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It
Alice encounters something on the hill that haunts her for many months and is difficult to explain and very frightening
189 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1977
21 people want to read
About the author
William Mayne
135 books16 followersWilliam Mayne was a British writer of children's fiction. Born in Hull, he was educated at the choir school attached to Canterbury Cathedral and his memories of that time contributed to his early books. He lived most of his life in North Yorkshire.
He was described as one of the outstanding children's authors of the 20th Century by the Oxford Companion to Children's Literature, and won the Carnegie Medal in 1957 for A Grass Rope and the Guardian Award in 1993 for Low Tide. He has written more than a hundred books, and is best known for his Choir School quartet comprising A Swarm in May, Choristers' Cake, Cathedral Wednesday and Words and Music, and his Earthfasts trilogy comprising Earthfasts, Cradlefasts and Candlefasts, an unusual evocation of the King Arthur legend.
A Swarm in May was filmed by the Children's Film Unit in 1983 and a five-part television series of Earthfasts was broadcast by the BBC in 1994.
William Mayne was imprisoned for two and a half years in 2004 after admitting to charges of child sexual abuse and was placed on the British sex offenders' register. His books were largely removed from shelves, and he died in disgrace in 2010.
He was described as one of the outstanding children's authors of the 20th Century by the Oxford Companion to Children's Literature, and won the Carnegie Medal in 1957 for A Grass Rope and the Guardian Award in 1993 for Low Tide. He has written more than a hundred books, and is best known for his Choir School quartet comprising A Swarm in May, Choristers' Cake, Cathedral Wednesday and Words and Music, and his Earthfasts trilogy comprising Earthfasts, Cradlefasts and Candlefasts, an unusual evocation of the King Arthur legend.
A Swarm in May was filmed by the Children's Film Unit in 1983 and a five-part television series of Earthfasts was broadcast by the BBC in 1994.
William Mayne was imprisoned for two and a half years in 2004 after admitting to charges of child sexual abuse and was placed on the British sex offenders' register. His books were largely removed from shelves, and he died in disgrace in 2010.
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
December 12, 2016
William Mayne was sort of the Ursula Le Guin or J.K. Rowling of British children's literature, collecting numerous accolades until he was convicted of sexual abuse of young female fans in 2004--and imprisoned for 2 1/2 years. Since then, Mayne's books were "largely deliberately removed from shelves from 2004 onwards ." (Guardian obituary, 2010). His books were so thoroughly removed from any kind of shelves that I had a difficult time finding a copy of "It." You can see from this review that Goodreads does not even have cover art for it. I had never heard of Mayne or his books until reading a review by Gregory Maguire in the New York Times (26 October 2016) that mentioned "It" and called it a "terrific children's novel." I finally found a ratty paperback, losing pages, on ABEbooks.
The greatest hurdle for American readers of "It," especialliy children or young adults--will be the British slang and the way the main characters think and speak. I probably did not understand--or at least could not have translated--about 10% of the sentences. The story is compelling, however. Alice, whose grandfather is a church vicar in her small fictional town, has discovered a hill where magic happens. The magic is related to medieval crosses that mark certain junctions of the town, placed there a thousand years ago. Alice's discoveries involve the intersection between the pagan and Christian histories of the town and her solution is an effort to put this conflict to rest.
Having been in England several times, I envisioned the medieval streets of York or the earthworks of Old Sarum while reading "It." Each time I sat down to read it, "It" transported me to medieval Britain. It is most definitely worth tracking down, although it will lose most American children. It will entrance adult readers.
The greatest hurdle for American readers of "It," especialliy children or young adults--will be the British slang and the way the main characters think and speak. I probably did not understand--or at least could not have translated--about 10% of the sentences. The story is compelling, however. Alice, whose grandfather is a church vicar in her small fictional town, has discovered a hill where magic happens. The magic is related to medieval crosses that mark certain junctions of the town, placed there a thousand years ago. Alice's discoveries involve the intersection between the pagan and Christian histories of the town and her solution is an effort to put this conflict to rest.
