Backlisted - Marianne Dreams by Catherine Storr

Episode Date: July 15, 2024

Children's writer Rachael King and novelist Richard Blandford join John and Andy for a discussion of Marianne Dreams by Catherine Storr, the eerie, disturbing tale of two sick children who meet in a realm of nightmares. First published in 1958, the book is now considered by critics to be a sui genesis classic. Storr was a prolific author, with dozens of titles to her name; her work for children often mixes fantasy and horror with her extensive professional knowledge of child psychology. In 1972, Marianne Dreams was adapted for television as Escape Into Night; in 1988, a film version entitled Paperhouse was released; and in 1999 the author herself turned the novel into an opera libretto. What is it about this story that speaks to successive generations of readers, viewers and listeners? Only the stones - and our guests - know for sure...  * To purchase any of the books mentioned in this episode please visit our bookshop at uk.bookshop.org/shop/backlisted where all profits help to sustain this podcast and UK independent bookshops. * For information about everything mentioned in this episode visit www.backlisted.fm *If you'd like to support the show and join in with the book chat, listen without adverts, receive the show early and get extra bonus fortnightly episodes, become a Patreon at www.patreon.com/backlisted *You can sign up to our free monthly newsletter here  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hi everyone. Hi everybody. People often ask me how I read so much and it's a fair question and one of the answers is well I have a very good reading light which makes a serious difference. I think I know what you're doing. You use, if I'm not mistaken Andy, a serious reader's lamp. The ones with daylight wavelength technology which are supposed to replicate the daylight spectrum as closely as possible.

I do. I've been using one for about five years and I absolutely love it. It's amazing how much clearer the type stands out on the page and it means I can whip through my 50 pages a day without any risk of straining either my eyes or my brain. So I just got one and actually it does. It's true. It makes me want to sit and read from an actual book and not turn the TV on, which is a double win. It's also ridiculously easy to unpack, beautifully hand-built in Great Britain. So backlisted friends and listeners, we're going to make you an offer we hope you can't refuse.

Yeah, if you order any Sirius Readers HD lamp, you'll get £100 off plus free UK delivery. You just go to SiriusReaders.com forward slash backlisted and enter the code back B A C K. If you're unhappy with it, there's a 30 day risk free trial. You can return it after 30 days for free, but trust me, you won't want to because they're great. So for that £100 off your Serious Reader lamp, go to seriousreaders.com forward slash backlisted and enter the code back. B A C K. It actually makes reading enjoyable again. Now there's a slogan we can stand by.

Let's make reading enjoyable again. Hello and welcome to Back to Stead, the podcast which gives new life to old books. Today you find us standing in front of a small house in the middle of a vast flat prairie. No hills, no valleys, no paths, just coarse grass stretching as far as the eye can see, and this curious looking house with leaning walls, four windows and a blank shut door without a knocker. A low wooden fence encloses a garden which contains a few pale yellow flowers, and scattered around the perimeter of the fence lie some large grey boulders. Smoke curls lazily from the house's chimney and then all at once there is a noise. The wind is moving across the vast plain and with it comes a deep sense of foreboding.

I'm John Mitchinson, the publisher of Unbound, where people crowdfund the books they really want to read. And I'm Andy Miller, the author of thebound where people crowdfund the books they really want to read. And I'm Andy Miller, the author of the Year of Reading Dangerously. And today we are joined by two guests who are new to Batlisted. They are Richard Blanford and Rachel King. Hello to you both. Hello. Hi there.

Hello, hello. Thanks for coming. Rachel is joining us from Christchurch in New Zealand and Richard is joining us from Worthing in Sussex with the result that this we're recording this at times that are both too early in the day and too late at night. So if we can get something passable out of next hour, we'll all be delighted. Richard Blanford was born in Cardiff and grew up in Southampton. After a period spent studying and teaching art history in Manchester and Winchester, his first novel Hound Dog was published in 2006 by Jonathan Cape. Detailing the adventures of a sociopathic Elvis impersonator, it was praised by author Dan Rhodes who called

it quote squalid, raucous and wildly entertaining. Squalid is very good, isn't it Riches? Do aim for squalid. You've leant into that in your career since then. Yeah, good squalidity. And was adapted into a script for an as yet unmade TV version by Simon Nye. It was followed by the coming of age story, Flying Source of Rock and Roll in 2008,

also published by Cape. Richard is the author of two ebook short story collections, The Shuffle and Erotic Nightmares, that mix the banal with the extraordinary and the humour with horror. Other projects include the art survey, London in the Company of Painters published by Lawrence King in 2017 and The Fixer, a serialised story in David Lloyd's online comic anthology Aces Weekly. Excitingly, however, a third novel, Whatever You Are, is beautiful, in which a disease

sweeps the world, compelling sufferers to turn into superheroes was published as an ebook by iBooks in 2021. Was that inspired by the pandemic or was it just... No, the timing was terrible. But basically I wrote it, sent it off to agents, publishers, whatever, about two weeks before the pandemic, pandemic hits and instantly becomes the most uncommercial property imaginable. I'm so sorry Rich. Yeah.

But your latest novel, My Life in Orbit, detailing the life of a comic book obsessed autistic man who finds himself entangled in a cult embedded in academia is published by Everything Words this month. Yep. July the 11th comes out. Okay. So that's out now. That's called My Life in Orbit. Richard now lives, as we've said in Worthing with his partner, Emily, and his daughter, Ella. Before we reveal what the title of the book is, has Ella read the book we're discussing? I read it to her back when, in the days when we're still reading books together.

Uh, so yes. I, and then I asked if she remembered it today. Oh, she said no. So there we are. Well, this is the hard sell. Good. Now turning to you, Rachel, Rachel King is a writer from New Zealand. She has published two novels for adults, one of which won the best first book at the 2007

New Zealand Book Awards and two for young people. Red Rocks won the Esther Glenn Medal and is currently being filmed as a TV series. And The Grimling is described by one newspaper as horse girl folk horror. Let's just reiterate that for listeners so they can absorb it. Horse Girl Folk Horror has just been published in New Zealand. What is Horse Girl Folk Horror? Well, it's a book for the pony girls, the horse girls, but it's also a book for the people that love to be scared, I guess. Yeah, I really latched onto that. It's like, finally somebody gets me. It's brilliant.

