Down in the Cellar by Nicholas Stuart Gray

by Nicholas Stuart Gray

A highly diverting and redoubtable band of children, combined with an appealing blend of adventure and magic, results in a story that will appeal even to readers who think they are too old for fairy tales.

Genres: Fantasy, Childrens, Fiction, Magic, Middle Grade

Hardcover

First published December 1, 1961

About the author

Nicholas Stuart Gray (23 October 1922, Scotland - 17 March 1981) was a British actor and playwright, perhaps best known for his work in children's theatre in England. He was also an author of children's fantasy; he wrote a number of novels, a dozen plays, and many short stories. Neil Gaiman has written that Gray "is one of those authors I loved as a boy who holds up even better on rereading as an adult". Many other modern fantasy authors, such as Hilari Bell, Cecilia Dart-Thornton, Kate Forsyth, Cassandra Golds, Katherine Langrish, Sophie Masson, and Garth Nix, cite Gray's work as something they enjoyed as children.

Perhaps his best-known books are The Seventh Swan and Grimbold's Other World. Gray often produced adaptations or continuations of traditional fairy tales and fantasy works, as in his Further Adventures of Puss in Boots. His The Stone Cage is a re-telling of Rapunzel from a cat's point of view. Over The Hills to Fabylon is about a city whose king has the ability to make it fly off across the mountains if he feels it is in danger.

Gray maintained a long-term collaborative relationship with set designer and illustrator Joan Jefferson Farjeon (sister of Eleanor Farjeon and Harry Farjeon); she supplied the costume and scenic designs for many of the theatrical productions of his plays, as well as the illustrations of his books.

---from wikipedia

Reviews

[Cassandra · Rating 5 out of 5]

I will never forget the Saturday afternoon (c. 1973) on which I finished my first reading of Down in the Cellar - I was about 11 and had borrowed it from my primary school library in the outer Western suburbs of Sydney, intrigued by the Edward Ardizzone cover. I remember feeling a kind of mysterious desolation, partly because I'd finished it and would never be able to read it for the first time again, but partly also because I knew I had now read the best book I was ever going to read. And I felt, then and still, that the only possible response to that experience was to become a children's author myself. Ever since, that book has been my benchmark.

Down in the Cellar is the story of four children and an ancient cellar which they discover accidentally behind, and below, a cupboard within the country Rectory where they are spending the Christmas holidays with their Uncle James, the Rector. The cellar is disused and, of course, out-of-bounds, but they play in it secretly anyway - until they discover another use for it.

That other use is a fugitive, and his name is Stephen. A young man, alone, injured, despairing, they come upon him in an old bomb shelter beside the chalk quarry nearby. Mysteriously, he will not allow them to get help, indeed he begs them to leave him alone, to forget him. It seems Stephen has enemies, and they are not the kind of enemies from whom the usual avenues will afford protection.

So (against his will, but by that time he is delirious with fever) the children hide him in the Old Cellar. Stephen gets sicker, the children find it more and more difficult to conceal what they are doing from their kindly uncle and his housekeeper (and to bear up under the stress), and as the days and nights pass, and the cellar is besieged, they begin to realize that the enemies they are dealing with are supernatural ones.

But they have supernatural friends, too. And, although they don't know it, the Old Cellar is on the threshold of something even older - a Gate into the centre of a hill that no longer exists, a hill which was demolished before the Rectory was built - a hill which, nonetheless, holds within it a faerie kingdom, where there is no death, no pain and no fear.

I doubt that this bare outline of the plot gives any inkling of what a rich, strange, poignant, breathtaking experience Down in the Cellar is.

Undoubtedly part of its strength lies in the characterization - Gray's stories always hinged on this. Each of the four siblings has a completely distinct attitude to the (increasingly supernatural) events, ranging from scepticism in Bruce, the eldest, who is the sympathetic but unreliable narrator, through to what might best be described as second sight in the youngest, Deirdre - quite possibly the best-drawn five-year-old in English fiction. Her eery, incongruous statements, spoken from the position of having one foot in another level of reality, and at first dismissed by her older and supposedly wiser siblings, are one of the most memorable features of the book. She is a tragic character in her own way, but there is even greater pathos in the roughly 12-year-old Bruce, whose narration is wonderfully comic and yet who bears the weight of one of Gray's enduring themes: cynicism as a cover for vulnerability. (Gray was a professional actor, which may account for his genius with individual voices - especially in minor characters - and for an extraordinary ability to place himself in a character's position and write from out of that. For a truly virtuosic display of this talent, see his novel The Stone Cage.)

