LIBRARIES: STRONGHOLDS AND GARDENS OF THE IMAGINATION.

At a time when many people, including unfortunately some librarians, seem determined to misrepresent the literate, it is important to remember that the digitised and electronic library is not going to interest those people who are not readers already. As a place of enchantment the actual library, with actual books, will continue to work real and extraordinary magic in the 21st century. Edited version of an address given at the Alia 2000 conference 23-26 October 2000

The first library I remember was my father's, in our house deep in the green, wooded countryside of southwestern France. A great collector of books old and new, many on esoteric or obscure subjects, he had had a room set aside from the beginning in the cavernous old place he and my mother had bought when it was not much more than a haunted ruin, for just this purpose. As the house took shape again, the golden lit flesh reknitting over its beautiful stone bones, this room became a hallowed place, a place of light and shadows, cool in summer, warm in winter. Because my father is a romantic from way back, it had a fireplace and a large winged chair beside it, a desk made of fragrant Indonesian wood, quills and silver inkstand and leather bound blotter at the ready, for when note taking mania took hold of you; blue toile de Jouy curtains featuring scenes of 18th century bucolic life, a Persian carpet decorated with longtailed birds alighting in marvellous trees; and of course, books. Books in large wide open shelves of beechwood, built specially for the purpose by a local artisan with an accent so thick it sounded like he was speaking through a mouthful of the local fouasse cake; in antique bookcases with doors that were like fretted screens, so that the books behind them looked as if they were in a kind of beautiful prison; books behind glass and in sandalwood chests.

It was a place no child was ever allowed in on their own; but sometimes Papa would take you in there, sit you on his knee and read from some old collection of Perrault's stories, or the fables of Jean de la Fontaine, illustrated by Gustave Dore. Other times, he would take down the huge volume of reproductions of Hieronymus Bosch's art, and point out to his quaking offspring the hellish consequences of misbehaving, of losing your footing on the ladder of holiness, or else, driven by another mood, pull out from the sandalwood chests bound copies of 19th century magazines and read out ancient faits divers, or human interest stories that seemed, strangely enough, to pop up again from time to time, almost unchanged, in the local newspapers.

Later, as we got older, we were allowed little by little to enter the library on our own, but no book was ever to leave it. You had to read the books in Papa's library in that place only; sitting in the winged chair, or at the desk. And that seemed such an amazing privilege, such a wondrous thing.

Of course, we children had our own `library' of books elsewhere in the house, shelves crammed with the pink backed children's hardbacks of the Bibliotheque Rose, and the green backs of the Bibliotheque Verte, dogeared paperback collections of traditional stories from all over the world, and magnificent illustrated editions of the Thousand and One Nights, the Ramayana, Greek mythology; Tintin and Asterix, and, later huge 19th century novels: by Balzac, Hugo, Feval, Gautier. On those shelves were journeys and escapes and spells; but they weren't what we called the library. That word, spoken in rather overawed and excited tones, was reserved for Papa's library. In that room was all the mystery and strangeness and ordered beauty of another world; a world removed from yet strangely within the world we knew; a world you had to earn a place in, through patience and the gaining of wisdom, a world that beckoned, whose enchantment made time stand still. It is an image that stayed with me, and every time we went back to France as children--which was at last every two or three years--after having rushed around to rediscover toys and bedrooms, it was always the threshold of the library that drew me, to stand dreaming and hesitant looking in at the books, waiting for permission to be invited in.

An Australian public library

In Australia, Papa had a room full of crowded bookcases, but it was not the same. The books were much less glamorous, there was no atmosphere in the room itself, and besides, I'd discovered another enchanted place. For the other world that drew me in Australia was our local public library. The children's section was probably not very big in reality, but in my memory it is a kind of huge, secure place, far away from the grit and heat of the street, far away from the dull routine of school.

