Ghost Drum Set
Map Rousch
The Ghost Drum is a children's fantasy novel by Susan Price, published by Faber in 1987, and the first book in the Ghost World trilogy (1987 to 1995).[1] It is an original fairy tale using elements from Russian history and Russian folklore. Like many traditional tales it is full of cruelty, violence and sudden death.
Farrar, Straus, and Giroux published a US edition within the calendar year, entitled The Ghost Drum: A Cat's Tale.[2] Ghost Drum was reissued as a Young Adult Classic by Faber in 2024.[4]
The novel is represented as a tale told by the "most learned of all cats". At the beginning and at the head of each chapter, the cat introduces the scenes and the characters. At the end, the cat asks the hearer/reader to pass on the tale so that it may "make its own way back to me, riding on another's tongue."
A slave woman gives her new-born daughter to an old witch to be raised as a "Woman of Power". The witch teaches the girl, Chingis, all her arcane wisdom, including the use of the shamanic ghost drum. With the drum she can enter many other worlds including the ghost-world, the land of the dead. When Chingis's apprenticeship is complete, witches come from all around to congratulate her, but the shaman Kuzma envies and fears her potential for greatness.
The Czar Guidon, the latest in a long line of ruthless rulers, has married by the counsel of his advisers, but he is deathly afraid of being overthrown by his son. He imprisons his pregnant wife, Farida, in a windowless room at the top of the tallest tower in the palace, and when she dies in childbirth he orders that his son, the Czarevich Safa, should never leave the room. Marien, Safa's nurse, raises him there. When he becomes restless at his imprisonment, she dares to speak to the Czar about him and is summarily executed.
The Czarevich spends many years alone before his psychic cries of distress reach Chingis, and then, with the help of the ghost drum, she finds and secretly spirits him away. He is filled with astonishment and wonder at the world he has never seen so much as a glimpse of before. Meanwhile, the Czar dies, and fighting breaks out in the palace as his sister Margaretta ascends to the throne: she determines to find her nephew, intending to kill him. Kuzma, arriving in the form of a polar bear, offers to help her.
Using his shamanic knowledge against Chingis, Kuzma succeeds in killing her and capturing Safa. However, in the ghost world, Chingis enlists the help of her mentor and of Marien and Farida, to return to her body and defeat Kuzma. The four spirits take over Kuzma's body and destroy Margaretta before returning to the ghost world to await rebirth.
The novel counterpoises the spiritual power of the shaman with the political power of the Czar. The absolute power of the Czar and the prevalence of slavery in the land are represented as productive of evil. The Czar's power is shown to be on uncertain ground; although he has the power of life and death over others, he is ruled by his fear of losing his Czardom. The shaman, however, whose power is based on knowledge, lives free, walks invisible, and is all but invulnerable to harm.
The terms 'witch' and 'shaman' are used interchangeably in the text, and both are applied to men as well as women. They can travel in other worlds in spirit, and they have healing gifts and other powers based on the various types of magic: the magic of herbs, the magic of words, the magic of writing and the magic of music. They demonstrate such skills as divining the future, invisibility and shape-shifting. The drum of the title is a common shamanic tool, in this case also marked with letters or runes through which the shaman can "question" the drum (similarly to the alethiometer in His Dark Materials).
The School Library Journal described the language of the novel as 'lyrical and poetic", saying that Susan Price "weaves together many common folkloric themes into an original story which is both charmingly new and hauntingly familiar".[6] When reissued in 2024, the book was described as "a gem ... the Faberg egg of fairytales."[4]
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The Ghost Drum is a richly emotional and lavishly written tale of love and learning and the tyranny that seeks their deaths. In a cold northern land, from a monstrous palace where speech is forbidden and sunlight filtered through stone, rules a Czar who won his crown by killing his brothers and sisters.
Everyone adjourns to the spirit-world and is appropriately reborn. What happens to the Czardom? The rich and the powerful go to war to decide who will be the next Czar, and the rest acquiesce in the outcome. This is adult fiction for eleven or twelve year olds.
