Katabasis “Down Under” in the Novels of Margaret Mahy and Maurice Gee

Home , Katabasis, Margaret Mahy, Shade (mythology), Shaky Isles

chapter 17 Katabasis “Down Under” in the Novels of Margaret Mahy and Maurice Gee

Elizabeth Hale

Two writers of fiction for young adults have dominated the New Zealand literary scene in the past few decades. Margaret Mahy and Maurice Gee are well- known, both at home and abroad, for their intelligent, sensitive, and dramatic fantasy, historical, and science fiction novels, which bring exciting action to the shores of this small country in the Southern Pacific Ocean. New Zealand consists of three islands, and is located in the very far South. Along with Australia it is affectionately known as the Antipodes, or “Down Un- der.” The first human inhabitants, Polynesians, are thought to have migrated to the islands in the thirteenth century, forming the seeds of what became the Maori culture. They called the islands Aotearoa, or Land of the Long White Cloud. The first Western sighting of Aotearoa was in 1642 by the Dutch explorer Abel Tasman; the Dutch called the place Nova Zeelandia. The name became Anglicised after James Cook visited the islands in 1769–1770. European migra- tion began in the nineteenth century, first by missionaries and then by set- tlers, in an organised scheme of land purchase and farming. The country was claimed as part of the British Empire, following the Treaty of Waitangi in 1840; it has remained in the Commonwealth, and the bulk of its population is of Brit- ish origin. The population is currently around four million people. It has strong political ties to Australia, the uk, and the United States, and is a leader in the Pacific region, with links to Asia as well. New Zealand literature reflects those ties and those influences, and is particularly concerned with engaging with them by incorporating them, reforming them, confronting them, in various literary shapes and forms. And classical material is part of that engagement, providing a tie to the myths, language, and narrative structures that underlie much European culture. New Zealand is seismically active. It is part of a submerged continent that lies over the borders of the Pacific and Australian tectonic plates, which are colliding at a rate of 40 mm a year; It is prone to earthquakes, and significant parts of the land were formed by volcanoes—the cities of Dunedin and Christ- church are located on or near extinct volcanoes. Auckland, the largest city, is built on or around seven volcanic peaks, including the dormant volcanic island, Rangitoto. Because of the seismically active nature of the land, New

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Zealand is often known as the “shaky isles”. There have been two catastrophic earthquakes in the past century, one in 1931 in Napier in the North Island, and a series of earthquakes in Canterbury and Christchurch in the South Island from 2010 onward. New Zealanders are brought up to be aware of the fragility of the land—its cracks and fissures, and the instability and danger that lurk beneath the surface. New Zealand’s geographical location “down under” and its geological formation, whereby seismic activity brings the “Underworld” closer to the surface, provide storytellers with many opportunities. One set of opportunities comes from its resonance with the classical narrative motif of “katabasis,” or the journey to the Underworld. The term comes from the Greek, meaning a trip downward—usually from the interior of a country to the coast, but in epic convention it refers to the journey to and return from (as anabasis) the Under- world. The katabasis is often part of the hero’s quest: heroes such as Achilles, Aeneas, Jesus Christ, Dante, or Gandalf make a journey into the Underworld, either to consult the ghosts of the dead and wisdom of the past, or to confront and overcome demons and death. In myth, Orpheus descends to Hades to attempt the rescue of Eurydice; Ceres is more successful in rescuing her daughter Persephone from the clutches of Hades. The term has application to literal descents, as in a hero’s quest. It is also used, literally or metaphorically, to express a number of related concerns to do with family, society, and the individual. In terms of the individual, katabasis also has psychological applications—the protagonist’s confrontation with the demons of her/his past, or of her/his own fears or weaknesses of character. As a narrative shape in the hero’s journey or stage in the protagonist’s development as an individual, katabasis has resonance in adolescent fiction, much of which is devoted to novels of coming of age and growth. The katabases that can be seen in operation in the young adult novels of Margaret Mahy and Maurice Gee combine the geographical and the emotional: an awareness of the fissures in the New Zealand landscape, from which evil can emerge, or into which protagonists must journey, connects with the individual descents into darkness (emotional, familial, societal) of the young protagonists. Margaret Mahy (1934–2012) was New Zealand’s most successful writer of children’s and young adult literature. From the 1960s on, she produced an enor- mous number of titles, including stories, poems, readers, learning media, non- fiction, and television scripts. In the 1970s, her work reached an international audience. For some time, Mahy wrote material that was deliberately unspecific in setting and theme, judging that if she was to succeed as a full-time writer of children’s literature, she needed to reach as wide an audience as possible.