Having been in England several times, I envisioned the medieval streets of York or the earthworks of Old Sarum while reading "It." Each time I sat down to read it, "It" transported me to medieval Britain. It is most definitely worth tracking down, although it will lose most American children. It will entrance adult readers.
November 6, 2022
The handling of a case of possession by a pagan poltergeist grants a sullen schoolgirl some worth to her family and wider community.
Sounds a bit bleak, doesn't it? It was.
Alice is the underachiever in the home of a cold and somewhat miserable Northern(?) English family. Her authoritative, former-missionary grandfather is the patriarch, who looms large over her rigid and subserviant mother; forester father is not 'posh' as her mother is, but dead common and very quick with a belt for the purposes of corporal punishment. Younger brother Matthew, unlike his sister Alice, did make the grade at the entrance exam and is now at the prestigious boarding school in the city.
Here we follow disenfranchised, practically unloved (certainly unappreciated and bullied, if not psychologically abused) Alice as she sulks her way through life... and towards the Eyell, an age-old mound in the field adjacent the Minster. This becomes a story of spiritual possession, by a poltergeist-like entity from pagan times, and how it seeks to achieve its own ends through her. It is also a story of Alice finding her place mentally in a family that hasn't any patience or love* for her (*love, as anyone who stops to think about it knows, is not so much a quality as an action. You show love, you give love. Anything else is NOT 'love' - it's something hard and cold and meaningless and dead: obligation, relation, genetics, burden, etc. It always bothers me when people claim they 'love' their children, but do nothing dynamic that demonstrates to them anything other than meeting basic needs and parental and social/cultural responsibilities. That's not love - that's duty. And all sorts of concomitant resentfulness often accompanies it). If you want to really mess up a young psyche and a soul for life, convince a child that a parent (or grandparent) "loves" them when it is abundantly clear that they do not. They'll grow up believing they are unlovable, or unworthy, or believing that 'love' is nothing but a word, or perhaps even a lie). This is how the book opens:
(A complete asshole, I'd like to add to that). Here's Alice's much-respected-by-all grandfather, speaking of her late in this book:
It's easy to feel sorry for Alice. She is certainly given a completely unfair shake, and the adults in her life are insecure and immature (only, of course, she's a child and can't know that - she thinks there's something wrong with her). Incidentally, this is in my opinion the sole cause of all of the world's problems. Don't spread your hatred to the innocent children and teens of the next generation, no matter how irritating they might seem to you. Suck it up like the man/woman/adult you supposedly are. Let it die with you, rather than seek 'fairness' or retribution by treating children as shittily as you were treated. That's not RIGHT - that's petty.
Soapboxing aside, the pacing of this book is on the slow side. It read like stop-and-go traffic; just when you can finally accelerate and get to tempo, there's another traffic light and snarl to seethe your way through. Mayne does this by setting the scene and building atmosphere (fair enough), but for me, much of the dialogue dragged horribly and caused the metaphorical jam. This, however, I attribute to being a foreigner (non-British). It's not the first time I've come across difficulty with colloquialisms and local slang and syntax in William Mayne's books (Earthfasts and A Parcel of Trees, for example). I think if it didn't throw you through a loop, it might be nicely realistic and culturally rich. It's a stumbling block for me, though, despite being a subject of the Commonwealth. Phrases like, "Happen.", and "Side on, Alice.", and exchanges like these (intelligible, but which constitute work for me to parse out):
Here's a sample from about 30 pages in, to give you a further idea of the general style:
The other downside is William Mayne's criminality. In my opinion, a male author writing about a pre-pubescent girl gets grace for one, maybe two, mentions of undergarments in a novel-length story, and even then it better be highly relevant to the plot. William Mayne mentions tights, underwear and bras quite often in this story, and how things feel against Alice's skin though her blouse and vest and tights. And the crotch ("leg-join") of her tights is caught on barbed wire, which she needs to unhook. Next time, it's the crotch of her jeans. The St. Hilda's school girls wear green undergarments, and we are even given a glimpse of some as Andrea Willis climbs into the backseat of a car. Alice gets a belt across the rump, while brother Michael gets one across the back. None of these things are creepy in themselves, but taken all together in a single novel, written by a convicted rapist and molester of twelve year old girls, it did give me pause for thought. The whole atmosphere of the book is uncomfortable to begin with, and this doesn't help. I certainly am not an unbiased observer, either.