A second part of the book's success is humour. Gray must be one of the wittiest writers ever to have written for children. Re-reading the book for this post, I laughed again, even after all these years, at the sheer wit, and was moved to tears once more by the superb final chapter. But the most original part of it is his mysticism, which reaches deep into pre-Christian folklore and myth.

The hill, though demolished, is actually still there - and it is the gateway to transcendence.

This idea, around which the whole book is built, was a complete revelation to me as a child (even though I was already in love with Narnia), and I still find it strangely enthralling, perhaps because, unlike, say, the Wardrobe in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, it is at the back of the story rather than in the foreground. Indeed, Down in the Cellar belongs to a tradition of British fantasy novels, perhaps beginning with Wuthering Heights, which have realist settings and yet which refer continually to an offstage fantasy dimension governed by a mythical system which is never actually articulated, and is probably original to the author. For Lewis, the Wardrobe is an assertion. For Gray, the Hill is an assumption. And in fact, when I compare the approaches of these two authors it strikes me that whereas Lewis was writing about mysticism, Gray was writing as a mystic.

And that is why he is so hard to beat. It seems to me that he is writing from so far inside the story that even as an adult I almost find it difficult to accept that it was something he invented. And believe me, that is a very spooky thing to have to admit.

[This review is an edited version of a piece first written for Normblog: http://normblog.typepad.com/normblog/... ]

[Louise Culmer · Rating 3 out of 5]

Four children staying with their uncle in the country find a mysterious young man called Stephen who is injured and afraid - but of what they don’t know. They decide to help him despite possible risks to themselves, so they hide him in the cellar. A number of mysterious people are looking for Stephen, and so are the police. Some of his foes seem to be supernatural, and some not. Although quite interesting, with some amusing incidents, I found this story rather unsatisfactory because nothing is really explained, we don’t know who Stephen is, nor who is after him, or why, nor indeed why the police are involved. And the book ends in a way that I have always particularly disliked, stories that end like this annoy me very much.

[robyn · Rating 3 out of 5]

My library had several of Nicholas Stuart Gray's books in its children's section, and I'll always be grateful I read my way through the G's because he was then and is now one of my favorite authors. He wrote real fairy tales peopled by lovely characters, something you don't come across very often, and was capable of genuinely creepy elements.

I've collected the book that the library didn't have, and they have been a mixed bag. One was genuinely bad, although to be fair, children's books weren't being aimed at the adult market at the time, and a child probably might have read it with enjoyment.

Down in the Cellar falls in the middle of the scale for me. Always bearing in mind that I'm coming at it as an adult, I have to say that Over the Hills to Fabylon, The Stone Cage, The Apple Stone, Mainly in Moonlight, Grimbold's Other World, The Seventh Swan - you can read them as an adult and come away with the feeling that you've had a glimpse of something magical and slightly tragic.

Down in the Cellar, his first book, FEELS like a first book. The elements of magic and the mundane haven't quite gelled, the way they do in The Apple Stone. If I'd read it as a child I think I'd have enjoyed it very much, but I think I would have seen the flaws when I revisited it; chiefly, the question of what Stephen has done and whether he's magic himself or just a fugitive who's fallen afoul of dangerous creatures. He's really just an excuse to thrust the children into strange company.

What will stick with me most are Deirdre's strange utterances, particularly her trick for identifying witches. Legitimately chilling. I think witches brought out a certain macabre humor in Gray, something (the right sort of) children appreciate more than adults seem to realize.

[CLM · Rating 4 out of 5]

A whimsical fantasy from a little known author who is highly regarded by those who know his work. Here is a link to my review:

https://perfectretort.blogspot.com/20...