Krishna
This starts out like a poignant family drama and then morphs into a kind of a fairytale based tale, albeit with some twists. It gets preachy too, but it is done in a way that is not cloying but certainly the preachy parts are not subtle. Overall, what impression does it create? Read on to find out.
This is about a boy, David, who lost his mother to a terrible disease. It is touching from almost the beginning, with David ‘trying to prevent’ his mother dying by making sure that he always knocks on doors even times and other ‘tricks’.
As she grows weak, he reads aloud to her from the childhood books that she read to him in the past.
He remembers his mother taking him for walks and teaching him about plants, he remembers her kindling his interest in books, and when he is in school, he gets the news that she died. He ‘knows’ that this is because he could not do his rituals in school and so could not protect her.
Towards the end, she was weak, groggy from medicines, and could not go for walks with him as before. He was not even sure that she always knew who he was and she even smelt funny, not the usual ‘mom smell’.
The family was relieved of the need to drive a long way to see mom when she was finally admitted to the hospital but then you noticed a new silence, new absence. The description flows like poetry and you are drawn into the story slowly – all told from David’s perspective, of course.
He kisses his mother goodbye in the coffin one last time. Gets her books with him.
He faints when he realizes that his father is in love with the woman who attended to his mother’s last days in the hospital and she reciprocates.
He faints a couple more times and his father sends him to a psychiatrist. That doctor asks him to draw things and analyzes the drawings. He decides not to tell the psychiatrist the real problem where he is having visions of terrifying creatures when he is asleep or when he faints.
He goes to live in the mansion of Rose (a separate room for him at the top) with a view to the forest around and his ‘illusions’ grow stronger. The books seem to have a voice and talk to him. The strange man in the dreams informs him that they are all ‘waiting for their king’.
He learns that some of the books where handwritten ‘additions’ were made were there when an uncle of Rose called Jonathan. The books were sold to them by a strange man in a bookshop. Soon after, Jonathan and a neighbour’s daughter called Anna disappeared. The bookshop also was found boarded up thereafter.
When David can take Rose’s taunts no more, he gets into a huge argument with her and she slaps him. He goes to his room and when his father, who is already tired and is fighting with Rose returns, she tells him her version of the story and dad gets into a huge rage with David, shocking him.
That night, his mother’s voice calls him to go explore the sunken place in the garden he had noticed and he goes into a small crack a tree and emerges into another land – rather like a reverse Narnia style as this land is bleak and he meets flowers that have small faces in them and shriek in fear when he approaches and tree trunks that bleed.
He also finds a bomber in flames with people trapped and dying inside crash to the ground close to him. This is the time of WW II and in his ‘real home’ London is being bombed mercilessly by Germany.
He is rescued by Woodsman, the man who lives there and the latter wants to take him quickly to safety. But first, he marks the tree with a distinctive twine so that they can find it again.
When he almost reaches his cabin heavily fortified, they are stopped by a pack of wolves, some of which are sentient, stand on two legs and wear clothes. They are the ones that the Woodsman fears, it would seem. He keeps David near while he confronts the leader of the pack.
The story now turns into borrowed mishmash of fairy tales. The Woodman talks about how the half man- half wolf, whose king and the most cunning and powerful specimen is called Leroi (Yes ‘the king’ in French?) came about. Leroi and their pack is plotting to overthrow the rightful king. They were formed when a girl wearing Red went from Grandma’s house (recognize the story?) fell in love with the wolf and mated with him, producing the hybrid offspring. Then a lot of girls followed her example (Don’t even get me started on the absurdity of all this) and the population of Loups – as half men and half wolves are called – started increasing. Yes, I know that Loups comes from ‘lupine’. The Woodsman is the Woodsman of the same story, except that he does not kill the wolf to save Red Riding Hood. There is nothing to save!
David is kept in Woodman’s fortified house. The next morning, they go to find the tree – the Woodsman hopes to find a way to get it reopened so that he can send David back to his world, but the cunning Crooked Man (another rhyme, which I did not recognize as such before) had tied identical strings around all the trees in that area! Defeated, Woodsman decides to seek the help of the king and takes David across. On the way, they meet a destroyed house made of chocolates and Woodsman tells him of a (twisted) tale of the boy and a girl who were lured into it and almost became the dinner of a witch. The twist comes in what happens after they vanquish the witch and the boy is resentful and goes away, with sinister consequences of him.