It's brilliant. What about folk girl horse horror? That would be like Joan Baez was scared by a runaway pony. Rachel was program director of the word Christchurch Festival for eight years until the end of 2021. And last year was named best reviewer at the New Zealand Media Awards. She writes about old children's books for the spin-off website, and most recently published

an essay there about why she no longer writes novels for adults. Why do you no longer write novels for adults? In a nutshell, I mean, I could read your nuanced thoughts on the subject. I like writing books for children better. Because? Because it's more of a challenge in a lot of ways. But also, I think I'm just better at it as well. Do you enjoy it more, or is enjoyment not really part of the...

I am enjoying it a lot more, I think. I think there's... I feel like there's almost less pressure on me to write children's books because people have kind of low expectations of children's books. They don't, it's very rare that you get a really slammingly bad review for a children's novel. I mean, that's only one aspect of it. Do you feel, this is really interesting to me, do you feel that imaginatively, I've always felt that I never quite recaptured the utter immersive kind of quality of reading my favourite

children's books. Never really, great literature, although I love it and it does all kinds of other things that's quite often children's literature doesn't do. But there is just something about the complete abandonment of being in another world and another story. Is it something like that? That's what I get from writing them definitely. And also it's a privilege to write the next, well the book that we're going to talk about, you know, like it would be my great dream for when my readers are 50 years old to say to each other, do you remember that book, the one with the horse? Were you terrified? That's my, you know, I want to settle into children's subconscious and for them to carry around for the rest of their

lives. I don't know. It's just, it's just really exciting. I'm just having so much fun basically. And I didn't have as much fun when I wrote novels for adults. It's a good answer. I would like to just say to John Mitchinson, when he says that he's never quite recaptured the immersive experience of childhood reading. I would like to quote Albert Camus who said, a man's work is nothing but this slow trek to rediscover through the detours of art, those two or three great and simple images in whose presence his heart first opened. And Richard will tell us who used that quote on which record. Scott Walker

is either Scott III or IV. Scott IV correct it's on the sleeve of Scott IV I've no idea where it comes from it's absolutely brilliant. That is absolutely brilliant thank you Andy if I get nothing else from this podcast. Well you were gonna get much more. Can I just say something else about children's book writing them as well? SF Said actually said recently that children's books are the most important books. And especially when you think about that we work in an industry that runs on people buying books. Who's going to buy all those books in the future? You know, it's children.

And so we, we kind of, we owe it to them to, to give them books that turn them into lifelong book lovers. Absolutely. I love SSI, our former guest and my very old friend. He has become the most incredible propagandist for children's literature. Absolutely. And justifiably so, justifiably so. Okay.

Anyway, what we're here to discuss is a book, Marianne Dreams, a 1958 novel for older children by Catherine Storr, first published by Faber and Faber with line drawings by Marjorie Ann Watts released as a puffin in 1964. Since then, it has gathered a reputation as an eerie children's classic. It tells the story of Marianne, a young girl who falls ill on her 10th birthday and is confined to bed for several weeks

that turn into months. To entertain herself, she begins to draw with a pencil she finds in an old work box which once belonged to her great-grandmother. She draws a simple house surrounded by a fence. That evening she sleeps and in her dream she finds herself in a landscape which seems to echo her drawing. From that simple premise Catherine Stoehr weaves a story of two worlds, the apparently

real one filled with worsening illness, a governess, and increasing frustration, and the dream world in which Marianne draws herself a companion, Mark, who is also an invalid, unable to walk, but who also seems to have a counterpart called Mark in the real world, someone Marianne never gets to meet. Back in the dream world, Marianne and Mark develop a cautious friendship and plot to find a way to escape from them, the rocks with eyes

that Catherine originally drew, but which now seem to wish them harm. It was first published in 1958 and was revised by Catherine Storr for the 1964 publication. Marianne's story has mesmerized generations of children. At the time she wrote it, she was working as a psychologist and said of her fiction that we should show children that evil is something they already know about or half know. The book was adapted into a cult TV series in 1972 with the title Escape into Night and again into a feature film in 1988, Paper House, directed by Bernard Rose. Storr didn't much like the film and subsequently wrote the libretto for an operatic version of the book in 1999 which was first

performed in 2004 with a score by Andrew Lowe Watson. Quite why Marianne Dreams continues to exert such a strong appeal is exactly what we are here to discuss but before we do that here is a message from our sponsors. We can book your reservation. And when you get to the main event, skip to the good bit using the card member entrance. Let's go seize the night. That's the powerful backing of AmeriCM Express. Visit amex.ca slash ymx. Benefits vary by card, other conditions apply. When you're working out at Planet Fitness,

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Let me start with a question that we ask all our guests in Backlisted. Richard, where were you? Who were you? What were you doing when you first read Marianne Dreams? Well, I worked backwards from the TV version, escaping tonight. Um, I was perusing the catalogs now sadly defunct, uh, network DVD, uh, re-release company. And obviously you see the description of a TV series about a girl who draws

some nightmarish house, which she then dreams of. He was to think I'm having that. And then I watched that, thought it was amazing. And so it was based on a book and worked backwards to Marianne Dreams. And Escaping Tonight is 72. So is it a kind of, I have seen it, but my memories of it are hazy. Is it kind of a, a sort of color separation overlay fest whereby primitive

video technology allowed them to recreate the effects or, or is it done in some kind of a more, more prosaic manner? Well, we don't really know what it actually looked like because they've lost the color version of the, of the videotape. Yeah. Only exists in black and white. Grainy would be a... Yeah.

I mean, I mean, it's an act of cultural vandalism, but I think actually works in its favour. I was going to say absolutely. Yes, absolutely. It's very true of Dr. Who of that period that where they junk the colour tapes, the black and whites, uh, tend to remove a layer of embarrassment. It looks slightly more sophisticated.