In terms of the ecclesiastical history, the pagan rites and monuments, and the possession of Alice, I found it rather engaging, especially when her asshole Grandpa began to be tied into the mystery. But again, we went back to that stalling-then surging- then stalling again pacing, and I found myself losing interest. I suspect that much of the charm of Mayne's writing was the dialogue, but as it was a hurdle for me I probably missed the intended comic relief or at least the levity it was meant to bring. I did get a little bogged down from time to time.
There were some supernatural aspects of the story which weren't entirely resolved to my satisfaction. And I'm not sure if the setting was meant to be somewhere like Durham (which I found by inserting the phrase "St Cuthbert's Parade" into Google), or entirely fictitious. The crumbling remains of pre-Christian Celtic crosses, surrounding what was once a sanctuary city, are the focus. The common thought is that the crosses at the cardinal compass points cross where the Minster stands, and this is explained by pointing out that many churches were built on pagan religious sites to lend credence to the incoming religion, or to show dominance over the old, etc. Alice figures out that it isn't the Minster but the unassuming mound (a barrow mound?) called 'the Eyell' just across the street from the church which forms the cross. A sun-cross (Odin's wheel, etc. - same shape as seen in The Dark Is Rising - a circle with an equilateral cross inset within) also appears later in a hidden carving, showing a grotesque, hooked nose ("that's not Jesus") figure trapped behind it or maybe strapped to it (bound, at any rate). This character is the titular "IT", and not much more is given about IT. I felt that an understanding of the person and mythology of Saint Cuthbert (who Wikipedia tells me is an Anglo-Saxon saint, very old, and, interestingly, one of the first known animal conservationists!) might have helped. Maybe. I couldn't find reference to any deity or demi-god or person that Cuthbert had bound or cast out on Wikipedia, so I'm assuming it's not referring to a myth that I am not privvy to. I don't know who IT is, and I rather wanted to know of the connection to the sanctuary status of the former city, and about that witch mentioned near the beginning.
I don't want to say much more so as to prevent spoiling the story, but while it wrapped up satisfactorily enough, there was still much more I wanted to know, such as:
Taken together, it's really only worth a read if you are interested in the intersection of pre-Christian Britain and the founding of the Christian church in the United Kingdom, assuming you like low-fantasy, slower-paced vintage YA novels, and can stomach it having been written by William Mayne.
I have two more books of his that I would like to read. One is A Year and a Day, which I purchased before realising that I could have read it for free first on OpenLibrary. And the other is the first book of the highly-regarded Cathedral series, A Swarm in May, which is also on OpenLibrary (though the others in the series are not).
Because I find it interesting, here's some of the praise he received for The Jersey Shore on the back jacket flap, prior to his criminal actions coming to light:
If you enjoy vintage children's books that have gone out of print, please consider joining the Forgotten Vintage Children's Lit We Want Republished! group: https://www.goodreads.com/group/show/... . There's a discussion already begun on William Mayne here: https://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/... , and there are many other excellent authors being discussed. You're more than welcome to join, and to start new discussions. :)
Sounds a bit bleak, doesn't it? It was.
Alice is the underachiever in the home of a cold and somewhat miserable Northern(?) English family. Her authoritative, former-missionary grandfather is the patriarch, who looms large over her rigid and subserviant mother; forester father is not 'posh' as her mother is, but dead common and very quick with a belt for the purposes of corporal punishment. Younger brother Matthew, unlike his sister Alice, did make the grade at the entrance exam and is now at the prestigious boarding school in the city.
