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Abiding in the imagination are the fairy

 



Peggy and Penny are inseparable, growing up together on a Hebridean island; even Penny's roller skates are shared turn-and-turn alike. Their lives are an admixture of the wholly realistic, the highly imaginative, and the whimsical, as children's lives are. It is a world on the cusp of change, but the glimmerings of social media and mobile phones have not yet broken out into the glamour they will come to possess: that admixture of truths and falsehoods that all glamour carries.

This world, too, carries other worlds within it. Most notably that of fairy. Fairy is woven into the fabric of shared stories and geographies - its knolls are there for all to see and respect, wondering what lies beneath.

It is this wondering that will set Peggy and Penny apart, for one day, when Penny is away, Peggy will skate her way into a knoll and behold the fairy.  The fairies are not what was expected - not small winged creatures fluttering in enchantment - but solid folk at work, often undertaking crafts that in the wider world are withering or lost. Practicing them for the moment when they might be needed again. Nor are all the fairies from the land of fairy, but it is implied that some are human folk who wander into a knoll here or there and never find their way back - for some this is a blessed relief; for others, it comes tinged with disappointment. As it does for Peggy's namesake, whom she meets there. The two worlds offer parallel but subtly different universes that are in some way seen, if not explained, as dependent and interwoven with each other. Each too can be tempting to the other. Peggy is certainly tempted, and tempered, by fairy, revisiting and sharing its life and rituals.

In her relations with Penny, not telling her of these journeys to the knoll will become the source of a separation. When she does come to tell her, explaining her reluctance, Penny feigns understanding, but the rift is there - and geography will deepen it. Penny will go to Canada, become a nurse, be absorbed in the efficiencies and exigencies of work, and a life of realistic normality. Peggy will become a local archaeologist, and through the artefacts she finds, the reweaver of a fragmenting community, and the protector of the knolls.

Campbell's novel is a wonderful evocation of childhood and coming of age, and how childhood friends, once seen as inseparable, will change; sometimes that change maintains the weaving between them, sometimes, as here, it engenders a falling away, a taking of different paths. It is also a love song to the imagination - imagination that makes the world more, not less, real, not an entrance into fantasy but into a deeper, more resonant form of seeing. This is so ably done that Peggy's departures into fairy work, whether they are seen as the forays of an actively imaginative child, actual journeys into other worlds, or a combination of both.

It also offers a sense of possibility that shared, communal story can be reenergized and renewed if we find ways of allowing ourselves to carry over our childlike imagining into our adult lives - for which, of course, we must have been allowed our childlike imaginings to emerge in the first place, for them to be honored and lived, as Peggy lives hers, and for which fairy, it is implied, are, for all their ambiguities towards the other world, deep, and natural, supporters.

It is a novel of poetry, a clear, realistic understanding of the complex psychologies of the child and the importance of growing up in worlds that allow imaginative spaces to be revealed (or made) that weave us together - human, fairy, and the nature that enfolds us both.



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