Yeah. Why it's so effective in black and white is obviously because Marianne is drawing with a black pencil on a white piece of paper. So it's like you're in the drawing when it's black and white. If you have colour, then that's one level of separation from the actual concept of the story. Rachel, how about you? When did you first read something by Catherine Storr or indeed Marianne Dreams? Okay, I'm similar to Richard in that I probably first read something by Catherine Storr when I was about 20. But the backstory to that is that I first encountered something by Catherine Storr when I was about 20. But the backstory to that is that I first encountered something by Catherine Storr when I was living, I had a very 70s childhood. When I was about four or five, I lived in this big old house with my family and two other families. We lived kind of communally. And it was this weird old Victorian house

that had been renovated in the 1960s. And it had these really strange rooms everywhere and kind of cupboards that became rooms. And it's become kind of like the house of my dreams, if you know what I mean. And when I was there, I apparently watched this terrifying children's show called Escapin Tonight. Everything took a couple of years to get to New Zealand.

So I think it must've been about 1974. But one of the features of this house that we lived in is that all the families, the parents were really into encounter groups. They were all doing this kind of, you know, psychotherapy, psychobabble stuff. And apparently, allegedly, the psychiatrist, R.D. Lang, visited the house for a party one night and had a heart attack after taking LSD. And luckily, one of my parents' friends

was a doctor. And I'm not, can I just interrupt, say, I'm not sure anyone on this podcast in 216 episodes has ever answered this question so extravagantly. So please carry on. I promise I'm not, I'm not usually such a verbose storyteller. Anyway, apparently I watched this show, but I don't remember actually watching it. But the stones with eyes haunted me my whole life. And for me, because there was a lot going on in that childhood, during these encounter groups, my parents decided to get divorced, strangely enough. There was a cemetery down the end of the road, somebody was murdered around the corner.

I feel like this television show was like all the dark corners of my childhood and the stones were there just watching me the whole time. Wow. And throughout my life, my teenage years and everything, I would say to people, do you remember a TV show that had rocks with eyes? And you would see, you know, they'd shake their head and say no. And then this look would come over their face and you could see their subconscious is caught up with them. And they get this look of horror on their face and they're see their subconscious is caught up with them and they get this Look of horror on their face and they're like, oh my god. Yes, they do. What was it? And we had no idea what it was. And then when I was about 20

I went to visit my parents my little sister who was about nine at the time was reading this book and I picked it up and I read the blurb and I just had this realization what it was Wow, and I said to her, are you terrified? Is it absolutely terrifying? She said, no. And I think that's probably the first time that I actually read the book. I have this memory that it was called The Magic Pencil.

It was published under that title. It's interesting, Rachel, we were talking about your book being described as folk horror and Richard, these kind of early to mid seventies TV programs for children, they are, they form a big part of the folk horror canon as it's been defined in the last 20 years, don't they? Yeah, very much so. I mean, I mean, I mean, the actual official folk horror film canon is like three films long, but you get, on television,

you get a lot of children's TV series, which fit into it, and a surprising amount of children's literature as well, which is lots of pagan aspects from around that time. 72, Ghana was what, it was the end of the 60s, or 70, wasn't it, the TV show, The Owl Service. And the one I was, the one I slightly conflated in my memory with this was Children of the Stones, which is set in Avebury,

and also involves kind of large stones, but not with eyes, as it turns out. That was definitely Escaping Tonight and Marianne Dreams. So, John, had you read this novel before? Oh, I read it as a child in the early... I read it when I was maybe 73, 74, when it was with the puffin jacket. What I really remember about the story is the, just very odd details about them trying to escape.

Obviously the stones are terrifying. They, you really remember, it really gave me a chill when I started reading it again, and you see the word they capitalized through the book and they is a reference to the the watchers outside. I was pretty amazed as rereading it. I mean you know apart from some little slightly annoying 1950s children's language everything's beastly. Beastly comes up 20 times in the book. And I've decided I'm going to bring it back. I'm going to bring it back into fashion.

It's a very, very odd book. That's the only thing I would say. And did you, did you read it when you were younger? No, I had not read it. I've thought I'm going to be brutally honest and say I hadn't heard of it until Richard recommended it to me a couple of years ago. No, didn't mean anything to me. Also, I was really interested because I, because I do now associate it strongly

with what we've been talking about early seventies TV. Uh, I was really surprised to discover that it was originally published by Faber in 1958. Yeah. Flush with the success of their Lord of the Flies money. They turned, speaking about children being in disturbing situations, they turned it into publishing Marianne Dreams. I'd love to know how it was revised between 1958 and 1964, but I don't have access to

a first edition, so I can't compare and contrast. And they don't go cheaply, those first editions. And also what I found very interesting, I'll just throw this out generally about Marianne Dreams, is Catherine Storr, whose biography we will discuss a bit more in depth later in this episode, wrote lots of books. She's got a good 50 works of literature to her name. Her children's work is the work for which she's most famous, but she wrote all sorts of things which are not merely out of print, but evidence of which they have no profile on Goodreads. They barely exist on the internet. And I wondered what it is about this book about Marianne Dreams that clearly rings some kind of bell with us as

adult readers or with childhood readers, what is the subliminal thing, the whistle that's being sounded? Richard. It seems to me to be a book that was written intuitively. It is a book by a psychiatrist and you can imagine the type of book a psychiatrist might write for young readers about something that may help their mental health or whatever, but this is not that book. This book is, if anything, it's probably going to make our mental health worse. It's, it is mysterious. There, there, it's, there's no clear code to be cracked.

It's a, it's a collection of quite basic elements, very well arranged, but creating this most intriguing mystery in the same way that Dave Lynch film works almost. Why you have a set, you have a sense of meaning. Yeah. Okay. What the meaning is. It's very hard to grasp.

Yeah. Just a few weeks ago, I went to see 2001, a space Odyssey at the cinema for the first time since 1979 and, um, uh, uh, The 1979 viewing, which I insisted my mom take me to see, and was not a grand success for either my mom or me. But watching it again, that sense of artworks that plumb some kind of mysterious depth, as you say, Richard, without dotting all the I's and crossing all the T's. Yes, I think that's exactly right here.

