Some Kind of Fairy Tale
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By Graham Joyce
avg rating
2 reviews
Some Kind of Fairy Tale is a very English story. A story of woods and clearings, a story of folk tales and family histories. It is as if Neil Gaiman and Joanne Harris had written a Fairy Tale together. It is Christmas afternoon and Peter Martin gets an unexpected phonecall from his parents, asking him to come round. It pulls him away from his wife and children and into a bewildering mystery. He arrives at his parents house and discovers that they have a visitor. His sister Tara. Not so unusual you might think, this is Christmas after all, a time when families get together. But twenty years ago Tara took a walk into the woods and never came back and as the years have gone by with no word from her the family have, unspoken, assumed that she was dead. Now she’s back, tired, dirty, dishevelled, but happy and full of stories about twenty years spent travelling the world, an epic odyssey taken on a whim. But her stories don’t quite hang together and once she has cleaned herself up and got some sleep it becomes apparent that the intervening years have been very kind to Tara. She really does look no different from the young women who walked out the door twenty years ago.
Peter’s parents are just delighted to have their little girl back, but Peter and his best friend Richie, Tara’s one time boyfriend, are not so sure. Tara seems happy enough but there is something about her. A haunted, otherworldly quality. Some would say it’s as if she’s off with the fairies. And as the months go by Peter begins to suspect that the woods around their homes are not finished with Tara and his family…
Reviews
Read with Gloucester Book Club.
I would have preferred it if the ambiguity was still there as to whether the fairytale was real or not. Having the old lady say that it happened to her sort or confirmed it to me. I liked the psychological aspect and think it would have been better to have turned out to be a psychological issue than true. It reminded me of Life or Pi.
This is my book group’s December read. A work of speculative fiction, it won the British Fantasy Society’s novel of the year award in 2013. Chosen with some trepidation, I really wasn’t sure, but I was looking for a novel with a link to Christmas. So I took the chance and I’m really glad I did. A tale of enchantment indeed. A young woman, missing from home for 20 years turns up on Christmas Eve saying she’s been traveling the world, but where has she really been?
It’s a story about relationships, things not being as they seem, and the power of a parallel world. The relationship between past and present, less of a connection and more of an overlay, because the past is always with us.
Joyce writes charmingly, and I found myself quite mesmerized. So what started as a tentative choice, was vindicated, for me anyway. I just hope the rest of my book club feel the same!