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This was easier to achieve in the shorter format material. However, in the 1980s, she began writing more complex work—novels for young adult readers. These novels can loosely be characterised as a blend of domestic fiction, magic re- alism, and fantasy. They engage with issues of adolescent identity in a family setting, and in the New Zealand landscape—particularly the landscape of Christchurch and the nearby Banks Peninsula, where Mahy lived. Many of Mahy’s novels engage with katabasis. I will focus on two: The Trick- sters (1986) and Dangerous Spaces (1991).1 Both of these novels consider the relation of an adolescent girl to her family, using motifs of magic, katabasis, and classical myth in order to depict different kinds of coming of age—of the protagonist and her family. The Tricksters is set in a family holiday house on a peninsula formed by an extinct volcano. The house, called Carnival’s Hide, has a sad past. It was built by Edward Carnival, an eccentric widower, who lived there with his son Ted- dy and his daughter Minerva. On Teddy’s death (by drowning, the story goes, though it later emerges that Edward had struck him on the head with a trowel, killing him), Edward and Minerva leave New Zealand for England. In the novel, the family of the protagonist, Harry, owns the house, and visits it every Christ- mas. The novel takes place from the summer solstice until just after New Year. At the heart of The Tricksters is Harry’s development toward self-acceptance and the resolution of tensions in a large and fragmented family. Harry’s real name is Ariadne. She is seventeen, and on the brink of womanhood. She is jeal- ous of her beautiful and melodramatic older sister, Christobel, and sensitive to the tensions between her parents, because her father Jack has been unfaithful, with Emma, a friend of Christobel, who has had a baby. Not everyone in the family knows about this, and the secret is not fully revealed until a climactic scene toward the end of the novel—its revelation, however painful, enables a resolution of the tensions in the family and healing of a kind. Harry is the quiet one in the family. She has secretly been writing a fantasy novel, into which she pours her desires for recognition, power, and sexuality. Early in The Tricksters, Harry goes down to the bay with her brother and sister. She finds a mollusc shell, eroded into the shape of a ring. Jokingly declaring her desire for power, she puts it on her finger, and says: “I’m Mrs Oceanus. Every- thing comes out of me” (18). She goes for a swim, and, feeling around in a small cave, formed by a volcanic worm of lava, finds a crack in the back. When she puts her hand in it, another, ghostly hand, clutches her own.

1 Margaret Mahy, The Tricksters (New York: J.M. Dent & Sons, 1986); and Dangerous Spaces (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1991). All quotations are from these editions.

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Harry has awoken the shade of Teddy Carnival and enabled it to come through from the Underworld. When she leaves the bay, she sees a dripping man, kneeling on a rock nearby. Shortly afterward, three unexpected visitors, the Tricksters of the title, appear at Carnival’s Hide. They claim that their names are Ovid, Hadfield, and Felix, and that they are descendants of the Carnivals. They have taken these names from the spines of three books in the house, including Ovid’s Metamorphoses. All three are the ghost of Teddy Carnival—they bear on their foreheads the same scar from the accident with the trowel—but of a particular kind. Ovid represents the Superego, Hadfield the Id, and Felix the Ego. Together, controlled by Ovid, they manipulate and tease Harry, and through her, her family. Harry falls in love with Felix. Hadfield tries to rape her. And Ovid reveals Harry’s secret novel to Christobel, the older and domineer- ing sister, who scornfully reads it out loud to the others. The novel is a fantasy romance, and Harry is humiliated at having her writing, and her adolescent feelings, made fun of. In a rage, she reveals the secret, that Jack has fathered a baby with Christobel’s friend Emma. Following a shattering scene, the brothers are finally vanquished by another visitor—Anthony from England, who turns out to be a descendant of Minerva Carnival—and the truth of how Teddy died is revealed. At the beach, Harry burns her fantasy novel, recognising that its uncon- trolled expressions of passion have partly called forth the disruptive spirits of the Carnival brothers. She finds another mollusc ring and draws on the powers of Mrs Oceanus once more—this time finding for a moment that all things do flow through her. In an orgasmic scene, she becomes one with the waters of the bay, and finds a peaceful and powerful clarity of vision. At the end of the novel, as she leaves the ocean to walk back to the house, she glances back, expecting to see that her footprints are made of light. Instead of taking Harry or her family on a literal underground journey, The Tricksters shows them being drawn into a frenzy of recriminations by the Carnival brothers. Felix, Ovid, and Hadfield function as Dionysian figures of chaos and destruction, setting out to blow up the tenuous serenity of Harry’s family, calling forth the malign spirit of their own unresolved family struggle. The family proceeds downward together, getting tenser and angrier and more unsettled, until a cataclysmic scene of revelation (the secret of Jack’s baby). Though Harry is ashamed of being tricked into making that revelation, her action enables openness, healing, and clarity—as indeed do the Eleusinian Mys- teries. (Interestingly, after Harry speaks the secret, she thinks of herself as both Pandora and the box of secrets—making the connection, of course, to the last of the secrets that is let out, which is that of Hope.)

