Spellbinding

Sara Maitland – True North: Selected Stories. Manchester: Comma Press, 2024

The North and magical realism now seem to make a natural pairing. In the wake of authors like Andrew Michael Hurley, Ben Myers, and Glen James Brown, one could be forgiven for thinking that the shapes and forms of the haunted North have always been here; lingering in the literary imagination as omnipresent as the fogs on the Thames, or the wee folk around the stone circles of Scotland.

But there was once nothing particularly magical about the North. For D.H. Lawrence, we were the mechanical men, troglodytic philistines. For Dickens we were associated with Gradgrind and his Hard Facts: “Facts-Facts-Facts, lad!” Even Ted Hughes’ crow – reborn as a transforming psychopomp in Max Porter’s Grief is a Thing with Feathers (2015) – was more a grim symbol, a bit of Northern dark humour, in Hughes’ own poems, rather than anything particularly magical.

If you’re looking for an ur-point – a literary spring from whence this myth first bubbled-up to the surface – the writings of Sara Maitland would be a good starting point.

She published her first novel, Daughters of Jerusalem, in 1978, and turned her hand to fairy tale and myth soon after. Her collections Telling Tales (1983), A Book of Spells (1987) and On Becoming a Fairy Godmother (2003) not only brought fairy into the modern world, but did so in a particularly Northern, and a particularly grounded and authentic way.

Indeed, rather than take the postmodern road, a road laid down by Angela Carter and driven down by hundreds, perhaps thousands of authors since, Maitland lodges her stories in very clear, set locations. In Gossip from the Forrest: A Search for the Hidden Roots of Our Fairytales (2012) she took the logical next step, presenting 12 fairy tales beside 12 pieces of nature writing, set each in a specific piece of woodland in the UK.

Scotland and the South predominated in Gossip from the Forrest. In the new collection from Comma Press, True North: Selected Stories, we find ourselves journeying the lands in between, further South and yet further North again.

In “A Fall from Grace” a travelling circus is called in for the opening of the Eiffel Tower. In “True North” two Intuit women fight to survive in the midst of the Arctic winter. In “Andromeda” we see the world of the Greek Gods through a very modern manner of monologue.

Maitland’s stories hum with a continuous glow, drawn from across different collections, different times, different places; they nevertheless convey that solid sense of simultaneous wonder and groundedness that has come to typify the magical realist genre; particularly Northern magical realism, or “Powerhouse Gothic”, as we’ve previously described it at the MRB.

That particular mix of quotidian and exotic comes through most strongly in the pieces “Miss Manning’s Angelic Moment,” and “Why I Became a Plumber”: both of which deliver almost what their titles suggest, albeit with a twice. While the opening story “The Moss Witch” is a classic work of uncanny nature: the wondrous weird.

Despite being only 175 pages, this collection covers a tremendous amount of (boggy, moss-strewn) ground. One feels a weight of experience behind the writing, where ideas that, in the hands of other writers, might be strung out to novel-length, being delivered with a deftness and grace that leaves room for the unexpected.

If you’ve yet to experience Maitland’s work, Comma Press have provided you with an excellent collection to start with. A collection that glimmers like the hilt of an ancient sword submerged beneath cold brown water.

• Joe Darlington