Mechanical Magic

David Almond's writing is deceptively simple, like Ernest Hemingway's, whose story "A Clean, Well-Lighted Place" first inspired Almond with the desire to be a writer (qtd. in Latham 2). His work is often described as "lyric," a term that summarizes without necessarily capturing its rhythmic cadences and striking imagery. Most of Almond's books begin arrestingly: in Skellig, a boy finds a "filthy and pale and dried out" (1) person lying in the garage of his new home; in Kit's Wilderness, a group emerges, triumphant, out of "nameless darkness into the shining valley" (3); in The Fire-Eaters, a "small, wild-eyed, bare-chested man" (2) pierces his cheeks with skewers in front of a jeering, somewhat repulsed crowd. From haunted beginnings, the tales progress with the clarity of conscious dreams, leading the reader through dark fears and luminous hopes to resonant, ambiguous conclusions that echo in the unconscious after the book is closed. Almond's books pulse between binary oppositions that he allows to remain in tension, fueling the imaginative experience by deliberately refusing the closure of resolution.

David Almond: Memory and Magic is a competent introduction to Almond's life and works. It provides a useful biography and bibliography, along with thematic readings of Almond's major writings for children and adults, with an emphasis upon his young adult novels. For high school and undergraduate students interested in Almond's work, this book will be invaluable; for researchers, while the work does not innovate or startle, it does lay the groundwork, one hopes, for more daring criticism that engages with Almond's dark luminosity, the stark luxuriance of his imagination and narrative style.

The book opens with a chronology of the major events in Almond's life, proceeds to a short biography with material from interviews published here for the first time, and then discusses Almond's writing through Clay (2005). As readers of his work might surmise, Almond grew up in northern England, in a large Catholic family. He was exposed to the reality of death early, when first a younger sister and then his father died prematurely. Although he always wanted to be a writer, Almond spent many years doing other things to earn a living: postman, brush salesman, and teacher, as well as editing Panurge, a fiction journal, before his stories found their audience.

Late in his twenties, Almond began publishing stories for adults, first in magazines and then in two collections (Sleepless Nights [1985] and A Kind of Heaven [1997]). Not until the publication of Skellig (1998) did he find his vocation and his audience. Since then he has published five novels, two collections of short stories, and a picture book, and has written and had produced two plays. His books have been honored both in Great Britain and the United States with the Whitbread Children's Book of the Year, the Smarties Book Prize, and the Michael L. Printz Award, among others. Thanks to the success of these young adult novels, Almond can now afford to write full time, with the happy result that he produces one or two new works every couple of years.

Almond's work can be classified as magic realism in its matter-of-fact blending of realistic and fantasy elements; indeed, he has acknowledged the inspiration of such writers as Gabriel García Márquez and Jorge Luis Borges, as well as William Blake. Latham's introduction to the book provides a definition of magic realism alongside an overview of Almond's major themes: development, liminality, the miraculous in the everyday, darkness, death, memory, and the imagination. Subsequent chapters describe each major work, beginning with Counting Stars, a collection of autobiographical short stories written before Skellig but not published until 2002. Latham explains that the collection "serves as a transitional work between the adult books and the young adult books, and as such provides an introduction to many of the themes and images that permeate the adolescent novels" (15). The novels Kit's Wilderness (1999...