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Harry’s name, Ariadne, of course, evokes another underworld traveller of a sort. It is Ariadne who gives the thread to Theseus to enable him to traverse the labyrinth of the Minotaur. But instead of a literal labyrinth, Minotaur, or classical hero, the labyrinth in this novel is the minefield of family relations and secrets; the Minotaur is the secret lurking at its heart, and the secret resentments of the family. It is also the labyrinth of the female writer’s identity, as Christine Wilkie-Stibbs and Claudia Marquis have argued:2 Harry’s novel has called forth the tricksters, who resemble in part her fantasy hero and reveal that he is more than she can handle. I will come back to the novel’s setting shortly. But before I do, I would like to discuss Dangerous Spaces, in which Mahy returns to the idea of katabasis and family tensions. As in The Tricksters, Dangerous Spaces is set on the Banks Peninsula in an old house filled with family secrets. The novel is less ambitious in scale and scope, focusing on two eleven-year-old cousins, Flora and Anthea, who are forced into cohabitation after Anthea’s parents die. Anthea is suicidal- ly depressed, and Flora is resentful at having to share her family with her. They find a portal to another world in a photograph taken by Flora’s grandfather, who had built the house in which they live, which Flora’s father is unsuccess- fully trying to renovate. In a clear allegory of suicidal depression, Anthea goes in her dreams to visit an underworld space called Viridian, where she encounters a boy, Griff, who lures her to stay there by promising that she can rejoin her parents. Griff is lonely because he misses his brother, Lionel, who, it emerges, is the girls’ grandfather, who built the house and whose ghost still haunts it. Ul- timately, Flora persuades Lionel to go with Griff. Having done so, she is able to bring Anthea back to life and integrate her into the family. The family is further healed by the exorcism of Lionel from the house—enabling them to renovate it and live in it on their own terms. Viridian (named after a shade of green) is explicitly classical: its entrance is a subterranean amphitheatre decked with classical statues. Griff and Lio- nel depart for the Underworld in a small boat across the sea to an island— recalling the boat of Charon, the ferryman of Hades. Griff’s attempt to pos- sess Anthea recalls Hades’ abduction of Persephone; so too, Flora’s rescue of her recalls Ceres’ rescue of Persephone. And of course, their names—Anthea and Flora—remind us of Persephone’s role as the deity of the spring and renewal. Indeed, Flora’s actions in rescuing Anthea enable renewal of the family

2 See Christine Wilkie-Stibbs, The Feminine Subject in Children’s Literature (New York: Rout- ledge, 2002); and Claudia Marquis, “Ariadne Down Under: Margaret Mahy’s The Tricksters,” in Elizabeth Hale and Sarah Fiona Winters, eds., Marvellous Codes: The Fiction of Margaret Mahy (Wellington: Victoria University Press, 2005), 62–83.