Rachel, is that what you feel about Marianne Dreams? Yeah, I think it's really interesting that it's, so apparently she worked as a psychotherapist, you know, and psychotherapists love to talk about childhood in dreams. And I think people probably try and look for lots of symbolism in the things she puts in the house, you know, like the eggs and the chicken,

I don't know, renewal or something. But I genuinely think that she allowed her own unconscious to write this book for her. And I think she probably went to the darkest corners of her own psyche to find it. And it's very much a book about feelings. I don't think I've read a children's book that has quite so much sniping and arguing and children getting angry. And maybe, you know, maybe she was seeing it as a way to show children how to direct those feelings maybe or the consequences of those feelings. But yeah, I really feel like it's just one of those things.

You know, some writers talk about discovering a book rather than writing it. And I wonder if this has been the case for her. It definitely feels very instinctive. Kind of what Richard was saying about it being made up by someone who hasn't yet learned all the rules of good fiction. I mean, I've read a number of her later books for children and young adults, and they are good books, but you can tell this is a psychiatrist, this is a person with a

theory of mind that got something to communicate. And man dreams to me that is not what this book is. Yeah. She said about it, I'm writing not to do something for children at all. I'm writing, I suppose, to get rid of my own fears, but it is mostly to discover what I feel and to discover some childish part of myself. Yes, I can relate to that. Which I think is kind of, I mean, there's a bit of post-rationalization going on there, I suspect, because I think what everybody's touched on is the most interesting thing about

this, is it doesn't feel like it's coming from a place of control. When I was reading it, I couldn't remember anything about the ending of the book at all. And having gone back this week to look at the various ways that the ending has been has been styled by both the TV show and the movie, which I thought was a particularly weird way to end the book. But it's just odd. I was very interested about what you said there, Rachel, about the children being angry and pissy with one another.

In a way that this is one of the reasons why I was surprised this book was written in 1958. I mean, maybe after the Beatles and the Lady Chatterley trial, she rewrote it in 1964 to make it more vibrant and pissy. I doubt it though. It seems like the children in it, and certainly this was really picked up in Paperhouse, the late 80s film adaptation. They're so pissed off with their parents, their situation. And then when they do make a friend, they really struggle to get along, don't they? They really, really, they have grievances for children in this book, which does seem to me very unusual for quote unquote children's literature, not just of this period, but of any period.

They do. And they're really quick to anger as well. I mean, there's one point where Marian says to Mark, look, don't be angry, but in the next minute, he says, da, da, da, da. He said angrily. Yeah. And I mean, I think they have like five or six quite big arguments in the whole thing. But you know, and Mark sort of talks with bitter contempt,

and he talks coldly and nastily and he tells her to shut up and the other thing he does is tell her that, you know, she's just a girl, what would she know and you know, you're just being a bossy girl. But of course, in my mind, that's Mary Ann's fears about her own self being just a girl. There's that brilliant scene that I think we're gonna talk about where she, the rage actually leads somewhere quite harmful. Spoilers. Spoilers.

And we should say at this point, there will be spoilers in this discussion. So if you haven't read Mary Ann Dreams and based on what you've heard already, you would like to read it. You may wish to pause at this point and come back to this podcast. In fact, it seems like a good moment for wish to pause at this point and come back to this podcast. In fact, it seems like a good moment for us to pause and we will return after this brief

word. I'm just going to read the, before we go on, I'm going to ask Richard to read to us from the book itself. But before we do that, I'm just going to read not the blurb on the back of the Puffin edition, but the note in the front of the Puffin edition. If you've been listening to this podcast for years, you might recall that we did this when we discussed Jane Gardner's first novel a long way from Verona. Kay Webb, the famous Puffin in chief used to write the note, the front of each book.

And here's the one for Marianne Dreams. And so when you opened your puffing book in the bookshop, this is what you would have read. Have you ever wondered why you dream what you do? Or whether the people and places that you dream about are real or imaginary? And what they have to do with your everyday life. When Marianne began to draw with a pencil

that she found in an old work box, she began to dream in a new way. She dreamed about what she drew. She drew a house. That night she saw it in her dreams. She drew a boy in the window of the house. The next night he was there too. Sometimes the dream world she had created

seemed quite separate from ordinary life. Sometimes the two oddly overlapped. At last, after Marianne has helped the boy, Mark, to escape from the strange, uncomfortable house surrounded by dangers, there seems to be from the strange, uncomfortable house surrounded by dangers. There seems to be no way out of the dream, but in the end, Marianne finds a solution. This is a fascinating and unusual story, which will appeal especially to imaginative readers of Nine or over.

Well, we're all over nine. I found that really interesting. What does Kay Webb do there that you should never do in a blurb? Oh, I don't know. I'm an author. She gives the ending away. She gives the ending away. Oh yeah.

She lets you know that everything's going to be all right. Yeah, I suppose so. And that's probably quite cunning, isn't it? Because as we discussed, it's quite a disturbing book. Yeah. You know, if you were to say they're surrounded by stones over which they have no control and God knows if they'll get out alive. That might be too terrifying.

But also it starts in such an ordinary way, you know? It's Marianne's birthday. She gets pony lessons, she goes riding on a pony, she feels sick. It's so kind of benign and just, you know, just your average book for children and it just takes this turn. So it draws you in with everything's fluffy and lovely. Yeah. Richard, could you read us a little bit from the book? Yes. So the bit I'm going to read is, let me get to it. So she's drawn a picture and she's dreaming. I think this is her first or second dream. And now she has entered the house. So I'm just going to read a little bit of that. The house was very quiet.