Here we follow disenfranchised, practically unloved (certainly unappreciated and bullied, if not psychologically abused) Alice as she sulks her way through life... and towards the Eyell, an age-old mound in the field adjacent the Minster. This becomes a story of spiritual possession, by a poltergeist-like entity from pagan times, and how it seeks to achieve its own ends through her. It is also a story of Alice finding her place mentally in a family that hasn't any patience or love* for her (*love, as anyone who stops to think about it knows, is not so much a quality as an action. You show love, you give love. Anything else is NOT 'love' - it's something hard and cold and meaningless and dead: obligation, relation, genetics, burden, etc. It always bothers me when people claim they 'love' their children, but do nothing dynamic that demonstrates to them anything other than meeting basic needs and parental and social/cultural responsibilities. That's not love - that's duty. And all sorts of concomitant resentfulness often accompanies it). If you want to really mess up a young psyche and a soul for life, convince a child that a parent (or grandparent) "loves" them when it is abundantly clear that they do not. They'll grow up believing they are unlovable, or unworthy, or believing that 'love' is nothing but a word, or perhaps even a lie). This is how the book opens:
THERE WAS A STRANGE SKY for a strange day. Alice Dyson could see it from the car, where she had been sent after being in Sarrow vicarage for about three minutes when she and Mum went there to bring Grandpa down into the city for lunch.
Grandpa was vicar of St Michael's church on top of Sarrow Hill, but he had to come down to the Minster six times a year and preach, and this was one of the days, and not quite an ordinary one either. He was less patient than usual on this day. Alice had begun to do what she had done several times before, that is, fold up his robes and put them in a suitcase to bring down with him. But she had gone into a dream and put a gravelly footprint on the sleeve of the white surplice.
It proved how careless she was and that she had not wiped her feet on the doormat either. Mum had sent her out; Grandpa had dropped her down in his opinion again. And this year, this time of it, in fact this very month, there was not a great distance for his opinion to fall, so she was down at nothing again.
Even the dream she had been giving herself had not been good. Now she considered it was the nasty dream of a nasty person. She had been looking round the room at all Grandpa's things and realizing how hopeless it was to expect to achieve anything for herself because he had already done it all, and there on his walls and shelves were the signs of it: the relics of foreign lands, the rows of books he had wrtten, and the signed picture of him holding hands with the queen; the things of a complete person who had completed everything.
(A complete asshole, I'd like to add to that). Here's Alice's much-respected-by-all grandfather, speaking of her late in this book:
"And about this girl, my granddaughter. I never reckoned much to her until today; she was always a miserable milk-and-water miss, with the milk curdled and the water tepid."The rest of this statement isn't the turnabout you'd like to see to balance it out, so I'll leave it (it also contains plot spoilers). There isn't really a happy ending on the family dynamic front, either, though Alice comes to understand herself a little better, leaving some room for optimism.
It's easy to feel sorry for Alice. She is certainly given a completely unfair shake, and the adults in her life are insecure and immature (only, of course, she's a child and can't know that - she thinks there's something wrong with her). Incidentally, this is in my opinion the sole cause of all of the world's problems. Don't spread your hatred to the innocent children and teens of the next generation, no matter how irritating they might seem to you. Suck it up like the man/woman/adult you supposedly are. Let it die with you, rather than seek 'fairness' or retribution by treating children as shittily as you were treated. That's not RIGHT - that's petty.
Soapboxing aside, the pacing of this book is on the slow side. It read like stop-and-go traffic; just when you can finally accelerate and get to tempo, there's another traffic light and snarl to seethe your way through. Mayne does this by setting the scene and building atmosphere (fair enough), but for me, much of the dialogue dragged horribly and caused the metaphorical jam. This, however, I attribute to being a foreigner (non-British). It's not the first time I've come across difficulty with colloquialisms and local slang and syntax in William Mayne's books (Earthfasts and A Parcel of Trees, for example). I think if it didn't throw you through a loop, it might be nicely realistic and culturally rich. It's a stumbling block for me, though, despite being a subject of the Commonwealth. Phrases like, "Happen.", and "Side on, Alice.", and exchanges like these (intelligible, but which constitute work for me to parse out):
"Are you fast, Mr Dyson?"