Elizabeth Hale - 9789004335370 Downloaded from Brill.com09/26/2021 01:01:48PM via free access Katabasis “Down under” 261 in several ways, not merely saving her from suicide, but saving herself from destructive jealousy of her cousin, and her fear that Anthea will usurp her role in the family. In these two novels the archetypal descent into and return from a literal or metaphorical or allegorical Underworld is connected with the complicat- edness of family relations. These katabases enable problems to be faced and worked out, and light to be shone on healed families—families that have defeated the monsters of the past. It is striking that in each of these novels, pain is inflicted through the generations. This is made clear in the setting for the action, houses built by previous generations, which need to be exorcised of their influence, one of a particularly oppressive form of conservatism, in contrast to the accepting and tolerant diversity of family advocated in the novels. Hol- ly Blackford points to the Ceres and Persephone story as enabling reflection on adolescent girls’ individuation in the context of their relations with their mothers, and I think she is correct, especially as this connects to Mahy’s work.3 But as well as being set in old houses, The Tricksters and Dangerous Spaces are set on the Banks Peninsula, where Mahy lived. The peninsula is a collapsed and extinct volcano near the city of Christchurch, and has many beautiful in- lets and harbours. The memory of the ancient volcano runs through the novels, as does a consciousness of the earth’s powers. Significantly, in The Tricksters, an earthquake rocks the house in the night before Harry’s disastrous revelations. A pathetic fallacy perhaps, but connected with the underwater volcanic cave in which Harry reaches through a fissure to touch the power of the Underworld when her hand is grasped by the ghostly hand. Geological moments and forces connect with the psyche, as strongly as the classical models: Harry’s mother, Naomi, reflecting on the pain Jack’s infidelity has caused the family, uses this metaphor explicitly:

“I got quite frantic,” Naomi said. “I tried to take everything over. […] first I wanted to adopt Tibby, and then I tried to have another baby myself. We all got so terribly unhappy that all feelings changed under pressure, like metamorphic rock—remember your geology?: rock altered after formation by heat and pressure,” she quoted in a school-teacherish voice, look- ing around her at the old volcano. “Metamorphoses by Ovid,” Harry couldn’t help saying. (253)

3 Holly Virginia Blackford, The Myth of Persephone in Girls’ Fantasy Literature (New York— Abingdon: Routledge, 2012).

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Harry is referring to the most powerful Carnival brother, Ovid, who has taken his name from the spine of a book in the house—the book, of course, is Ovid’s Metamorphoses. And the term “metamorphosis”—be it mythological or geological—has especial power in the novel: formation by heat and pressure is responsible for the exploded volcano in which the action takes place. The risk for the Hamiltons is that, like the Carnivals before them, the heat and pressure of family emotions will cause a similar cataclysm. The risk for Flora and Anthea is that mutual distrust and unhappiness will leave Anthea marooned in the dangerous space of Viridian. A key aspect of Mahy’s work, however, is the emphasis on regeneration and healing. Metamorphosis can be for the bet- ter as well as for the worse, and though she sends her characters into perilous realms, she brings them out again, made stronger by facing danger. The other novelist I discuss, Maurice Gee (b. 1931), has an altogether bleaker vision of humanity, at least in terms of the scale of evil afoot in the world. Mahy’s novels are concentrated on the family. She is less concerned with the overthrow of evil or villainy, and more interested in the potential for human passions to spill over, harming others. Gee is more concerned with a broad, sociopolitical type of evil, particularly that which comes from im- perialism, corporate greed, and the corrupting aspects of power. Gee is one of New Zealand’s foremost novelists, with an oeuvre of some thirty novels for adults and fifteen for children. Unlike Mahy, Gee has never consciously written for an international audience: New Zealand society is his subject. His novels are deeply embedded in place. Of his novels for young readers, half are realist and historical, providing a novelistic history for New Zealand children. The other half are fantasy novels of differing kinds—some set in con- temporary New Zealand, some involving portal travel from New Zealand to another world, some set in a post-apocalyptic degraded New Zealand. In all of them, children or young adults do battle against villains of various kinds, villains whose conquering requires travel to metaphorical or literal underworlds. Gee’s first novel for young readers, Under the Mountain (1979), is set in Auck- land.4 It concerns the efforts of a pair of psychic redheaded twins, Rachel and Theo, to defeat “the People of the Mud Who Conquer and Multiply.” These are worm-like mud-dwelling aliens who came to earth centuries ago, and secreted themselves beneath Auckland in lairs formed from the volcanic caves that lie under the city. They have been gathering their strength to take over the Earth: to do so, they plan to link up the volcanoes of the city, causing a cataclysmic explosion that will destroy human life and enable them to reduce the planet to

