We found my brother in the skybog.
It was me that found him.
…
Boson Quirk is dead, face-down in a bog of stars. Almost everyone in Carrick said that the boy was a monster, and now Fermion is sure that the townspeople are looking sideways at her, wondering if she’ll go the way of her cursed, mad twin. When a new voice rises inside her, Fermion begins to wonder the same thing. The voice tells her that the answer to Boson’s Affliction lies on the Other Island, the one that everyone says is bristling with gods and monsters. But what waits for her there? Surely it is madness to pursue the answer?
Tantony is the new novel by Ananda Braxton-Smith – before you dive in, make sure to check out Ananda’s first novel Merrow (a CBCA 2011 Notables book). For fans of Merrow, Tantony will now form the second of what is to be a Secrets of Carrick series. Horray!
Boson Quirk is dead, face down in a bog of stars... I read the first line of this blurb months back and I knew that this was a book I had to read immediately, so as soon as it rocked up on my doorstep I wasted no time in getting stuck in. When you read an entire novel with your heart in your mouth and you get up to page 22 and your eyes are misting over, you can be sure that this is no ordinary story.
Approaching a book by Ananda Braxton-Smith is akin to suddenly find yourself as a small child again and approaching an adult with a book in hand. There are writers and then there are storytellers and Braxton-Smith is the latter in spades. Her writing doesn’t just convey a hypnotic and otherworldly voice unlike any other, it is a language in itself. You know this is not some fantasy/sci-fi/dystopian novel that uses token words to convey a certain token world – this is total immersion. I just want to hold a cup of cocoa, curl up in my doona and have Ananda read on and on.
I could almost drown in what is sometimes just sheer poetic beauty: “She was tipping his head back by the chin to look at him eye-straight. He was smiling like her face was a blossoming meadow and he had all day to spend in it.” I could spend all day picking out the passages that I think are beyond gorgeous.
Tantony is a novel about duality – the main characters are twins Fermion and Boson, one sane and one crazy. It is about the main island where the ‘normal’ people live and another island that appears eerily on the horizon only to disappear again, an island full of ‘monsters’. It is about what is considered right and wrong, what is Goldly and what is monstrous, all painted in Braxton-Smiths strokes of black and white. One moment there is beauty (“He said all purgatories are private places, and you can’t visit folk there.”), the next there is unbridled grimness (“My heart was full of little murders. Just the right size for these two.”), where both fight and struggle with each other to become one . At the heart of it is a story about the duality in each human, fighting mental illness and a life-affirming message that is it not a sin to be different.
I love it. I love how you can go to the middle of the book and find that it is actually two stories in one. I love how characters from Merrow make a cameo appearances. I love the fact that I might see Fermion again. I love how a book this real and organic can be published in this current sterile and plastic publishing environment.
This is an incredible book, rich and dense like mud cake and at times not easy to read, but one to be slowly savoured. This is my voice of the year. It might be an early (and big) call, but this is my Book of The Year. I don’t think I’ll find another one as beautiful, scary, challenging, confronting or as unique. It makes me feel alive. My heart still beats thinking about it. This is a good thing.
PS - Don’t you think the cover is beautiful? You also have to check out the inside artwork – full of birds and bees. Also, despite only making a wisp of a reappearance, I am in love with Scully Slevin.
>> Visit black dog books to find out more about Tantony
>> This review also appears here at Goodreads.com
Interview with Ananda Braxton-Smith
I’m lucky enough to grab a few moments with the beautiful, but busy-as-a-bee Ms Braxton-Smith to ask her all about her new novel and obtain these awesomely detailed responses about how she thinks, works and basically breathes.
Ananda, Merrow celebrates its 1st birthday this year and Tantony is out – congratulations! The title of your novel Tantony – what does this means?
