Leading light of strange and eerie
Late last year, to very little fanfare, one of the world’s most intriguing novelists released her latest book. Thank goodness for a summer holiday and finally having time to read and take in
Frances Hardinge’s A Skinful of Shadows in all its eerie and enchanting glory.
Makepeace is a 12-year-old girl living in one of the most troubled times in English history; no, not Brexit but the earlier English Civil War when Parliamentarians and Royalists duked it out to control how England was governed.
Like many of Hardinge’s characters, Makepeace seems delicate and defenceless but there’s more to her than people imagine, particularly after she happens across a dying bear. She’s the illegitimate daughter of a dead lord from the aristocratic Fellmotte family and her mother has done her utmost to keep Makepeace far, far away from them.
Mother’s untimely death sees Makepeace sent to live with her father’s rich and powerful family; she is soon to learn that the family includes centuries’ worth of ancestors who may not be as distant as they should be.
It’s often said that a royal or noble family needs an “heir and a spare”; one to succeed to a title and the other to guarantee that should the first-born not be able to do so, the family line will be continued. Hardinge toys with this idea in an imaginative way.
A Skinful of Shadows is packed with magic, menace, adventure and an alternative look at history through the eyes of a girl who, had she been real, might have been a bit part player in it. Or maybe not — if you accept Hardinge’s fantastical and fantastic premise.
When Hardinge spoke at the Auckland Writers Festival last year, she came across as an unconventional soul who’s probably been on the outside looking into a fair few worlds in her 44 years. Indeed, on her official biography it states that she spent her childhood in a huge old house that inspired her to write strange stories from an early age.
Since Hardinge quit her job at a software company, she’s enjoyed considerable success, culminating in 2015 when she won the Costa Award with The Lie Tree. Philip Pullman’s The Amber Spyglass is the only other children’s book to have done so (in 2001).
Hardinge’s stories are strange and always a little bit spooky: mysterious realms with spies and secret agents (Fly By Night), children who battle witches who live in wells (Verdigris Deep), doll-eating girls (Cuckoo Song) and furtive plants that feed on lies (The Lie Tree). The personalities in them are frequently as peculiar as the plots.
But peculiar and strange doesn’t equal bad. On the contrary, Hardinge’s books are ambitious and absorbing, interesting and intelligent and more than a little subversive — which brings us back to A Skinful of Shadows, where all these qualities are on show.
The story might be set in the 17th century but, as with many historical novels, the present is, well, present.
Hardinge skilfully comments, subtle as always, on power and obligation, the thin line between supposed good and evil, and the relationship between rulers and the ruled.
It’s no coincidence that the one person who holds the key to the future is a young woman called Makepeace who, quite literally, kills the ghosts of the past.