M is for Magic

M is for Magic
Neil Gaiman
Bloomsbury Books

250 pages
2007

It's been all of two weeks since my last Neil Gaiman related post (in which I got excited by the new website, and blurb, of The Graveyard Book) and since 2008 is quite a busy year for Neil, I thought it might be timely to review some more of his books!

M is for Magic is Gaiman's first collection for younger people, but a lot of his children's work lends itself to towards reading by adults. Nearly all of the stories have been collected in various different anthologies and collections before; this is then, a compilation of stories that Gaiman thinks will appeal to younger readers coming to his work for the first time.

There are 11 stories in total, including the novella length extract from The Graveyard Book, and a previously unpublished story.

1) The Case of the Four and Twenty Blackbirds. It was first published in 1984, in Knave magazine and was Gaiman's third published short story. It's an alternate take, of sorts, on the Humpty Dumpty story and poems from Alice in Wonderland, and was amusing, filled with references to the Queen of Hearts, Cock Robin, The King's Men ... plastic surgeons, private detectives, Albert Einstein, et cetera. I enjoyed this one, and it was funny in an often ridiculous way.

"Let's see the colour of your money."
I showed him a fifty.
"Hell", he muttered. "It's green. Why can't they make puce or mauve money for a change?" He took it though...

2) Troll Bridge. This is one of the longest stories in the book, and tells the story of a young boy who makes a bargain, under a bridge, with a troll, and of their strange relationship over the years as the boy ends up revisiting him and having to postpone their agreement (his life, which the troll wants to eat) several times, until eventually, he comes back willingly when he's older. It was strangely funny in a disturbing way, and quite sad, too, and it's one of my favourites, though I'm not sure that I would have placed it so early in the collection.

3) Don't Ask Jack. At four pages long, this is the shortest story of the collection and has also appeared in Gaiman's collection, Smoke and Mirrors. It's one of the creepiest tales in M is for Magic, a disturbing story of a Jack-in-the-box that haunts the lives of the children who never played with it. Toys with faces have always had a potential for creepiness, but I expect every child who reads Don't Ask Jack will have a sudden desire to get rid of any old toys that just might be alive ... whatever the adults say...

And deep within the box within the box, Jack waits and smiles, holding his secrets. He is waiting for the children. He can wait forever...

4) How to Sell the Ponti Bridge. I particularly liked the setting for this one as it's quite a change for Gaiman. The Rogues' Club, seventy thousand years old, of interuniversal renown, is the setting for this story within a story, of the brilliance of a con better than that of selling the palace of the king of Vandaria to the King of Vandaria; the selling of the Ponti Bridge, a bridge made out of jewels. It was first published in 1984, and was one of the earliest stories Gaiman wrote, and I enjoyed it, but in some ways it's noticeable that it was one of Neil's first stories. Some of the dialogue was a bit false, particularly towards the end. Nevertheless, it was a fun story, and I think it will appeal to children.

5) October in the Chair. This one was an interesting tale of a meeting of the months, around a campfire, with sausages, telling each other stories. October was in the chair, and he told a story of a boy who ran away from home and met a dead boy. I'm not too sure what to make of this story. I liked the idea, and it was confidently written, but I just couldn't help the feeling that I was missing something completely. It's dedicated to Ray Bradbury, this story, so it could be a reference to something he wrote.

6) Chivalry. This one is hilarious, and has a very unusual take on the Arthurian Grail legend. At her local Oxfam charity shop, the elderly Mrs. Whitaker comes across the Holy Grail on sale for 30p: it will look nice on her mantelpiece, next to the photo of her husband (God rest him). Along comes Galaad, Knight of the Round Table, of course, on his Grail quest with a scroll from Arthur, King of all the Britons, with a portrait of Galaad on it -- she'd expected a small card with a photo on it, but this is much more impressive. I love the idea of a frail old lady wandering down to a charity shop, and picking up various famed and legendary items, and knowing precisely what they are. The Apple of Youth, the Holy Grail, a Phoenix Egg, Aladdin's Lamp, et cetera. One of the funniest, and one of the cheeriest, too.