If anyone had heard Marianne clattering on the stone floor, they had not taken any notice. There was not the absolute silence of a deserted house. Marianne, as she came through the door, had felt certain, without knowing why, that the house was lived in. There was something going on, something which at first she couldn't put a name to. Something that went with houses inhabited by families, that went with ordinary life,

that went with people, and it was in this house. It might have been a smell, because although we very seldom realise it, we respond to smells a great deal more than we know. And the smell of an empty house is quite different from the smell of one that is lived in. This house had no smell, and this alone would have been extraordinary. In furthermore, those imitation houses which were put up for show advertisements in exhibitions are on the stage. Those houses have no smell. You could tell with your eyes shut and your hands tied behind you that they are not real, not only are they not lived in, but never

have been and never will be lived in. There is, or used to be in London, a row of houses which backed onto a railway. One of the houses, in the angle where the road meets the rail track, is a sham and has no thickness at all. Although in front it has a door and windows and it's gone up to look like an ordinary house to match the others in the row. That house, if it existed, would have the same no smell. It's a curious sort of flatness

which tells you something not being there. But it wasn't the no smell that Marianne noticed. Something else was contradicting the smelllessness of the house and the lack of furniture, the emptiness of the room and hall and the echoing sound of the footsteps. But something else was a sound, the regular, ordinary tick of a clock. So good. I agree. That's so good. Anybody like to explain to me why that's so good? Before we get into that, can I just say that that sham house reappears in a final novel,

The If Game. Interesting. In The If Game, it's about a boy and it's a collection of keys and every time he finds a mysterious door, he can open it with one of his collection of keys. One of the doors he opens is that very sham house which is mentioned in Married Dreams and then he goes into some alternate reality. What is the space there I think I want to say? That bit you've just read Richard feels full of air, feels full of distance.

How is she doing that? Do you think? Well, I think, I think that the, the, the focus on the, uh, the smell or the lack of smell, the smelllessness, uh, because I mean, you know, smell is underused in novels. It's not something that's focused on particularly, but it's a very emotive sense. It brings back memories and sensations perhaps more than any other sense. So to have this focus on the smell or smelllessness takes you into this very unusual space where you think about something you don't usually think about particularly in this media and it's lack. So I think she's taking you somewhere

very unusual and unexplored. It's like a sudden silence, right? When you lose a hearing, when all sound disappears, you're suddenly thinking, well, what's this alternative nothingness, this space that's been carved out that wasn't there before? I've got a thing I'd like to read from Catherine Stoehrer edited a book by a quite well-known book in its day called On Children's Literature by Isabelle Jeanne, a French child psychologist and literary critic. And in her introduction, Catherine Storr writes this, which seemed to me very relevant to Marianne Dreams and indeed the thing we've just been talking about. She's just been talking about

Mame Jean's description of Hans Christian Andersen, and this is what Catherine Stoer says. He, she believes, uniquely combines these unconscious obsessions retained from childhood, which inform a writer's choice of images and also the capacity, what Keats called negative capability, to allow those symbols to speak for themselves.

She draws a contrast between writers like Anderson, who are led into the story by the characters, and those like Dumas and Jules Verne, who write adventure stories, in which the plot is imposed on the characters and takes pride of place. It is the difference between the inward-looking writer who dwells on situations which mirror his or her own preoccupations,

and the outward-looking writer to whom action is more important. Whether she is considering the poets or the adventure writers, the moralists or writers of stories about animals, or the classic fairy stories whose authors are not single individuals but peoples. Mademoiselle Jean speaks always with the voice of common sense, learning and perceptive appreciation. Her conclusions may perhaps have surprised herself. She finds that the real literature for children is written by those who can conduct a dialogue between themselves as adults and the children they once were. Now, in terms of negative capability and allowing the symbols to speak for themselves, that seems to me the very reading that we've all attributed to Marianne Dreams.

But I wonder, Rachel, if I could ask you about the latter point she makes there. Real literature for children is written by those who can conduct a dialogue between themselves as adults and the children they once were. Yeah, I mean, for me, because I read a lot of children's novels, partly with a writer's eye, but also with a reader's eye. And the ones that really stick with me are the ones that have just have that extra layer. I mean, there's a writer I immediately comes to mind is David Armand, who tells stories

from the point of view of a 15 year old girl. And I don't know how he got inside my head when I was 15 but he's you know he's absolutely brilliant at it. You know so many writers think that they have to dumb things down when they write for children. Catherine Storr talks about Clever Polly and the Stupid Wolf as being something she just wrote off the top of her head and she kind of dismisses it as just something frivolous, whereas all the other books she said she wrote from a depth of feeling, I suppose. And I think those are the books that really stay with us.

They're the ones that, you know, they might tell a good page turning story, but then they go deeper. And child readers might not necessarily pick up on it at the time, but they're the stories that will keep coming back to them as they grow older, I think. I hated the hardy boys as a child. I didn't want any of that adventure shit. I wanted Tove Jansson and Betsy Byers and morbid introspection, which is what I desired from literature, real children's literature.

I had no truck. I haven't changed, John, have I? I had no truck with plots. This book must be right up your street because on one level, it's a book about illness. It's a book about the liminal state, isn't it? It's about neither Mark nor Marianne are well. So that's, now we know this from classic children's literature, Secret Garden, The Ill Child.

I was going to say, there is something of The Secret Garden about this, isn't there? The Ill Child, the Gothic House as well, you know, that she's kind of playing with these symbols. But I think what makes it work is that you don't feel that she's playing with symbols at all. You feel that she's kind of created this dual world. And at various times you find yourself going back to where she's being sort of fussed over by parents and her governess and life is very, very dull.

She's even finding the books boring. I mean, go back to one of our favorite themes, Andy, neither Marianne nor Mark are particularly relatable children. They're both quite annoying and quite self-obsessed. In that sense, they're very relatable because they're just not likeable. That's a different thing. Yeah, maybe you're right. I think it's quite interesting that Marianne is called Marianne.