4 Maurice Gee, Under the Mountain (Wellington: Oxford University Press, 1979).

Elizabeth Hale - 9789004335370 Downloaded from Brill.com09/26/2021 01:01:48PM via free access Katabasis “Down under” 263 the sea of mud that is their preferred habitat. It is a clear allegory of imperial expansion or corporate greed: they have invaded planet after planet, exhaust- ing their resources, and will now do the same to Earth. The twins develop their psychic powers under the tutelage of Mr. Jones, a Gandalf-like figure who is the last of a benign race of aliens (the People Who Understand) who have devoted their civilisation to eradicating the People of the Mud Who Conquer and Multiply. After various encounters with the worms, which involves being chased through the slimy tunnels they have carved under the city, Theo and Rachel hurl psychically charged magic stones into the cra- ters of two of Auckland’s most spectacular volcanoes: Mt Eden and Rangitoto. Rachel’s does its job, but Theo’s stone explodes early, causing a disastrous erup- tion. (As a skeptic, Theo has struggled more to control his psychic abilities than has Rachel the humanist, who pities the worms as much as she fears them.) Though the worms are defeated, much of the city burns. The novel ends with the twins walking slowly through the landscape to find their family. Under the Mountain had a significant impact on New Zealand readers— mainly because of the way that Gee brought galactic action to a local setting. And like Mahy, Gee uses recognisable archetypes, such as the hero’s journey, the wise mentor, the underworld journey, and connects them to parts of the seismic landscape. Where Mahy’s seismic landscape, however, offers a sym- bolic connection to the cataclysmic powers existing within the family, Gee’s landscape in Under the Mountain draws on a more basic fear of the threat of volcanic eruptions. Beneath the peaceful city, then, dangers lurk—in more than one guise. On the one hand, there are the volcanic caverns and mountains, loci of terrifying and deadly power; on the other hand, these are benign until exploited by the aliens who dwell in them. Another possibility exists: that the aliens themselves are victims of their own natures—as amoral as the landscape. That is partly why Rachel pities them. The idea of the pitiable monster lurking in a labyrinth beneath the city is something Gee returns to. In Salt (2007), the first of a trilogy of novels set in a post-apocalyptic New Zealand, two adolescents, Hari and Pearl, help overthrow Odo Cling, the evil overlord of a decaying city.5 Cling maintains his powers by harnessing the energy of an abject monster, the Gool, which lives under- neath the city. Hari and Pearl penetrate a labyrinth of tunnels to confront and overcome the Gool, but when they reach it, though they are revolted by its abject monstrosity, they (especially Pearl) feel pity for it:

5 Maurice Gee, Salt (Auckland: Puffin, 2007). All quotations are from this edition.

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The Gool had been born from an oily crack in the mountainside. It bulged from darkness into the morning light, undulating beneath its skin. The main part of its body lay on the slope down from the crack, spreading, flattening, busy at its edges with a thousand tiny mouths eating whatever they found. Except for that ant-like busyness, and the organs turning under its skin, it was like a dead jellyfish on a beach, but a thousand times larger than any jellyfish ever seen. (73)

Though the Gool is abject and frightening, Pearl, like Rachel before her in Un- der the Mountain, conquers it by pitying it. In confronting an Underworld de- mon, then, she is able to find redemption, to resist a traditional slaying. In this novel Gee investigates the nature of heroism—true heroism requires the abil- ity to turn away from violence, to turn the other cheek, perhaps (to harrow hell through pity?). He shows the need for both physical strength and confidence, but also for intuition and empathy when encountering demons. Such emotional strength enables the protagonists to return to the surface, having con- quered their own base emotions as much as any monster they may encounter. Gee is continually concerned with understanding and depicting the nature of evil. He refers to his work as “mining,” and in his children’s literature, he says, he gets away from the “explorations of guilt and delving into psyches I’d been doing in my writing for adults”:

