Review: The Cottingley Secret
A magical book, writes Brian Byrne. It is, after all, about fairies. And fairies are the essence of magic.
Few of us admit to believing in them. But equally there are few who, somewhere in the depths of our childhood memories, can't resurrect some level of belief. It was a comfort when the real world was tough and gross and frightening, that we could depend on something, some beings, which we couldn't see but which were nice, and friendly, and safe.
It is precisely because the world had recently been so tough and gross and frightening almost a hundred years ago that many were ready to believe in fairies after two young cousins, Elsie, the older, and Frances, showed photographs they had taken near the stream at the bottom of their garden in a village in Yorkshire. The iconic one is Frances looking dreamily at a parade of fairies playing in the grass.
It was a prank, made possible by Elsie's skill as an artist and as a photographer's assistant. A secret meant only for their family. But, as a kindly Irish teacher in Hazel Gaynor's fictionalised account of it said, 'small villages can't keep secrets … they have a funny way of setting them free, and who knows where they'll end up?'
The Cottingley fairies secret ended up in the hands of 'important men from London' in 1920 who included the writer Arthur Conan Doyle. He and the other 'important men' declared the photographs to be genuine. After the trauma of the Great War, the nation needed something nice to believe in. And it did, mostly, when serious articles were written about the matter. The two girls later went on to live their lives separated by the Atlantic Ocean, but kept their secret until sixty years on when Elsie finally confessed in public. Though Frances's belief, that she had watched fairies at the spot ever before they went to take the pictures, never wavered to the day she died.
The story is from Hazel Gaynor's own Yorkshire, one which she grew up with and which she believes today is the reason she was meant to become a writer, so that it could be the core of what is her fourth novel. That became a magical process in its own right.
The first scatter of fairy dust was in her discovery that a daughter of Frances was still alive. Christine Lynch lives in Belfast, and was very happy to meet Hazel and, even better, to give her access to Frances's own memoir about the events.
Then there's the kind of magic which Hazel practices herself. She takes an historical nugget from the early twentieth century time that she so obviously loves, and creates her own characters to tell a story in a way far more fascinating and accessible than would dry history or contemporary journalism. She developed the technique with her three novels before this one, and in The Cottingley Secret she has added a new thread to the weave. Fairy fantasy. Or is it fantasy?
This is a book of two times. Of Elsie and Frances and their prank in Yorkshire a century ago which took in so many eminent minds of the real world of then, and of a fictional young woman in a Dublin of today who has uncomfortable personal and business decisions to make. It is in the melding of their stories through which we can perhaps properly understand what happened in that small village.
The Cottingley fairies story is well documented, and has been regularly rehearsed down the decades since the photographs were first taken — on cameras which Hazel's narrative prompted me as a photographer to research with some interest. But her interpretation of it is … well, that word again, magical.
The Cottingley Secret switches between the narrative of a young girl in 1917 heading towards her teens and that of a young woman in the time of now. Hazel has found and written the voices of both, in textures and contexts that allow us believe we are listening to — and even are a part of — their actual lives.
Hazel's ability to describe locations and timeline backgrounds have been honed through her previous books. And her Cottingley as the reader experiences in this one is its real place, with real people. Even the fictional ones don't ask us to pause and wonder where actuality and imagination merge.
As we grow older it becomes less easy to write in the voice we had when we were children. Hazel remembers that voice, and in the character of Frances we hear her in her time and mind. Equally for Olivia in today, the young woman with modern emotions and concerns is alive right through to the last page. Making this to be one of those stories that you don't want to stop reading. And yet which, when you know you are close to the end, you do stop reading so that you can save a little to savour just that bit later.
Then, there are the fairies. This thread in Hazel Gaynor's latest book doesn't offer an explanation. It is the wondering if? Suggesting that she herself is still open to the essence of her story. Were there really, or are there, fairies?
We can believe or we can wonder. And if there isn't anything to wonder about, well, life is without magic.
The Cottingley Secret is published in the UK and Ireland on 7 September. A very special Kilcullen launch will be held in Woodbine Books on 15 September.
