Perry merry dixi, dominee

Thanks to nineweaving for introducing me to the music of Anne Lister. She reminds me of Dave Goulder, with the kaleidoscope only a little shifted: seascapes and dry stone walls, months incarnate and riddles of thorn.

I am particularly enamored at the moment of "Beech and Willow," whose chorus makes use of a rhyme I first encountered in Peter Blair's The Coming of Pout—a strange and not entirely successful children's book (illustrated beautifully, however, by Trina Schart Hyman) from the late 1960's. Its plot concerns the occasionally clairvoyant Sally and her more pragmatic brother Alexander, who are on vacation with their parents in the Fens when they meet with an eccentric nighttime stranger whose connections to Ely Cathedral are long-standing and not altogether voluntary. The eponymous Pout is a weathercock archetype, instantly familiar—half-monastic and mercurial, given to Latinate self-congratulation ("In fact, this is really the year 637 P.P.T. . . . Post Pouti Triumphum, of course!") and rhyming imprecations ("Spitfires and spatchcocks!"), who in one moment can threaten Sally and Sandy as though all the powers of hell were at his command and the next wander sadly through the moonlit fens, forlornly hunting the one flower that will free him from his centuries of imprisonment. He cooks up saints' bones for soup and claims personal acquaintance of Cerberus, teases Sandy remorselessly and stands in reluctant awe of Sally's second sight, and soon cajoles both children into his search. The mysteries only thicken with the introduction of Cornelius Candlewick, a fussy medievalist who bobs up inconveniently at each point in the children's explorations: he may be several buttresses short of a nave, but his erratic behavior eerily mimics the children's own trains of thought. And as to how Cerberus is tangled up in the binding and unbinding of Pout, the answer will surely be found nowhere in Greek myth.

"This looks more promising, but it isn't really out yet. I think it must be Lysimachia nummularia. Do you think that might work? By the bones of St. Guthlac, it ought to with a name like that. What do you call it, my gentle-eyed Jessica?"

"I call it Creeping Jenny, but my name isn't Jessica."

"What is it, then?"

"Sally. You know, short for Sarah."

"But Sally isn't any shorter than Sarah."

"I know it isn't, but it's just what people say."

"Rule one. Never pay any attention to what people say. You'll be telling me next that Pout is short for hippopotamus. I say your name is Creeping Jessica. And I'm Pout of Pout Hall, and I'm always right!"

Much of the book works very well. Pout is excellently drawn as a figure who is never seen to do anything supernatural and yet carries with him the feel of too much time and chance for comfort, while Cornelius Candlewick, with his erudition and his odd rituals, makes a comical and potentially sinister adversary. There is some lovely sun-and-moon symbolism in the characters of Alexander and Sally, whom Blair introduces with Hilaire Belloc's "The Early Morning" (The moon on my left and the dawn on my right. / My brother, good morning: my sister, good night), and for a while events follow their own curious dream-logic, self-consistent in their resonance and slightly surreal imagery. Everything might evaporate into midsummer haze or darken to nightmare: or both, if not necessarily in that order.

Unfortunately, the story has too many elements to keep up in the air—the trickster nature of Pout, the significance of the Green Hellebore, the motives of Cornelius Candlewick and the ultimate relevance of Cerberus to Ely Cathedral—and resolve in kind with their build-up, and it all collapses with a thud of explanation in the last chapter.* In the jacket bio, the author claims that "Underneath the moonshine comedy there is a deliberate underlay of terror which builds up to what I think is a very terrifying climax," and certainly there are writers who could have pulled off this combination. Lloyd Alexander, yes. Diana Wynne Jones, yes. Even Alan Garner, if you wanted the folklore really dark. Peter Blair, alas, is not one of them. I know that profundity in a dream often turns to nonsense in daylight: men rarely make passes at girls who wear glasses, after all. But for the love of several different gods, a little inexplicable never hurt anyone.

I like Anne Lister, however. Petrum patrum paradisi tempori, perry merry dixi, dominee . . . Beech and willow and mistletoe. There's good inexplicable there.

*I grew up on The Coming of Pout, but in this respect I regard it not so dissimilarly from Edward Fenton's The Nine Questions, which I read for the first time this winter—it would have been a brilliant book without the last few pages, in which the allegory rises from the deeps and eats the rest of the story. There's no allegorical strain in The Coming of Pout, but after all the half-hints and puzzle-pieces and hagiographical odds and ends that add up to more curiosity, a sudden hit of brisk clarification is the very last thing the reader needs. The only questions Blair leaves unanswered are the ones whose answers actually matter.