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An unusual children's novel with elements of fantasy, horror, and healing via secret garden, about a girl whose drawings with a special pencil come to life in her dreams. It was very loosely adapted into the movie Paperhouse, and also into a TV series I haven't seen. This is the first Storr novel I've read, as her other books are very hard to find in the US.
Marianne begins drawing while bedridden for an extended period with an unnamed illness. She misses her school term, and gets a governess to teach her at home. Bored and frustrated, she quizzes the governess about her other students, and learns that she's also teaching a boy named Mark, who is partly paralyzed after having polio and is refusing to do the physical therapy that might allow him to to walk again. Marianne is baffled and fascinated by this: she's stuck in bed when she wants to get out, and Mark is supposed to get out but doesn't want to.
Marianne picks up a pencil that once belonged to her grandmother and draws a house in a grassy plain, with a boy's face looking out of the window.
That night she wakes and finds herself on the plain, looking up at the house. It feels more eerie than in her drawing, as her child's drawings with poorly proportioned flowers and grass look weird and alien when replicated in reality. She and the boy call to each other, but he can't let her in because the door doesn't have a knob and, he says, the house has no stairs.
The next day, Marianne draws in a doorknob and stairs. When she goes inside, she meets a boy who stays sitting on the windowsill, doesn't believe anything Marianne says, and refuses to come with her to verify some things (like the existence of stairs), not even when all he'd need to do is walk across the room.
Over a series of dreams, the boy is confirmed to be Mark. He eventually admits that he can't walk, but continues to deny that Marianne drew the house, and also denies anything Marianne tells him about things in the house that are out of his line of sight. Marianne gets obsessed with proving that she really can draw things into existence, and begins drawing all sorts of things that then appear in the dream. But when he still refuses to believe that she drew them, they get in a big fight. Angrily, Marianne draws some scary things into the picture to punish him...
There are sequences in this book that would have scared the living daylights out of me had I read it as a kid, and they're pretty unsettling even as an adult. Coexisting with that is the off-kilter comedy of the literal way that Marianne's drawings appear in dreams, with sausages on the floor because the drawing was getting too cluttered to put them anywhere else. There's also a delightful coziness and domestic magic in her ability to draw a cozy space.
The dream world is both a refuge from their real world, with comfort and companionship and even a safe place to practice physical therapy, and a reflection of it, reversed as reflections are, with the threats coming from without (Marianne's horrifying creatures) rather than within (illness). It's a short but complex work.
This unique novel is somewhat deniable fantasy, as it's never objectively confirmed that the Mark who appears in Marianne's dreams is the same Mark who exists in reality. He sure seems like an independent person rather than someone Marianne could dream up, though.
The illustrations are essential, as some are of Marianne's drawings, some are of her drawings come to life, and some are of the real world.
Marianne begins drawing while bedridden for an extended period with an unnamed illness. She misses her school term, and gets a governess to teach her at home. Bored and frustrated, she quizzes the governess about her other students, and learns that she's also teaching a boy named Mark, who is partly paralyzed after having polio and is refusing to do the physical therapy that might allow him to to walk again. Marianne is baffled and fascinated by this: she's stuck in bed when she wants to get out, and Mark is supposed to get out but doesn't want to.
Marianne picks up a pencil that once belonged to her grandmother and draws a house in a grassy plain, with a boy's face looking out of the window.
That night she wakes and finds herself on the plain, looking up at the house. It feels more eerie than in her drawing, as her child's drawings with poorly proportioned flowers and grass look weird and alien when replicated in reality. She and the boy call to each other, but he can't let her in because the door doesn't have a knob and, he says, the house has no stairs.
The next day, Marianne draws in a doorknob and stairs. When she goes inside, she meets a boy who stays sitting on the windowsill, doesn't believe anything Marianne says, and refuses to come with her to verify some things (like the existence of stairs), not even when all he'd need to do is walk across the room.
Over a series of dreams, the boy is confirmed to be Mark. He eventually admits that he can't walk, but continues to deny that Marianne drew the house, and also denies anything Marianne tells him about things in the house that are out of his line of sight. Marianne gets obsessed with proving that she really can draw things into existence, and begins drawing all sorts of things that then appear in the dream. But when he still refuses to believe that she drew them, they get in a big fight. Angrily, Marianne draws some scary things into the picture to punish him...
There are sequences in this book that would have scared the living daylights out of me had I read it as a kid, and they're pretty unsettling even as an adult. Coexisting with that is the off-kilter comedy of the literal way that Marianne's drawings appear in dreams, with sausages on the floor because the drawing was getting too cluttered to put them anywhere else. There's also a delightful coziness and domestic magic in her ability to draw a cozy space.
The dream world is both a refuge from their real world, with comfort and companionship and even a safe place to practice physical therapy, and a reflection of it, reversed as reflections are, with the threats coming from without (Marianne's horrifying creatures) rather than within (illness). It's a short but complex work.
This unique novel is somewhat deniable fantasy, as it's never objectively confirmed that the Mark who appears in Marianne's dreams is the same Mark who exists in reality. He sure seems like an independent person rather than someone Marianne could dream up, though.
The illustrations are essential, as some are of Marianne's drawings, some are of her drawings come to life, and some are of the real world.
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I have an assortment of her other books - her ones for younger children, like the Clever Polly & the Stupid Wolf series, other children’s ones with fantasy elements (I really like the Chinese egg but the sequel had a really odd development that I didn’t get on with) and she did some YA. All her characters are always very good (Storr was actually a psychiatrist).
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Oh, i love this book. I read it as a kid, and the concept of long-term convalescence confused me, and yes, there were bits with the rocks that were very scary ad a tween. Don't blink. Don't close your eyes.
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