You mentioned the secret garden there. The heroine of the secret garden is of course called Mary, Mary Lennox. It seems to me that there is a kind of similar brattishness between those two protagonists of those novels. I've also got just here, I think this will fascinate you. There were not, as you would expect, many reviews of Marianne Dreams when it was first published, but there is one here from the listener in 1958. And I'm just going to read it to you because of the book that

it's reviewed alongside. I think you'll find this fascinating. The listeners reviewer notes for girls up to 12, there are two rather ambitious time dream fantasies. The first is of the Mrs. Molesworth variety, but not so smoothly contrived in Tom's Midnight Garden by Philippa Pierce, Oxford, 10 shillings and sixpence. Tom is staying with his uncle and aunt in an old big house,

now converted into flats. He intrudes into the life that once went on there, but also seems to enter the dreams of the old lady living in the top flat, who of course was the heroine of the early history. It takes too long to tell the story by this complex means. That's it. That's, there goes Tom's Midnight Garden down the dumper. The other Marianne Dreams by Catherine Storr is a strange attempt to equate the recoveries of two sick children known to each other only by the casual words of a common governess in their dreams. The dreams are instituted by Marianne, the less ill of the two, who draws a venue for them when she is awake,

to which she adds day by day. The author understands illness and its ill humours and points the moral un-laboriously.' There you go, there's the quote for the cover, points the moral un-laboriously. You said it was about illness and Richard, you said it was about, and this is going to sound very pretentious, but it is what I'm thinking nevertheless. Richard, you were saying about smelllessness or how smell is evocative, just like taste is evocative. There is a delightfully Proustian element, therefore, to this, right? The idea of the bedridden, the sickly creative person inspired by some kind of vision or sense or absence of sense into creating an alternative world which has a relationship to their own.

ALICE What it did actually make me think of is how many post-war figures, when you hear about their childhood, people who go on to be creative in some way or other, there is often a period when they were bedridden and they disappeared into this own little world. Ringo Starr. Oh yeah. Alan Garner wrote a brilliant essay called The Edge of the Ceiling

about lying in bed, being very ill, and populating the ceiling with a whole sort of series of interlocking worlds and characters. Elizabeth Knox, the Bintner's Luck, I have to say, a New Zealand author. An angel came to her and her pain medicine riddled brain while she was in some kind of liminal state. We haven't said much about her biography, Andy, maybe we should, but she was married at the time that this book was written to a very distinguished Jungian psychiatrist called Anthony Stoll and had three daughters with him.

And I think you said, Rachel, she was working at some level as a psychotherapist as well at this point when this was kind of, this is pretty interesting time for child development. And I mean, there is a kind of, I don't think massively convincing attempt. I've read a couple of people who've tried to say that, it's about, it's Jungian Marik Marianne's dream. She's the anima. He's the animus It's about her trying to reconcile these these elements to herself of herself

The process of becoming an adult. I mean, I think more interesting is that which is obviously Nagged away at some of the people who've adapted it is that there is a sort of, there is some kind of budding sexual tension in the, in the book. Indeed there is. Let me ask you all the question. Have, has everybody seen the film adaptation paper? I have, but it didn't make a great impression on me. Rachel, have you seen it? I saw it a long time ago and I poo-pooed it and I refused to go back and look at it. Whoever adapted it or the director, it seemed to me once there to be some buried abuse subplot, which isn't in the novel at all. Is it?

No. I mean, the dad is like this very vague presence. He's mentioned three or four times. He seems entirely benign. The dad is like this very vague presence. He's mentioned three or four times. Yeah. He seems entirely benign. He makes her a calendar, I think, is the most interactive. I mean, look, people can do what they want, right? But it does seem to me that that was shoehorning a kind of a modern take on the story

that didn't actually kind of add to the story. It didn't really. No, it's a very 1980. I mean, the director had a career in pop video. Yeah, he was, Frank, he goes to Hollywood director, wasn't he? Yeah. And so there is a kind of element of Hellraiser,

specifically, which wasn't really in the original. so there is a kind of element of hell raiser specifically, which wasn't really in the original. We went on to direct Candyman. Ah, there we have it. Candyman, Candyman, Candyman. But the stones are horrific in themselves. They didn't, they didn't need to have this scary father figure. You've got rocks with eyes. What more do you need? They're, you know, they're pure evil. They're pure evil that can't be overcome. They can only be escaped if you're lucky. And they move, but you don't see them move. They're like the weeping angels in, uh, in Dr. Yes.

Yes, that's exactly what that brilliant rich. That's I knew they reminded me of some playground. What's that playground game? Oh, well you, Mr. Wolf. Yeah. We used to have to stop. So there's a kind of, there's a kind of relationship to play as well, isn't there? It reminded me a little bit of the book that we just did, the Joan Barfoot.

Gaining Ground. About a woman trying to exist on her own. And how do you go, actually the novel has to go through all the stages in which you can liberate yourself or escape from your family. This book, she had to think of, you know, she had to think of what's Mark going to eat, how are they going to get bicycles, how are we going to get a bicycle that he can train on, lots of practical problem solving in this. Well, also, she's kind of caused this horror as well, and she comes to the realization

that it's her job to fix it and so she goes through all these stages to try and undo what she's done. Does everybody remember the bit where she actually touches one of the stones as well? Yes. That is the stuff of absolute nightmares. Why? Because it recoils and it's kind of a living texture to it. Rachel, you've got an equally eerie bit to read us, haven't you? So why don't you read us that now? I have. So this is where Marianne's been in the house with Mark. They've had their conflicts and they're sniping at each other and she's not feeling very warm towards him. And then she gets jealous because Miss Chesterfield,

her governess who she shares with Mark, it's her birthday. And so Marianne's spent her money on buying her some roses and she's really excited. And then Miss Chesterfield is late because she stopped off to see Mark along the way. And when she arrives, she says, look at these beautiful roses that Mark brought me and they're this glorious bouquet that's bigger

and better than Mary Anne's. And she's so angry with him and with Miss Chesterfield that she kind of sends her away. And so my reading kind of starts there. When she'd gone, Mary Anne sat up. She was angry, so angry, that she felt she must do something violent to express her feelings. She threw all the roses, Marx roses, which Miss Chesterfield had given her, on the floor, where they lay in a sad, wet heap. But somehow that did not express any feelings as fierce as Mary Ann

felt hers to be. She longed to smash something, to kick or bite or scratch, to hurt something terribly, to show just how much she'd been hurt. She looked all around. There wasn't much within reach, only the nine roses she'd bought herself to give Miss Chesterfield. She had quite unreasonable feeling that she wouldn't throw them about because that was how she treated Mark's roses, and she wouldn't give them the same treatment as his had received. On the table by her bed was a small pile of books, mostly school books and exercise books, which she used in her lessons. It seemed silly to do anything to them.

