Some Kind of Fairy Tale by Graham Joyce

Publisher – Gollancz

Published – Out Now (Published - 2012 - the oldest book in Mount TBR as part of the #TidyTheTBR challenge!)

Price – £3.56 paperback £2.43 Kindle eBook

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...

Books are a form of time travel. I can spend four or five hours reading and travels weeks or months in the company of characters and that seems totally normal and natural. Time is fickle we all know one second is the same length as the next in theory but who doesn’t sometimes think wow where has that decade come from (usually when I work out how long ago the 90s actually where) and you can be sometimes stuck in a moment of time and never realise how long reality passed you by. Time is magic; this gets explored in a fascinating way in Graham Joyce’s Some Kind of Fairy Tale where the characters all have to face up the idea of time flying by.

Peter is a modern-day farrier with big family and preparing in 2012 for Christmas with his parents. Then he gets the shock of finding his sister Tara is back after vanishing 20 years ago when she was 16. Tara is vague about where she has been and why she appears to have not aged much at all but eventually she claims she went to a strange magical land for six months and came back to find two decades have passed. Peter tries to get to the bottom of the mystery using tests and psychiatrists. Into the mix comes Richie Peter’s once best friend and Tara’s boyfriend who was accused of her murder when she vanished. He is now a struggling musician living in the moment. All though are being closely watched by someone less than happy at Tara’s reappearance.

This is a suitably bewitching tale. The start grabs you with Tara’s arrival and Joyce worked hard to make Peter’s world feel solid and normal. He is a very settled man with a very familiar family scene and then Tara’s appearance uproots everything. He’s suddenly staring at a big art of his life he has forgotten and perhaps a vanishing that impacted him in ways he didn’t understand. You’d think he would be overjoyed at Tara’s appearance by the gets quite resentful particularly when hearing her story which feels quite a realistic reaction. What is fascinating seeing someone faced with what is apparently a rebellious teenage sister again and realising you are no longer the teenager they knew. Peter sees his life of responsibilities, work and family and likes it that way. He seeks Tara to come clean on the real reason for her vanishing so life can return to normal.

Witch Richie we get a character stuck in the moment of his youth. We see immediately after he got into a lot of trouble with the police when Tara vanished; and that experience has shaped him in a very different way to Peter. He is the teenager who never grew up -still obsessed with guitars, music and taking dope and you sense the pain of Tara’s disappearance is a big factor in those decisions. For him Tara’s reappearance is a chance to repair a damaged friendship with Peter (who seems far easier to accept his best male friend than his sister back in his life and relax his inhibitions too – which is an interesting choice but feels very plausible) and perhaps find a way to move on at last.

Tara is the more cryptic character as Joyce doesn’t want the reader to decide too soon if this was a real experience or not. She is herself fey and unknowable wearing sunglasses even indoors due to an apparent issue with the light. Taking her story on face value she is the teenager suddenly finding life has move don twenty years. I loved her description of strange fairyland where the land itself is strange and magical with colours you never see in our world (although it did seem very a very sex-obsessed community!) but I didn’t feel her own sense of dislocation now back in our world come out very often. She seemed a little too accepting of her situation and taking all the changes in her stride. I’d have liked to see a bit more of her inner conflict. There almost seemed a subplot of was this Tara who had she been replaced but it seems to fizzle away without much explanation.

What though really works is the plotting and the mystery. You want to get to the bottom of the mystery and Joyce slowly builds up signs that this part of England has many strange encounters in it that have gone on for a long time. This story fits I that rural fantasy tradition that writers such as Alan Garner, Susan Cooper, Liz Williams, and Juliet E McKenna are playing with as well taking ancient stories and placing a modern gaze on them. Magic is part of the land and the tradition.

Joyce is a lyrical writer never too showy but subtly guides us through the story and the character’s lives Those looking for epic showdowns of magic and humans may be disappointed but for me this was a tale exploring life and time and how those two things are not the same. We change subtly over the years and suddenly hardly recognise ourselves or those around us. We can be frozen in the wrong moment and uncomfortable with who we used to be or now are. Its chewy thoughtful contemporary fantasy that I think even in 2022 will still ring true to readers. Well worth your attention it will hover in your thoughts afterwards. I am glad I finally got to this book!