Excessive Candour
In the Forest of Things

Much has been said about how she begins: way inside medias res: in the center of the world. Here we are at the beginning of "Hero Vale," one of the best tales in Red Spikes, which is Margo Lanagan's third collection, and as exactingly fine as either White Time (2000) or Black Juice (2004). Somewhere outdoors in England, Diammid Anderson is gazing into a liminal crossroads-between-worlds called the Vale; he is with another lad, called Razor. They converse. Within a page or so, an astonishing nine additional names have appeared in the text. They are all boys. All of them, except Razor, are incarcerated in a British boarding school. Whatever crosses over through the Vale has already hurt two of them very badly.

Before we know much of anything for certain about any of these lads—though each of them has been subtly and swiftly differentiated—we begin to understand that the second scene of the tale precedes the first, and that Diammid's earlier witnessing of a savage bullying ritual may be the motive for his current excursion into real danger. Suddenly a figure wells into something recognizable out of the chaos within the Vale, wells into something like a role. Razor, who has been there before, knows that something new is happening: "Arr, gawd," he says:

"Always when I bring you Grammar lads. I come by myself and all I see is elefumps or horned horses that stray out and wander and stray back. But that's a full hero, that one. The real thing. Oh, my."

There is a lot going on here very fast. We may detect an echo out of Robert Holdstock's Mythago Wood (1984)—in her acknowledgments, Lanagan makes it clear that she takes lots of incipits from various sources, including other authors, and runs with them—and a parodic rendering of class differentiation in England; but we may also sense a clue to the rest of the tale (on a second reading the clue is clarion-loud). As a Grammar lad (according to the orthodoxy she's making a certain amount of fun of), Diammid only naturally evokes out of the Vale a mythago pertinent to his potential standing; and though the rest of this story shakes apart in anguish and revelation any link we may have suspected to British boys' stories about stalwart lads undergoing initiation rites that entitle them to defend the Empire, Diammid does transform the scourging he is soon to undergo into acts of genuine heroism. Nor are we sure at the end of the story that he will survive the experience.

Meaning that's there all the time

Everything that happens in "Hero Vale" is already aswarm in its first sentences; it begins exactly where it begins to count. In an interview published some years ago, Langan lists a number of influences upon her as a child who read; in among the usual suspects we find two significant figures: Alan Garner and William Mayne, perhaps the two most "difficult" authors of any renown in contemporary children's literature: Both of them authors who make it clear that, when finally you catch up to where they are telling their tale, they were there all the time. Everything you needed was a feast before you in the first place. Reading Lanagan is a similar festival.

But I think there's more to her beginnings than medias res and dances of incipits (I take the term from music, where an incipit is a fragment or chord or passage a composer like Handel or Bach or Beethoven might ingest as a starting point from which to excogitate some miracle). What Lanagan breathes upon us in her opening words is not just technique but what technique, in her case, seems to be there for: some instant stink and attar of silva rerum—a Latin term meaning literally "the forest of things" but intending something like "cauldron of story," a body of material containing fables, sententiae, proverbs, jokes, images, mnemonics. For Romans, silva rerum seems to refer to something like the circumambient buzz of the world as known. It is raw materials of the world as it can be told. It is, in other words, a kind of imago for the Renaissance Theatre of Memory. In modern times, it was reinvoked by the late journalist and travel writer Ryszard Kapuscinski in an interview he gave to Bill Buford in 1987 for Granta 21: "In describing what I do," Kapuscinski says there, "I resort to the Latin term, silva rerum, the forest of things." He then goes on to say that

"Story is the beginning. It is half the achievement. But it is not complete until you, as the writer, become part of it ..., have experienced this event on your own skin, and it is your experience, this feeling along the surface of your skin, that gives your story its coherence: it is what is at the centre of the forest of things."

So silva rerum can mean the veritable forest of things of the world, or an interlocking murmuration of Story about the world. In the end, they may seem as one. For Lanagan, certainly, as befits her profession, any significant experience of the world is of a multifariousness best—or only—caught on the wings of story; but also, as befits a relatively young writer (she is not yet 50) in a world whose stories have become old, what she makes new is what has already been told. The incipits, the echoes, the borrowings, the shocks of the Twice-Told, the clamor when they all talk at once: these do seem to supply the grist of her beginnings. Even the newest-coined of her tales seems to ring with lore.

Learning to pass in the forest

Unsurprisingly, therefore, her protagonists almost always seem to be listening or being listened to; watching or watched: for the world is palpably older than they are; and it's everywhere: the intercrural fasces of family; the palings of village; the mysterious strangers who tear things apart. Again and again a particular trope appears: someone prays not to be seen and stands as still as ever she can, though she will seem battered as by wings. Sometimes it works, and the protagonist edges free into the dance of things again; sometimes it doesn't—as in "Winkie," an exceedingly terrifying tale (from the 1841 poem by William Miller)—in which Wee Willie Winkie catches a small girl, who had been unable to remain still enough (for she had "wilted and whimpered and shrank into a ball" under an exposing porch), and almost tortures her to death. You are never alone in the forest of things. And you are always being told.

All this being-surrounded-by and getting-free-of supervision is, of course, very much like growing up—for that matter, it's rather like becoming a travel writer, a person who is constantly having to learn how to pass. In the 1990s in her native Australia, Lanagan did begin as a writer of novels for older children; and even the title story of White Time , which is in fact pretty long, does explore the claustrophobias—the prison staleness—of adolescence more detailedly than older readers will be entirely comfortable with. But in the twenty-first century she has published so far only stories shorter than that, snake-free, no fixatives applied. (Her publishers, in Australia and later in Britain and the States, have clearly found her new work problematic in marketing terms, and Black Juice and Red Spikes will almost certainly occupy more than one ghetto inside the big boxes of Barnes and Border.) When she is weak, as in "Forever Upward," it is because she has fixed simplistically into story form what needs to be expanded into a big dialogic novel, some big garden of a book with ley lines all through it so we can trace long happenings after the incipit.

But silva rerum is most thrilling and wildest when glimpsed. There are no gardens in the rest of Red Spikes. There is only the glimpse-god in the forest.