The Guardian’s podcast this weekend included Jonathan Stroud reading from Ptolomey’s Gate, the third and final book in the Bartimaeus Trilogy.
It seems like so many things are ending… the warm weather of Indian Summer seems to have finally worn out its extended lease, the month is ending, and we are finally both entering and leaving October Country. I have always loved the metaphor that Bradbury presents in this series of stories, in that ‘undiscovered country’ of imagination. I think the October Country is where my imagination lives most of the time, but it’s only in the autumn that others join me there.
I don’t mean that I’m a Halloween person necessarily — I’m not all that fond of being importuned by costumed little strangers questing for candy — but the sort of melancholic half-light of time changes and shadows, slivers of moon and the wind rustling across dryness of stalks and leaves makes room for the senses, seems to speak to another part of the mind. In the sunfiltered days of autumn, before the endless rains and the dregs of the year, some of the best dreams are yet waiting to be discovered.
When I was very small and fiction-deprived, I read Lucy Maud Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gables over and over and over and over. Before I ever knew what it was, from ages nine through eleven I wrote what is now called ‘fan fiction,’ my own sequels and new endings to the novel, where I either wrote out Gilbert altogether, or added another boy who wasn’t such a git — and then I forgot about it before growing older and learning, safely away at boarding school in high school, that there were actual sequels to my hands-down-favorite-heart-pulling-vocabulary-expanding novel of all time. So you can see how the news I learned via Fuse#8 has me shrieking blindly at the screen, “NO!!!! NO!!!! NO!!!!!!” Because honestly — a prequel novel before Green Gables? NO!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
