Introducing Fern Capel

I'll quote a lengthy paragraph from the first chapter of Jan Siegel's Prospero's Children.  I am tempted to quote something about the elemental mermaid from the rather gripping, rather fantastic prologue, but the novel really gets going with the introduction of our main character: so sensible, so grounded Fernanda Capel.

That was the beginning, she decided long afterward.  The meeting at the gallery, the sense of menace, the picture.  The incident seemed trivial enough at the time but it left her feeling vaguely perturbed, as if the outlying penumbra of some far-flung shadow had brushed the borderline of her bright safe world, or she had caught a few isolated notes of an eerie music which would soon come booming from every corner of the universe, obliterating all other sound.  The events of that extraordinary and terrifying summer became perhaps easier to assimilate because she was in some sort prepared: from the moment of that initial encounter an unfamiliar atmosphere began to seep into her life, unsettling her, unbalancing her cultivated equilibrium, making her vulnerable, unsure, receptive to change.  She was sixteen years old, well-behaved, intelligent, motivated, a product of the Eighties in which she lived, viewing the world with a practical realism engendered by the early death of her mother and the responsibilities which had devolved on her as a result of it.  Her father's easygoing manner had acquired its undercurrent of anxiety from that time, left alone with a small daughter and smaller son, but it was Fern who had gradually taken charge of the household, trading au pair for housekeeper, seeing the bills were paid, bossing her surviving parent, attempting to boss her younger brother.  She had coasted through puberty and adolescence without rebellion or trauma, avoiding hard drugs, excessive alcohol, and underage sex.  Her future was carefully planned, with no room for surprises.  University; a suitable career; at some point, a prudent marriage.  She thought of herself as grown-up but behind the sedate facade she was still a child, shutting out the unknown with illusions of security and control.  That summer the illusions would be dissipated and the unknown would invade her existence, transforming the self-possessed girl into someone desperate, frightened, uncertain, alone--the raw material of an adult.


--Jan Siegel, Prospero's Children, A Del Rey Book, Random House: New York, 2001.  Pages 16-17.

Now some will say that there's far too much telling and not enough showing in the above paragraph, and I can see the point of such an observation.  I can also see the point of laying out the larger trajectory of Fern's summer, her transformation, in one such paragraph and then devoting three hundred pages to the How of that summer, that transformation.  Desperation, fright, uncertainty, isolation: those are crucial ingredients of the stew of life, the factors without which we may never mature.

Fern Capel's career spans three books: Prospero's Children, The Dragon Charmer, and The Witch Queen.  I recall reading somewhere that Jan Siegel was interested in taking the child-hero of the classics of the fantasy field--the Narnia books, The Dark is Rising books, and so forth--from that special, fantastic, and haunted childhood into adulthood.  For as we all know, stories never really end, not even when the books are unwritten . . . .

"There Is A Tide In The Affairs of Women . . ."

Or, "But Actium, Lost For Cleopatra's Eyes"
--Byron's opening to Canto VI of Don Juan:


'There is a tide in the affairs of men
Which taken at the flood'--you know the rest,
And most of us have found it, now and then;
At least we think so, though but few have guessed
The moment, till too late to come again.
But no doubt every thing is for the best--
Of which the surest sign is in the end:
When things are at the worst they sometimes mend.


There is a tide in the affairs of women
'Which taken at the flood leads'--God knows where.
Those navigators must be able seamen
Whose charts lay down its current to a hair;
Not all the reveries of Jacob Behmen
With its strange whirls and eddies can compare:--
Men with their heads reflect on this and that--
But women with their hearts or heaven knows what!


And yet a headlong, headstrong, downright she,
Young, beautiful, and daring--who would risk
A throne, the world, the universe, to be
Beloved in her own way, and rather whisk
The stars from out the sky, than not be free
As are the billows when the breeze is brisk--
Though such a she's a devil (if that there be one)
Yet she would make full many a Manichean.


Thrones, worlds, et cetera, are so oft upset
By commonest Ambition, that when Passion
O'erthrows the same, we readily forget,
Or at the least forgive, the laving rash one.
If Anthony be well remembered yet,
'Tis not his conquests keep his name in fashion,
But Actium, lost for Cleopatra's eyes,
Outbalance all the Caesar's victories.


He died at fifty for a queen of forty;
I wish their years had been fifteen and twenty,
For then wealth, kingdoms, worlds are but sport--I
Remember when, though I had no great plenty
Of worlds to lose, yet still, to pay my court, I
Gave what I had--a heart:--as the world went, I
Gave what was worth a world; for worlds could never
Restore me those pure feelings, gone for ever.


--Lord Byron

Minerva, Mermaid: sculpture mix: sea foam glazing; copper wire.