Even though she was in a temper, she could recognise that hurting them wouldn't make her feel any better. Then her eyes fell on her drawing book. She snatched it up. It opened at her page of the drawing of the house, with with the boy who had been Mark in her dream, looking out. Marianne picked up the pencil which had been lying beside the book and scored thick lines across and across and up and down over the window. I hate Mark, she was saying to herself under her breath. I hate him. I hate him. I hate him. He's a beast and he's spoilt my present. I hate him more than anyone else

in the world and I wish he was dead." She scribbled viciously over the face in her picture and felt as if it really was Mark she was destroying. The house had begun to look like a prison now, with thick crossed lines like bars over the window. Marianne took an evil pleasure in heightening the resemblance. She made the fence around the sad little garden thicker and higher, so that it enclosed the house like a wall around a prison.

Outside it were the great stones and boulders she had drawn before, reminding her of jailers. They should watch Mark, she thought with angry satisfaction, keeping him prisoner under constant surveillance. Mary Anne drew in more stones, a ring of them round outside the fence. To each she gave a single eye. If he tried to get out of the house now, they would see Mary Anne thought. They watch him all the time, everything he does, they will never let him out. She was so much engrossed that she had actually forgotten that Miss Chesterfield had gone to fetch

her mother until she saw her come back again and stand, hesitating at the door. How do you feel? she asked, seeing Mary Anne was sitting up in bed and no longer prostrated on the pillows. I feel beastly. Where's mother? So great. It's fascinating. Yeah, she creates the terror that she then has to run from. I find it very interesting listening to you read that. It actually reminded me not of a children's program or a children's book per se, but another cultural phenomenon of the mid to late fifties, which would be an episode of the Twilight Zone. It's quite different from the Twilight Zone,

but there is that sense where you're pitched into a world whose rules you don't really understand. That's one of the great Twilight Zone tropes, whether it's an alien world or history or there's some change to the universe in which that story takes place. That's what's going on here. You're being asked to interpret the rules of just as Marianne is, as she is is finding out herself what she can draw, create, which pencil works, which pencil doesn't work. Can I also just say one of the reasons I like that passage is because, you know, Catherine Staw is just allowing this little girl to just be angry and little girls are told, you

know, that they have to be polite and nice. And I mean, even in her interactions with Mark, you know, she's having an argument with herself like, Oh, I must be nice. I must be nice. Oh, and then she can't help it. She has to be really nasty to him. Yeah. I think she talks about being, um, you know, trying to show children how they can be ruthless and angry and cruel, but they have to also fit into society. So maybe here's a way you can do it. And

here are the consequences if you let that get out of control. Yeah. And then now you have to fix it. They are like a married couple in that regard. It's very, they're like arguments of really interesting. Certainly true of paper house of the film adaptation. The truest thing in a sense to the original novel is those two kids spend the whole film bickering. I'm going to just say a little bit about Catherine Storr's biography. She was born in 1913. She died in her late 80s in 2001. She was one of three

children, the daughter of a barrister. One of her brothers was Hugo Cole, a composer and music critic, and at school she was taught music by Gustav Holst. She became the school's organist, so she was a very talented musician. She went on to study English literature at Newnham, Cambridge, and intended to pursue a career as a novelist for adults, which she attempted without success. She kept writing. She studied medicine, qualifying as a doctor in 1944. And in the 1950s, she was a senior medical officer in the department of psychological medicine at the Middlesex Hospital. And in this period, she starts writing for children as discussed. She marries Anthony Storr, the psychologist. She works as an editorial assistant for Penguin from the mid-60s

to the early 1970s. But perhaps most significantly, she writes two or three novels for adults, which I was reading descriptions of. I couldn't lay my hands on any of them. They're very rare and hard to find. And I was thinking, gosh, these sound like the novels of Rosemary Tonks. And sure enough, I found a roundup in one of the papers from 1970 of a review of one of her novels for adults, Black God, White God, next to a review of the whole during the chase by Rosemary Tonks. I was saying to our panel, have any of you even seen or read any of her novels for adults? And Richard, you have read black God, white God. Amazing. And it's an interesting book. It starts off not particularly invitingly. There's a woman and she thinks she's dead and she thinks she's been taken to

heaven and she thinks she sees St. Peter and there are angels and stuff. And that, I mean, that's the sort of thing that winds me up rotten, but what's it like funny descriptions of it. Tiresome. Um, but if you stick with it, it becomes very, it becomes very quickly apparent. She's not in heaven. She's in hospital or some sort of mental institution.

And then you, uh, well, what, what, what the kind of format is, is that she sort of says, I want to speak to this dead person that I knew in my life. And so these various people come forward and through that, you sort of explore her life story and what's happened to her. And it's a good stimulating exploration of someone's inner world. I mean, story wise, it's pretty bog-standard, unhappy, 70s housewife, but it's well done. It's good. But it does sound like a Rosemary Tonks novel or a Penelope Mortimer novel or something of that

period exploring the psychology of the unhappy, quote unquote, housewife, or the unhappy wife. I think it sounds really, really interesting. I would love to read that. I can send it to you. Oh, thank you very much, Rachael. Rachael, but she did write a sequel, didn't she, to Marianne Dreams? She did, Marianne and Mark,

which I kind of almost wish I hadn't read, I have to say. Oh. And Marianne and Mark, which I kind of almost wish I hadn't read, I have to say. I think, I think Marianne dreams just, you know, it stands alone and you know, that the ending, it kind of leaves us to speculate about a lot of things. We meet them again five years on, don't we, from the events in Marianne dreams. Yeah. So, so Marianne's 15 and she goes to Brighton to stay with her aunt and uncle and her aunt's a social worker and her uncle's a psychiatrist.