Now, I'm not saying Philip Pullman has read this, or was overly influenced or anything, but the trio of "Ghost" books, set in a vaguely Imperial Russia and mythological underworlds, is one of the most astonishing things I have ever read and reminds me not a little of the Northern Lights trilogy.
Another reviewer felt it rather dark for the age it is aimed at. Perhaps, but no more so than Northern Lights and the His Dark Materials trilogy. Some of the folk-lore, much of the icy scenery that forms an important part in the Ghost Drum turns up in Northern Lights. It's coincidental, but I think anyone who enjoyed Pullman's books will love this.
The rich, sparce, beautiful language, the twists of plot and the feisty characters are all interlaced with the traditional Russian story-telling device of a learned cat (as in Pushkin's "Russlan & Ludmilla poem).
I loved it -- and the sequels, for once, did not disappoint. I cannot understand why this isn't more famous, has not been filmed, raved about, discussed and celebrated. Read it and be swept away into a dark, thrilling,cold and timeless world of stories and storytelling. You won't want it to end. SUPERB!
I read The Ghost Drum when I was 11 and it is, without a doubt, one of my favourite books of all time. The story expertly subverts classic fairytale clichs -- an imprisoned prince is rescued from the clutches of an evil princess by a good witch -- and cleverly references Slavic, particularly Russian, myth and legend. Witches own houses that move on chicken legs, reminiscent of the Baba Yaga tales, and cats tell stories and sing songs.
As other reviewers have said, it is incredibly dark in places and I admit that as a child, I was quite shocked at some of the violence. However, this is by no means a criticism, and cursory look at the majority of fairytales will reveal that children's stories are not free from bloodshed.
The prose beautifully written and some of the images and ideas in the story haunted me for some time after finishing. But above all, Susan Price tells a good yarn, and it is a gripping adventure from start to end. My one complaint is that it is inexplicably out of print, and therefore not that easy to find.
I wholeheartedly recommend this book to anyone who loves a good story, young or old.
The narrator of this trilogy is a learned cat on a golden chain and we are at once in the world of long dark winters and Slavic myth. The witches' houses run on chicken legs or cats' paws but their inhabitants are not as instantly terrifying as the iron- toothed Baba Yaga of Ransome's Old Peter's Russian Tales. They are old and wise and various. Their magics are the powers of words and music. They must be learned. At the beginning of the story it is the deepest midwinter night and a slave-woman, huddled close to the big communal stove, has given birth to a baby girl. An old witch is nearing the end of her three hundred year life. She needs an apprentice and has come to take the child.
Now the horror of the slave-mother's situation becomes apparent. She would like her baby to have a better life but she is afraid. "My baby doesn't belong to me. I am a slave, her father is a slave, and she and we belong to Czar Guidon. If I gave you the baby, we should be whipped for giving away our master's property." This modern fairy-story is about power. The witches and shamans have power but theirs is a power that has been worked for and learned and must be exercised within rules. The Czars and Czaritsas, however, are human and ignorant and are finally driven mad by their own absolutism- - though not before they have caused untold suffering and death along the way.
The Ghost Drum is beautifully written using a starkly simple vocabulary. "Far overhead the sky-stars glisten white, bright, in their darkness; underfoot the snow-stars glitter white in whiteness. Between the sky-stars and the snow-stars hangs a shivering, milky curtain of twilight." Many of the most telling moments use this simplicity to shocking effect. "Swiftly she was brought into the dazzling light of a small courtyard and there -- when the soldiers' eyes had got used to the light -- they cut off her head." When the Czaritsa Margaretta succumbs to paranoia she sees the ghosts of her naked and starving people in every palace mirror. Naturally she has all the mirrors smashed and then ground into powder. This then is "poured into jars and put away in the palace storerooms for sprinkling on the food of her enemies. Though a Czaritza, she was a thoughtful and thrifty housewife."
Fairy stories have traditionally given a voice to the oppressed. The Ghost Drum can be read as an exotic and magical story from a faraway land and simultaneously relished as a satire on the madness of dictators. It's timeless.