Tantony comes from the legend of the Tantony Pig. The story goes that St Antony was very fond of meditating and praying alone in natural places. The Devil got mad with the saint’s perpetual goodness and sent a demon-boar to attack him while he was praying in a cave. The boar went the saint viciously, but Antony refused to fight back. At meeting such trustful holiness, the vicious demon-boar changed into a friendly little pink pig. The pig became St Antony’s companion, known as St Antony’s pig. After time it became the ‘Tantony pig’. One of its meanings was the swineherd’s favourite piglet in any litter of piglets … and was usually the runt. I like the story because it suggests the possibility of transforming of our own rage into understanding.
Did the title come first and you worked the story around it, or did it come after the story was finished?
The story came first. The title wasn’t decided until the very last moment. It was called Mooncalf at first.
Tantony is the second of the “Secrets of Carrick” series – did you intentionally set out to write a sequel to Merrow?
No, I didn’t. When I wrote Merrow, I just thought of it as a one-off story. But toward the end I began to think that Carrick could hold any amount of comin-of-age stories, and that they didn’t have to lead one into another like in a serialised set of stories. They could just happen at the same time, as they do in life, and any overlaps could be random and unplanned, likewise as they are in life. So I started thinking of a structure for the stories and hit upon the landscape structure; Merrow was set up the isolated northern cliffs, Tantony is set on the western edge of the high bog lands, and any others will be set in the south and/or east.
How many books will make up the Secrets of Carrick series?
Well, certainly three … and maybe four. Four compass directions; four stories, see. That’s the idea. Writing being what it is, whether it will happen so is whole other thing of course.
Can you let us in on what the experience was like writing Tantony?
It was much harder than writing Merrow. I enjoyed every moment of writing that, maybe because I had nothing to lose. I felt like I was being watched over my shoulder by somebody very critical while writing Tantony, it was a weird and obstructive feeling. I had to breathe through it every five minutes. So it was tiring.
The character of Fermion’s bipolar twin, Boson, caused some emotional upset to write. And the terrible loss to his parents when he dies. These were hard, very hard, to work on for weeks and weeks at a time. On the other hand, I loved writing the ‘monsters’ on the Other Island. They made me laugh out loud.
An unexpected element of writing this one was that I often didn’t know what was going to happen moment-to-moment. It was an exercise in trust, and in meditative breathing. But it also meant I was more and more caught up in an unfolding story.
As you’ve mentioned, Tantony deals with themes of twins and having two sides to one personality in parable to mental illness, particularly bi-polar disorder. What came first? The story of the twins Fermion and Boson or the theme – a need to speak out about mental illness?
It was always a story about the twins. Boson’s affliction, Fermion’s lost childhood, the family’s disintegration and reintegration were all the point for me. I tend not to write conscious issue stories. Everything human is an ‘issue’, or can be seen as one, but for me the moment the issue takes over from the singular humanity, the heart of the story is gone.
The Trepan: mediveil cure for mental illness
Having said that, mental ‘illness’ is a very interesting thing indeed. Different behaviours have been seen as crazy at different times in history, and a lot of that diagnosis has to do with gender, race, class and age expectations rather than any timeless, universal standard of sense. I was interested in Boson as a type of consciousness, a way of being in the world, rather than a ‘sickness’. Many of the characters around him aren’t particularly ‘sane’; his mother has become verbally paralysed, his father has withdrawn from all responsibility, his little brother is living in a hole in the ground, the monks believe he is possessed by demons, and the followers believe he is possessed by angels. They’re all crazy!
It’s just his type of crazy is not acceptable in his world.
Tantony is so intricate in it’s descriptions of the island life and of myth and legend, how much research did you do (what did this consist of) and how long did it take?
I read a lot about the Natural History of wetlands, their types and creation, their creatures and habitats, their flora and folklore. This reading suggested many, many ideas for the actual characters and story.
I read about turfcutting, modern and ancient. I studied coracles, making them and sailing them. The stories of St Cuthbert and other Celtic hermit-saints, St Brendan and his sea journey in a leather boat, and a book called Passionate Wanderers, about Celtic Christian monastics, all helped build an idea of the Other Island and Dogsbody.