And he kind of probes her at dinner time, and it's like he's using her as some kind of experiment. He tells the aunt to just leave her alone, don't ask her any questions about where she's been or who she's going to see, and it's almost like he's just sitting back to see what happens. It's like a gritty realism kind of young adult novel.

Mark doesn't appear until three quarters of the way through the book. And Marianne barely acknowledges what happened to her in that first book. And then when she meets Mark, he doesn't remember her and she doesn't really remember him, apart from the fact that she knew that they had the same governance. And they go up to the lighthouse at the end and she feels like, I'm sure I've been here before.

And then it kind of fades away. Sorry, I've just given away all the spoilers at best. No, you haven't. Because let me tell you, I would love to read the descriptions of Brighton in that era. So it'll offer me something. But what it felt to me, it was a classic second book in a trilogy. So she finally meets Mark at the end. Mark likes her. Yeah, she found a boy she likes. And it's like in the third book, Mary Anne will come into her power

and Mark will be by her side and something amazing will happen. But it just kind of peaces off and it's yeah. But now we must leave Marianne and Mark and their dream world behind. Huge thanks to Richard and to Rachel for allowing us the chance to visit the haunting landscapes of the novel and to our producer Tess Davidson for turning our full-way conversation into a proper grown- up podcast. If you would like show notes with clips, links and suggestions for further reading for this show and the more than 200 that we've already recorded, please visit our website at backlisted.fm. If you want to buy the books discussed on this or any of our other shows, visit our

shop at bookshop.org and choose backlisted as your bookshop. If you're in London on the 17th of July 2024, we will be recording a show at Foils with our friends Caroline Crampton and Andrew Mail on the subject of the 1960s Agatha Christie novel Endless Night. There are still a handful of tickets left for that. You can get them via the foil's website. And we are still keen to hear from you on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Blue Sky, or, you know, Child's Sketch Pad and wherever else you feel compelled

to write from. Yes, if you want to hear backlisted early and without ads, you can subscribe to our Patreon, patreon.com forward slash backlisted. Your subscription brings other benefits if you subscribe at the lock listener level for roughly the price of a secondhand puffin. You'll get not one but two extra exclusive podcasts every month features. That's an actual puffin, not a book. A salted puffin. Famously what they used to eat for breakfast when they were children on St Kilda. Anyway, it features the three of us talking and recommending the books, films and music we've enjoyed in the previous fortnight. For those of you who enjoyed our What Have You Been Reading

slot, that's where you'll now found it. It's an hour of tunes, musings and superior book chat. Plus, lot listeners get their names read out like this. Holly Simmons, thank you. Jesse Abelson, thank you. Anis Lampard, thank you. Letter Keens, thank you. Beej, thank you. Caroline Kerr, thank you. Wayne Paul Olsen, thank you. Hope Hampton. Thank you. Deborah Freeman. Thank you. Sue Ray. Thank you. Finally, Richard, is there anything else that you would like to add on the subjects of Katherine Steele and or Marianne dreams that we haven't covered in the, in our chats?

Maybe I could raise it very quickly. Share my collection. Oh yeah. I'll describe it for listeners. Yes. Go on, show us. It's a book she wrote in the eighties called two's company about what I would describe as love square.

It's two girls are going on holiday and they hook up with some two boys. But the cover is the two boys are walking in the distance. The two girls behind them. It's yeah. So the boys are into each other. I haven't read this one. Um, I'm saving it. I was going to say, have you read it?

No. Okay. Uh, and the next one growing up, which is her, uh, practical guide to adolescence for parents and children. Amazing. So you kind of get her attitude towards childhood and adolescence and, and, and, uh, parent child relations and stuff. And so you get a bit of a philosophy.

There is one bit where she seems curiously liberal about bestiality. Caught me by surprise. Curiously liberal. Good. One more, please. One more. One more. Cold Marble, which is a pretty good collection of ghost stories in the mid-80s.

Yes. Now look, I saw this one listed. This looked really interesting. So this is a collection of ghost stories in the mid 80s. Yes. Now look, I saw this one listed. This looked really interesting. So this is a collection of ghost stories that was published when? In the 80s or 90s. Judging from that cover. 86 I think. Yeah. By Faber and it's got a pentagram design cover. Yeah. And it is quite odd because they, it's not in like a children's range or anything. So it's kind of, it's, some of it feels like it's not in a children's range or anything. So it's kind of, it's, some of it feels like it's for children. Some of it feels like it's not.

It's just, just seems to be a lot of stories that he wrote sort of clustered together, but there's some good stories, ghost stories in that. What's that one called? Cold marble and more ill children. More ill children having supernatural experiences. More stones, presumably more stones that don't feel right. Well, a marble fireplace. A marble fireplace doesn't feel right.

Okay, very good. Thank you very much. Rachael, is there anything you would like to add before we wind up? Oh, I think like Richard, I've become slightly obsessed with Catherine's store and I'm working my way through the Christchurch City Library's store of all these first editions.

I also am desperate now to visit the Story Museum in Newcastle to delve into her archives. Yeah, yeah, the archives. I'm just really interested in the story behind everything. I have one last thing to say about my first story. There's a little bit of an ad-end and I went back to that house that I grew up in. In January this year, I knocked on the door and the woman let me in and the house is exactly the same as it was in 1974. Except a lot smaller than it was, than I remember.

And I'd forgotten there were all these words written on the walls in this kind of 60s font. And one of them was still there and the word was dream. There you go. Wow. Good Lord. The store store. Perhaps this has all been a wonderful dream, Joe. It's all been a wonderful dream. It's a wonderful dream.

I think it's an amazing book, I have to say. It gets more amazing the further away from the childhood you get. It's in print everybody so you don't need to be upset if you can't get hold of a copy you'll be easily able to get a hold of a copy. Thank you so much Rachel, thank you so much Richard for choosing this book and for joining us today to talk about it. We'll see you next time and we'll see some of you at foils on the 17th of July. That's it. Thanks very much everyone. Bye.