Part I of a series on out-of-print novels.
Joan North’s The Whirling Shapes (1967) is a whimsical novel of the mid-twentieth century. If you have not heard of it, that is not surprising: it was published as a children’s book and is out-of-print. I would argue that this all-ages book could be marketed as adult fantasy or meta-fiction. The novel relies on sequences of mirroring and parallelism, the study of art and dreams, and the “psychedelic” trips the characters undergo to battle the whirling shapes.
It is very much a psychedelic ’60s novel in which dreams and reality merge. The whirling shapes escape an artist’s mind and his paintings. Through the medium of art and dreams, North examines the mechanical society that critics and activists wanted to change in the ’60s.
“Perfectly loathsome,” thinks Liz, who has been hustled by her artsy, yoga-practicing Aunt Paula to see her cousin James Mortlake’s first art exhibition. His drawings and paintings are “studies of grayish spirals and whirls seen at different angles against different backgrounds.”
James is so obsessed with the whirling shapes that he cannot leave his studio after a certain point. He “has to deal with them.”
There are other mysterious things in London. Liz is enchanted by a beautiful, well-lighted house on the heath. Her cousin Miranda, who listens constantly to “wild” pop music, says it does not exist. Great-Aunt Hilda Harbottle, a retired anthropologist who lives in the flat upstairs, says that she personally is responsible for “the house… that isn’t always there.”
And here we enter 1960s psychedelic territory.
Aunt Hilda imagined the house with the help of an egg-shaped piece of wood, carved from the sacred tree of a Central Indian tribe – the Tree of Dreaming.
“It was a sort of dreaming true – a creative thinking. I handled the wood, I said the short incantation they had taught me, I imagined a house, a doorway… I was remembering the little cottage in the country where I used to stay with my grandmother and how it looked at night when I was in the garden and the lights were shining on the grass.”
Liz’s enchantment with the house mirrors Aunt Hilda’s love of her grandmother’s house. And it is significant that Aunt Hilda creates the house the night Liz arrives. Its beauty balances James’ whirling shapes, and the well-lit house links the oldest (Hilda) and the youngest (Liz) in the family. This short book is beautifully-constructed, with much mirroring, parallelism, and concern for the future. James Mortlake, in his twenties, is the unhappiest character. And this, we learn later, has to do with his family’s history as exploitative industrialists.
And then the whirling shapes, which encircle and attack unwary humans, arrive in a cold gray fog. Gradually, the world around the Farrels’ house disappears in the fog as the whirling shapes grow stronger. And finally, after their house disintegrates, Liz, Aunt Hilda, James Mortlake, Miranda and Tom, a medical student who is her boyfriend, enter the portal – the doorway of the house that isn’t always there – and embark on “psychedelic trips” in fantastical territory to destroy the whirling shapes.
Each person undergoes a different fantastic experience. Aunt Hilda meets her younger self, who saucily insults her appearance and then more kindly guides her across a stream; James Mortlake finds himself in the polluted gray world of slag and filthy lakes; Miranda and Tom see their future and then walk through a forest where they face Blake-ian tigers. Liz’s task is saved for last. What happens next is both fascinaing and whimsical.
This book has a ’60s feeling. You can feel North’s idealism and hope for the future, written from a certain liberal perspective.
Where is that portal, we wonder?
She wrote two other novels, The Cloud Forest and The Light Maze.
