytellers with better tales to tell and a better understanding of how to inject the magical into their prose.

Many of the readers who would be attracted to Wildwood will have already read better books of this type. If they haven’t, those superior works, by artists such as Tolkien, are waiting to be experienced and will place Meloy’s derivative and pedestrian effort in the lesser ranks of fantasy writing. The story simply is not good enough to compensate for the lacklustre prose.

Eileen Battersby is Literary Correspondent and author of Ordinary Dogs, published by Faber