David meet (or rather spies on while being hidden) Harpies of the Greek mythology – women’s heads, with sharp teeth permanently exposed, able to fly.
There are trolls who give an old (and well known) riddle for David to solve before he moves on, always with Loups in hot pursuit. The Huntsman stays back to give his life to save David and onward David goes to a twisted Snow White story where she is fat, and an insufferable bully who torments the seven dwarfs day and night.
You now begin to think that these travels are nothing but snippets connecting as many twisted fairy tales as the author can and it all gets a bit tiring – a long way from the excellent first few pages of the story where you were drawn into David’s uprooted world outside London.
He then meets a deer with a girl’s head briefly before ‘it’ is hunted down by what turns out to be a lady. The huntress seems to be doing experiments like Dr Moreau of HG Well’s imagination – OK, not really a fairy tale here but still a copy – and she finds and takes David to her house to turn hum into a human and fox hybrid. David quickly outwits her by telling her of a being that is invincible in hunting and she wants to become that hybrid and teaches David how to convert her. He nearly is caught after cutting her in half, but her other ‘creations’ the animal heads with human bodies surround her and overwhelm her, allowing David to make his escape.
He meets a knight who promises him to take to the king that he seeks if he would be his squire for an errand first and David agrees. On the way, they see a great sign of slaughter – but no bodies. Incongruously, there is also a military tank in the middle – another intrusion from his real world where Germans are bombing Britain.
There are some side stories – told by almost all characters to David – but we will skip over these since they seem to have nothing to do with the main story (such as there is).
Roland, who was in search of his closest friend (and love?) learns that the friend had gone to see the king too, and never returned. The castle has been moved to a desolate place surrounded by a forest of thorns.
The next piece strung up on this themeless story is how a monster comes to attack the farmers and David and Roland together face it. In the midst of what looks like a trap for the monster, it falls down and dies, and out of her (yes, it is a female) stomach comes hundreds of small monsters.
They manage to kill it and when they reach the fortress of the enchantress, Roland makes David wait at the entrance with instructions to take Scylla the horse and move on if he does not return by morning. The thorns part for him and he goes in.
But David, after a bit of a wait, goes near the thorn and touches them and they part. He decides to go in. He finds a sleeping lady, who looks like Rose. Egged on by his mother’s voice, he ascends the stairs to go to the lady and on the way finds both Roland and his friend impaled on the thorns. He manages to kiss the lady but she turns out to be the enchantress. Before she can entrap his mind, he manages to kill her with the beast’s claw that he had as a present before, and goes his way with Scylla, grieving for Roland and knowing that his mother is not trapped here and it was all a ploy to make him go deeper into trouble. The Crooked Man meets him after he manages to kill two evil people who were trying to steal his horse. The latter urges him to go to the castle quickly to meet the king and promises to keep the wolves, which, under Leroi, are hot on his scent, at bay until he can reach the castle.
David manages to reach the castle and meet the old, feeble and dying king. The king bades him to rest before ‘showing him the book of lost things’. While he wakes up in the night, he overhears the Crooked Man and the king talking and also sneaks around to read the book. He realizes that the king is really the brother of Rose, Jonathan who had sacrificed Anna to the old man. David also manages to find Anna’s spirit in the underground dungeons of the Crooked Man.
He realizes that the Crooked Man searches for jealous and angry boys who hate someone (brother, a friend, anyone) and gets them to this place. Jonathan was scared of the wolf man and in his fear, had created the Lupes.
When the Lupes surround the palace fortress, the Crooked Man shows the way in. He then compels David to utter the name of his brother but David, wise to the man’s trickery refuses. The Crooked Man dies, his lifespan borrowed from Jonathan’s friend Anna, having expired.
Leroi manages to kill the King and David almost decides that he is next, when the victory of Leroi turns pyrrhic. With the King, whose fear to animate Leroi having disappeared, Leroi himself crumbles.
There is a surprise at the end, when all the magic ends, where one character that we thought was dead turns out to be alive all the time. (The others stay dead so it is not the escape route of let us all go back to how it was…)
The book ends with a lot of preachy things about how David’s life back in the world where he belongs is not a bed of roses and follows him through his old age, where he visits the enchanted forest one last time.
He is supposed to have been lost, found to be in a coma, and came out of the coma so you are left to your own conclusions as to what the strange forest and David’s experiences really were.
A fairly interesting read.
6/10
= = Krishna