I wanted, for a time, to write horizontally rather than vertically—do open-cast mining, if I can put it another way, rather than deep-shaft mining. For that reason I decided to write what I call fantasy/adventure—put the emphasis on movement, develop narrative pace, tell a story as story pure and simple.6

Gee claims that his children’s literature is “surface” work. Yet in his repeated use of imagery of the Underworld, of passages to and from it, of the need to dig, or travel, beneath the surface, Gee cannot escape from katabasis as an allegorical or metaphorical alternative to the intense psychic exploration of his adult novels. The Fat Man (1995), his most striking realist novel for young readers, is a case in point.7 This novel, set on the North Island during the Depression Era, is about a man who returns to the village where he grew up in order to exact revenge on his childhood bullies. It is told through the eyes of Colin, the son

6 Maurice Gee, “Creeks and Kitchens: Margaret Mahy Lecture—Maurice Gee, 23 March 2002,” Inside Story: Yearbook (2002): 18. 7 Maurice Gee, The Fat Man (Auckland: Viking Press, 1995).

Elizabeth Hale - 9789004335370 Downloaded from Brill.com09/26/2021 01:01:48PM via free access Katabasis “Down under” 265 of one of the bullies. The Fat Man, Herbert Muskie, has made money as a gun- runner in the United States, and is wanted by the law. Because he has money he has power over his former tormentors, suffering in the Depression, which struck New Zealand hard. It is a frightening story of sadism and abuse. Colin is a reluctant ally of Muskie, who has caught him trespassing in his mother’s creek. Muskie rises, dripping, from the creek, like an Underworld avenger coming out of the Styx, and captures Colin, and Colin is in horrified thrall to him thereafter. Muskie’s rise to the surface might be an anabasis—the opposite of katabasis, where the journey is made in reverse—a journey up from the coast to the hinterland, or up from Hades to Earth. However, Muskie plunges the village into various kinds of moral darkness, not only by his desire for revenge, but by his unredeemable bad nature. No one is able to conquer him; he is only defeated when the law discovers his whereabouts, and he is forced to run. Even then, ultimately, Muskie conquers himself. When he goes on the run, he kidnaps Colin as security. But when they reach the edge of a crevasse, and the only way across is through a flying fox, a small cage winched across on a cable, he climbs into the contraption, and begs Colin to operate the machine. Both of them know that the cable will not bear his weight. And here, once again, a protagonist learns to feel empathy for a monster. Colin, pitying Herbert—in both his monstrosity and his pain—agrees to assist him in committing suicide. And so Herbert returns, or is returned, to the depths from whence he came. Order is restored in The Fat Man, though Colin’s comprehension of his parents’ frailty never leaves him. Indeed, this is a key aspect of Gee’s novels. To have compassion for the frailties of others, even of evil others, requires his protagonists to confront and understand them, to go into the depths where they lurk, or to accompany them when they come to the surface. Katabasis (or anabasis) in Gee’s work, connected to the labyrinth or the underworld and its relation to the upper world, again connects to the hero’s journey—not neces- sarily to restoring order, or defeating evil, but to achieving understanding and knowledge. As any Ancient Roman could tell us, volcanoes and earthquakes are not a new invention. They are certainly not a postcolonial construction designed to overturn and challenge classical literature. But they are a distinctive feature of the New Zealand landscape, and offer interesting possibilities for writers who wish to set their novels in that landscape. Mahy and Gee, by exploiting those possibilities, find useful thematic resonances with the journeys they take their protagonists on. And in doing so, they connect the new with the ancient, placing their narratives about very young people in a young country in the continuum of long-used powerful motifs. In using katabasis Down Under, then,

Elizabeth Hale - 9789004335370 Downloaded from Brill.com09/26/2021 01:01:48PM via free access 266 Hale both Gee and Mahy employ archetypal structures that are useful for exploring adolescent identity, in terms of individuation within the family and in terms of the broader society—the networks of feeling and common effort that join a society together, whether for good or for ill. And they do it by connecting to the seismic nature of the landscape, its ready porousness, which provides, through crevasses, creeks, bays, caves, fissures, earthquakes, and volcanoes, ready access to, and from, the world that lies beneath.

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