7) The Price. This is a rather strange and wonderful tale -- the one that is always mentioned on the blurbs -- of a cat that does a grim nightly battle to protect his adopted family. With the Devil. Not some Miltonian Lucifer, but a shape-shifting Devil. This one is also filled with references to Gaiman's own life -- failed screenplay writings at the BBC, his love of Lud-in-the-Mist by Hope Mirlees, et cetera. Again, this one is quite sad, and quite frightening too, especially for children, I would expect. Children cope very well with the weird, and stuff that would frighten adults tremendously (Coraline for example), but nobody likes to imagine their cat fighting for our lives!

8) How to Talk to Girls at Parties. This one has been in numerous anthologies and nominated for many awards. It tells the tales of Vic and Enn, two teenage boys, one who is good with the girls, and one who always ends up talking politics or something to the girls' parents, in the kitchen, shyly. Most people have probably had difficulty, at some point in their lives, talking to someone they fancied, so this story resonates with you straight from the beginning. At a rather strange party, which Vic has forced him to go to (whether Enn want to or not, and he doesn't), they encounter some Girls. Except these ones have been to the sun, and swum in sunfire pools with the whales; they have bifurcated fingers and names like Triolet. It's a very readable story, but not one that I can really classify as "funny", or "scary" ... it's just "good".

9) Sunbird. This is another one of my favourites, written in 2005, about the Epicurean Club -- a group of people who live for their food, and who have eaten everything there is to eat (wooly mammoths, Tasmanian tigers, too many different types of beetles) except a bird that they all except one of them doubts exists. Zebediah T. Crawcrustle, a homeless man (who is occasionally rich, before he remembers how much he hates being wealthy) who claims to be several thousand years old, takes the Epicurean Club on a quest to Egypt to eat from the legendary Sunbird. It's quite funny in places, and a rather happy story. I'm a sucker for stories with immortal (or seemingly immortal) characters, anyway, so Sunbird went down very well.

10) The Witch's Headstone. Chapter four of The Graveyard Book, and the first chapter Neil wrote; each chapter being relatively stand-alone. It tells of a small boy, Nobody, who lives in a graveyard, brought up by ghosts. He is absolutely abysmal at "fading" and all the other things the ghosts try to teach him, but when he meets the witch, Eliza, he befriends her and decides to travel to the Outside to buy her a proper gravestone... and gets into a bit of trouble. The Witch's Headstone is, without a doubt, my favourite story from this collection. It's extremely funny, clever and rather strange, and no one can read it without wanting to read more stories of Bod. It's a novelette-sized chunk, and you can in fact hear Gaiman reading it, for over an hour, to an audience hanging on his every word, on YouTube.

11) Instructions. This is the last story in M is for Magic, a rather beautiful poem that I've heard Neil read before. As he said then, when he told a story of someone who'd complained to him that authors shouldn't do poems, "it's not like it's costing you any extra", and personally, I think it really adds to the collection. My favourite of his poems is The Day the Saucers Came, but Instructions, while not a funny poem (in most places) is very well written, and takes us on a journey through many fairy-tale type lands. For some children it will probably be one of the first "proper" poems that they read, and I can think of no better introduction!

I think perhaps the best thing I can say about M is for Magic, instead of saying how good a collection it is, how entertaining and well-written it is, is to shove it into the hands of my youngest relatives as soon as possible. That said, I'm not entirely sure that some of the stories are appropriate for the 10-12 year age range advertised... Being an adult, though, I would say that.

For readers who own other Gaiman collections like Fragile Things and Smoke and Mirrors, a lot of the stories will already have been collected for them -- personally, I think it's worth the small price just for the extract from The Graveyard Book, but if you already own all the stories, then this is a very good gift for a younger relative or someone you want to introduce to Neil Gaiman.

Neil has also written a very short story for the Waterstones charity auction for PEN, about a monster which is like a were-wolf, but chairier, which can be read over at their site. They will also be selling the postcode stories in a little chapbook -- stories by Gaiman, J.K. Rowling, Margaret Atwood, et cetera, as well as one of the best stories submitted by the general public :)

For more information:

Amazon UK
Amazon US

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