Archaeological Adventures: Stag Boy, by William Rayner

Hello! (It’s Christmas now on Pile of Leaves, so I’ve gone a bit cheery. Blame the fumes from the brandy cream.)

So this is one of my texts, these children’s novels I’m after, where acts of archaeology summon something dangerous or revelatory. Often I explain my quest with reference to Alan Garner’s Owl Service, that story of the many unhappy returns of Welsh myth upon whoever reads too much into it. Often, though, there is time travel too; this summer in a charity shop, between applying to do this research and finding I would be, I turned up a time slip novel by William Rayner which seemed to fit: Big Mister.

This study ought to be archaeological in itself, and Rayner’s was a name I’d never heard of, though Big Mister’s blurb suggested it was highly regarded at time of publication. I am a superstitious character, and to leave it behind would have felt like my own rejection of the PhD application. But it was whilst Googling William Rayner that I discovered his other novel: Stag Boy.

Can we glory in that title for a couple of minutes. Stag Boy. Doesn’t have much in the way of nuance or atmosphere, does it? The Owl Service / Stag Boy. Try saying it aloud – imagine, maybe, that you’re a parent asking after it in your local bookshop. The Times Education Supplment has called it a work of ‘great beauty and strength … with a welcome vein of broad humour.’ Ideal for your kids. Look at it queued up for reading on my shelf for reading: The Whispering Knights … The Waterfall Box … Whispers in the Graveyard … Stag Boy.

It does sound filthy, doesn’t it? And lo and behold, it is! It’s a sexed-up version of The Owl Service. Jim has come home from the city to the countryside, and here’s the girl he used to be closest to, Mary (sometimes it seems all the girls in the children’s books I read are called Mary, or Susan) and of course she’s lovelier than ever and gives him a different feeling to the one he used to have. But Mary prefers the handsome, clever and rich Edward. (Edward forms part of her imagined ‘future world … of parties and dances … amusing people, clever people, rich people’ while Jim reminds her of the wild and silly let’s pretend of childhood amongst hills and trees.)

Edward is strong and likes hunting; Jim is asthmatic and likes hanging round spinneys and deserted cottages. But when Jim puts on the ancient antlered helm from the strangely undisturbed cave, he finds he can enter the body of the stag, be powerful and playful, embarrass the hunt by leading it in circles. Will Mary notice the change?

The mysticism of Herne the Hunter is actually handled very nicely, which is to say, there are some potently disturbing sequences, particularly a dream sequence with a mysterious exchange, ‘his answers mounting from some deep unguessed part of himself.’

Again and again the word came, like a pulse: ‘Blood.’
‘What seals the great bargain?’
‘Blood.’
The dance of the antlered man changed. There came into Jim’s head the words: ‘Paid and bought.’

The scene is set for a hackneyed but basically interesting take on this masculine magic, these old orders. There might be a bravery in tackling the erotic aspect of this encounter with myth, which Garner’s novel somehow leaves out, though it includes a whole lot of things. A lot, of course, rests on Mary and her response to Jim and to this slightly ridiculous macho mysticism of antlers and inheritance. You suspect a woman might be best placed to write a novel of this kind – but who knows?

Well, things turn a lot less subtle when Jim blurts out his special power to Mary, and follows up his revelation with a visit to her garden in stag form. Mary, at this point, is of course naked (‘I’m so hot,’ she said aloud. ‘I’m so hot.’) and she’s bowled over by this uncanny visitation. You’re still, by your fingernails, clinging to the notion that this might be a slightly misjudged but overall interesting addition to the genre, when Jim the Stag comes to Mary’s window with a rose in his teeth.

Not long after this, Mary is riding round on Jim the Stag by moonlight, still naked, and they’re both having a wonderful time: Jim gets over his asthma and Edward turns out to be an idiot, and what’s worse, unromantic – desperate for a quick fumble in the woods. Edward couldn’t summon the magic sexual power of the stags, not for money.

So it’s stilted and clichéd and its vision of sexuality, even teenager sexuality, is superficial to say the least. None of this makes the novel uninteresting, of course, bearing in mind the recommendations from the likes of the TES and Junior Bookshelf.

And if you don’t care about any of that, the cover is beautiful – and appears to feature David Bowie quite heavily. Unfortunately, though, there are no gnomes.