"I am that," said Dad. "And I've the roof so well stemmed with fibre-glass there isn't any heat coming up, and I'm starved. Who's yonder, anyroad?"
"Barney Larkman," said Barney. "Tha knows, Boniface."
"Oh, aye," Dad shouted back from under the tiles. "What'll you do? Can you get in? Where's our little lass?:
"She came on for me," said Barney. "I'd ha' been on sooner, but I were ligging i' bed."
"Get thysen moving," said Dad. "If I's here much longer I'll not bend to come out."
Here's a sample from about 30 pages in, to give you a further idea of the general style:
But there came to Alice what often did come, a sense that the hand in hers was the wrong one, not Raddy’s, but that from the Eyell. Or, and she was not sure, perhaps she did not take Raddy’s hand at all, only the other one. That feeling had already caused Alice to drop a plate that week through finding some extra substance inside the tea-towel.
So now Raddy’s hand became that other hand; there was the same grip and pull, and the hard existence of a ring on one of the fingers just as she had experienced it that Sunday more than a fortnight since. One hand or the other let go; Alice did not know which it was, her or the other. Raddy went on climbing with her feet, which she should not have been doing anyway, and started falling with her arms, and flopped down on her back on the springboard.
“Radigund Larkman,” said Miss Flowers, “are you all right? Get down, Alice Dyson.”
Alice got down. No one laughed at Raddy’s full name, because if they did there was Ted, who was nearly eighteen, to reckon with, as well as Nell, Maud, Ruthy and Joe.
“She’s been thinking she’s a dromedary all morning,” said Raddy, sitting up.
“Concussed,” said Miss Flowers. “That’s certain.”
"Just me backside," said Raddy, rubbing it; and the affair was over for her. She went back and took another jump, had a passing push from Miss Flowers, and came over pink and smiling.
“Sorry about that,” said Alice in the cloakroom after the lesson.
“I never got hold at all,” said Raddy. “I went for a sixer, didn’t I?”
“I dropped you,” said Alice, remembering all the brains and livers and other belongings that had scattered on the floor and the springboard. Remembering as well as she could what had not happened, so that remembering what hadn’t happened would seem more likely.
“It’d take more than you to drop me,” said Raddy.
But Alice knew what had happened. It was no use inventing a fancy along that road, because it went through the very thing she was trying to make into a fancy. She forgot about the brains and liver, but very annoyingly they wouldn’t go away. She was in a half and half state about what was going on in her mind until the end of school, long after Raddy had forgotten about being dropped.
Miss Flowers, coming out of the school gate as Raddy and Alice went out, slowed her bicycle, which she rode for health and vigour, and asked: “Are you all right, Radigund?”
“Eh?” said Raddy. “I wasn’t doing owt. Oh, that; I’m grand. It’s her that’s all thumbs,” and she nodded at Alice.
Miss Flowers nodded too, meaning that she had understood the message and was content with it, and rode on.
“She want to see my bruise or something?” said Raddy. “Chance would be a fine thing.”
But Alice was thinking of a hand all thumbs. It might be horrible in real life, but in life less than real it might only be amusing.
“It’s a different world,” she said.
“It is that,” said Raddy. “Get the other side of the gate and you think it’s Christmas.”
The other downside is William Mayne's criminality. In my opinion, a male author writing about a pre-pubescent girl gets grace for one, maybe two, mentions of undergarments in a novel-length story, and even then it better be highly relevant to the plot. William Mayne mentions tights, underwear and bras quite often in this story, and how things feel against Alice's skin though her blouse and vest and tights. And the crotch ("leg-join") of her tights is caught on barbed wire, which she needs to unhook. Next time, it's the crotch of her jeans. The St. Hilda's school girls wear green undergarments, and we are even given a glimpse of some as Andrea Willis climbs into the backseat of a car. Alice gets a belt across the rump, while brother Michael gets one across the back. None of these things are creepy in themselves, but taken all together in a single novel, written by a convicted rapist and molester of twelve year old girls, it did give me pause for thought. The whole atmosphere of the book is uncomfortable to begin with, and this doesn't help. I certainly am not an unbiased observer, either.
