A lonely teenager. Parents missing in action. A boy who appears from nowhere. An enormous black stallion. So far, so classic. Yet nothing is what it seems in this first children’s book in more than a decade from Christchurch writer, reviewer and former festival director Rachael King. While each of these elements is present in many of the best books for children, King knits them together with more than a touch of magic to create a dynamic new adventure that will reverberate in the reader’s memory.
In her earlier children’s book, Red Rocks, it was selkies, the seal-like creatures of Scottish legend, around which the story was spun. This time, it’s kelpies, those beguiling water-horse shape-shifters, taking centre stage in a story that starts in Scotland but ends somewhere in Central Otago.
At the heart of the story is Ella, isolated geographically and socially with her fatherless family – fragile younger sister Fiona, mother Morag and ailing granny Griselda, known as Grizzly – on a farm somewhere in the south of New Zealand. Or so one assumes, although it took this reader some effort to resist the pull of the Scottish landscape in which the plot is so strongly rooted.
The opening line is up there with Ronald Hugh Morrieson’s Scarecrow: “The same evening Josh Underhill went missing, the black horse appeared on the hill above the house.” Fed up with his constant jibes, Ella, 13, lashes out verbally at the bully on the school bus, who then disappears – just as her father and grandfather have done.
The girl on the cusp of womanhood knows full well that words have power for good and ill – her granny has a grimoire, a book of spells and rituals, that’s part of their family heritage – but she is totally unprepared for the consequences of her curse.
This is a story about transitions and transplants, traditions uplifted, re-rooted and re-enacted in foreign soil, in a kind of cultural colonialism. It’s about enchantment, especially the wafer-thin veil at the centre of all stories of good and evil, of movement from one world to the next, one stage of life to the next. And about dramas that must be re-enacted until some spell is broken. Think Alan Garner’s The Owl Service.
Drawing on a wealth of traditions, The Grimmelings defies categorisation – it resists and transcends any label you might try to hang on it, much as Magpie, the curiously eared horse that Ella has raised from her apparently miraculous birth, resists handling. Even the title – deliberately perhaps – misleads.
Grimmelings, a Scots word from Norwegian, is that fleeting burst of brilliance at sunset (or sunrise) that is gone all too soon. Although the stunning cover image might suggest otherwise, it has nothing to do with wild horses – or does it? For it’s at that time of day that this dark horse appears, to spook children and beasts. The witching hour.
The world of the faerie is here, in recurring shared dreams, and the character of Gus, among others. It’s not purely fantasy, though there are elements from the best of these – it shares much with Susan Cooper’s The Dark is Rising sequence.
It’s certainly not simply a horsey book, no more than Black Beauty is. It has the moodiness of Wuthering Heights, and the satisfying comfort of one of Stacy Gregg’s standalone equine stories. There’s certainly nothing glamorous about the horse-trekking business the family relies on to survive.
Conservation issues give it contemporary currency – one of the reasons the community has ostracised the family is because of activist Grizzly’s battle against Big Dairy over wilderness acquisition in the area. On the other hand, the red-berried rowan trees she propagates to guard against witchcraft have become pest plants in her new country.
Playing with words in the most skilful way, exploring the language of horses, of winds, of landscape, of relationships, King stitches together her magical elements, introducing us to whole revelatory concepts, as the child Fiona similarly fashions flowers, feathers and found objects together to create talismans to protect her family.