Photo of a leather coracle (boat) as described in Tantony
I read accounts of lives lived as conjoined twins, small people, and other human variations; most of them were online. As were my sources for the experience of bipolarity from the inside. They were on You Tube. I pored over medieval bestiaries. Not to mention basic medieval research on life in the early middle ages; food, work, houses, clothes, religious beliefs, church lore, science and medicine, etc. There was so much. I watched dvds on the islands of Britain, and the bogs of Ireland, and the natural history of the Irish sea.
Among others, I read Taliesin for the rhythm of Celtic poetics, ‘Beowulf’ for some old English sensibility, and any amount of Yeats collections of Irish stories for flavour. I read a bunch of the world’s creation myths to create a new one for the monsters. So much. I researched generalities for three months before writing anything. Same as for Merrow. Then I kept researching particularities as I went, for another seven months or so. I never stop researching.
What surprises me most is the voice of the novel, its like from a completely different time and place – almost speaking in a different language, Ananda how do you achieve this?
That’s a hard question. Where does any writer’s word-hoard come from? Quite practically, I suppose it’s a function of considering what the character thinks they know. Anybody is only made of what they think they know about the world. My characters know what they know, and it’s nothing like what we think we know; they are a mix of very real pagan and early Christian knowledge, a close relation to the earth and the seasons, an expectation of work and hardship … even a pride in it. Their moral worthiness is not connected to wealth, but to tradition and family and this work. We are a mix of science and vague spiritualism, our separation from our own nature and even the nature of the world, and an expectation of self-satisfaction. Our moral worthiness is connected to our thin-ness and our wealth. We are very different consciousnesses. That’s why the islanders sound so Otherwise. They are.
Language-wise, they speak in a kind of straightforward all-purpose rural dialect … much of it inspired by southern America writers like William Falkner. I considered my own family’s tricks of speech, and stretched and embroidered them. Then I started collecting other people’s colourful phrases and tweaking them. The islanders use a lot of compound words. This comes from the Celtic poet’s habit of creating new words to describe that which is as yet undescribed. If there’s no word to say exactly the thing you want, the theory goes, just make one up by joining two suitable words together. Shakespeare did it, and it’s fun. Children do it. When my cousin was a little boy he saw his first caterpillar and not having the word for it, he came running to say there was a ‘snake-mouse’ in the garden.
I also borrowed lots of British dialect words from collections of such. Clarty, stolchy and queach are three I found in a book called Chosen Words, all to do with the quality of mud and earth. Gruntle came from one of these books too … I love this word. It means a nose, and gives you a new view of the real meaning of disgruntled.
More than anything, though, I just let myself go without censorship. I let it fall out. Obviously I worry it’s all going to be Too Much and so forth, but in the end I guess I just don’t care if it is. Maybe that’s why it comes out sounding like that.
I’m just very happy you like it. That it works. It’s all that really matters.
Ananda’s Visual Inspiration Photo Board
Here are a few of the huge amount of photos that Ananda collected to help put together the story of Tantony, that she has kindly decided to share:
Medieval Monsters such as these appear in a book dug up from a bog by heroine Fermion: Dog Headed Man, Two-Headed Child and a No-Header
Here Be Monsters: Two-Headed People from a Medievil French Text
Marfans Syndrome: inspiration behind one of the "Monsters" called The Bone Child banished to The Other Island
Hypertrichosis: inspiration for the "monsters" described as being covered completely in hair
Saint Chad and a Whale: inspiration for the climactic seafaring journey described in Tantony
An Irish Bloodhound: inspiration for Fermion's faithful companion, Mungo
The Shore Nesting Imperial Shags that appear along the coastline of the Island of Carrick
Tantony is available now at all good book stores! Once you’ve read it, please share your reviews and opinions here at Goodreads.com (as Ananda would love to know your thoughts) or in the comments below!