In terms of the ecclesiastical history, the pagan rites and monuments, and the possession of Alice, I found it rather engaging, especially when her asshole Grandpa began to be tied into the mystery. But again, we went back to that stalling-then surging- then stalling again pacing, and I found myself losing interest. I suspect that much of the charm of Mayne's writing was the dialogue, but as it was a hurdle for me I probably missed the intended comic relief or at least the levity it was meant to bring. I did get a little bogged down from time to time.
There were some supernatural aspects of the story which weren't entirely resolved to my satisfaction. And I'm not sure if the setting was meant to be somewhere like Durham (which I found by inserting the phrase "St Cuthbert's Parade" into Google), or entirely fictitious. The crumbling remains of pre-Christian Celtic crosses, surrounding what was once a sanctuary city, are the focus. The common thought is that the crosses at the cardinal compass points cross where the Minster stands, and this is explained by pointing out that many churches were built on pagan religious sites to lend credence to the incoming religion, or to show dominance over the old, etc. Alice figures out that it isn't the Minster but the unassuming mound (a barrow mound?) called 'the Eyell' just across the street from the church which forms the cross. A sun-cross (Odin's wheel, etc. - same shape as seen in The Dark Is Rising - a circle with an equilateral cross inset within) also appears later in a hidden carving, showing a grotesque, hooked nose ("that's not Jesus") figure trapped behind it or maybe strapped to it (bound, at any rate). This character is the titular "IT", and not much more is given about IT. I felt that an understanding of the person and mythology of Saint Cuthbert (who Wikipedia tells me is an Anglo-Saxon saint, very old, and, interestingly, one of the first known animal conservationists!) might have helped. Maybe. I couldn't find reference to any deity or demi-god or person that Cuthbert had bound or cast out on Wikipedia, so I'm assuming it's not referring to a myth that I am not privvy to. I don't know who IT is, and I rather wanted to know of the connection to the sanctuary status of the former city, and about that witch mentioned near the beginning.
I don't want to say much more so as to prevent spoiling the story, but while it wrapped up satisfactorily enough, there was still much more I wanted to know, such as:
Taken together, it's really only worth a read if you are interested in the intersection of pre-Christian Britain and the founding of the Christian church in the United Kingdom, assuming you like low-fantasy, slower-paced vintage YA novels, and can stomach it having been written by William Mayne.
I have two more books of his that I would like to read. One is A Year and a Day, which I purchased before realising that I could have read it for free first on OpenLibrary. And the other is the first book of the highly-regarded Cathedral series, A Swarm in May, which is also on OpenLibrary (though the others in the series are not).
Because I find it interesting, here's some of the praise he received for The Jersey Shore on the back jacket flap, prior to his criminal actions coming to light:
"Mayne is a phenomenon. With almost every new book one feels, with a sense of revelation - this must be the best Mayne yet. And what a remarkable best it can be, in idea, and depth, and technique. All this could be said of The Jersey Shore, perhpas as important a book as he has ever transferred from imagination to print." Naomi Lewis
"This cunning, pointed study of people in shifting relation to one another can only add to William Mayne's already towering stature." Sunday Times
If you enjoy vintage children's books that have gone out of print, please consider joining the Forgotten Vintage Children's Lit We Want Republished! group: https://www.goodreads.com/group/show/... . There's a discussion already begun on William Mayne here: https://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/... , and there are many other excellent authors being discussed. You're more than welcome to join, and to start new discussions. :)
March 4, 2022
Dull boring and uninteresting, and that was chapter one, why the publishers agreed to publish this bum fodder us a mystery unless they were bed fellows of Willy
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