I was a good student, at least in fits and starts, but a rather bored one, having been raised on the rich treasure of stories, and not facts. In any case, at the rather modest parish school I went to, the only library was a couple of sets of glassfronted bookcases in the senior primary room; at home, we'd only been able to bring a few of our beloved Bibliotheque rose and verte with us, and insatiable reader that I was, I'd soon have dessicated from the need to imbibe stories if we children and Maman had not discovered the local library. That was my real education in English, the library; left alone by Maman to make my own pathways through English language children's books, I made wonderful discoveries, but also missed out on some marvellous things. Quietly stubborn, I made my reading decisions according to some rather strange criteria; sitting cross legged on the itchy carpet near the bookshelves, I scanned titles and blurbs with a keen eye. Magic and fairies and giants and trolls and other worlds always attracted me; anything that smelt of mundane routine I cast aside, and thus it that was I met, and loved dearly, Tove Jannsson and CS Lewis and Alan Garner and Patricia Wrightson and Leon Garfield and James Thurber and a host of others; but missed out on Laura Ingalls Wilder because I was sure a book with `house' in the title must be about housework; and that Tom's Midnight Garden must be about pushing wheelbarrows, or pulling out weeds, both things Papa used to try and force us to do; and I simply could not see why anyone would care about What Katy did at School! It wasn't till I was much older that I read those books, and loved them, and wished I'd met them much earlier.

What my mother lacked in knowledge of English language children's books, or classical English literature, she more than made up in knowledge of modern English adult literature. She it was who introduced us to Anthony Burgess and DH Lawrence and who scouted out Australian novels for us to read, as teenagers. When, in high school, the school librarian sent a note home querying my younger sister's wish to take out Martin Boyd's mildly racy novel Nuns in Jeopardy, my mother sent back a note informing the librarian that her daughter was perfectly capable of dealing with such things, having cut her teeth on Rabelais and Perrault! I'm not sure what the librarian thought of it ... but I noticed that afterwards the book was placed on a `Special Permission' shelf!

An Australian school library

Ah ... high school and the school library ... It too, became another world for me. Despite the mild wowserism that occasionally broke out a la Nuns in Jeopardy, it was a great place, and the librarians very pleasant people who did a lot to extend my reading range. It was also a place where I could go to be in peace and quiet to compose poetry and look up poetic forms which I wanted to emulate. In my first term in high school, I'd had a very bad experience of bullying which had changed the usually quietly confident child I had been into an ultra sensitive adolescent, for whom the library was a true refuge from cruelty. When my parents, realising my plight, moved me to another school, there was no longer any need to escape, but I never quite recovered the trust I'd had in the past, and cultivated a certain wary self-sufficiency, even with my friends, which meant I could tactically retreat whenever I needed to. As well, my parents' strictness meant that much of the usual teenage preoccupations--sex, drugs, rock and roll, 'Al pumped up by peer pressure--had to be kept hidden from view, secretively thought about, rarely indulged in, and that left plenty of time for reflection, for intellectual and mystical excitement, for strange story pathways to be taken, through that world within the world. I must say that now, though I do not necessarily think that prohibition is a very good idea, my parents' attitude certainly forced me to follow my own deepest inclinations, and not just the whims of teenage fashion and trend, at a time when most kids simply cannot stand the peer pressure. I actually got bored with constant conversations about who was dating who or sleeping with who and what so and so had got up to that weekend, for all that could only be academic for me, and the library was the perfect place to retreat to, to be myself and follow my daggy enthusiasms for myth and legend and wild adventure. It had always been a place associated with pleasure for me; mind journeys, heart-adventures, in the past. Now it also became an island of calm in the turbulent seas of adolescence, where I could explore both reading and writing at my leisure.

I did not spend quite as much time in the public library any more; having outgrown the children's corner, but not quite ready for the maze of adult bookshelves. Fortunately my school, limited as to space, growing hugely as to population, never stinted on the library, and there was always much to occupy me there. There were also audio-visual sets available for senior students; you could go in a little booth and write poetry whilst Vaughan Williams' The Antarctic Symphony flowed into your ears from your headset. You could also watch an early video of John Bell and the Nimrod theatre company playing Hamlet. You could sit crosslegged behind tall banks of metal shelves, and pore through all kinds of books on myth and legend, making feverish notes and sparking off all kinds of ideas for vast novels.

Writing

The first novel I ever wrote--for I had written lots of poetry, short stories, plays and illustrated tales before, but not novels, thinking I could never finish one--was started thus, at the age of 16, in the library. It was a vast fantasy novel--I'd discovered Tolkien and others of his ilk by then--which would incorporate as many of the known mythologies of the world as I could manage. It filled exercise book after exercise book, full of wild magic, strange adventures, and unpronounceable names, and I loved it dearly. Writing it made me read and read even more too; for those of you who think the rise of fantasy is the sign of a growing illiteracy amongst young people in particular, think again. Fantasy writers--and readers--are probably the most voracious readers of all, delighting in all kinds of connections and arcane knowledge.

When I finished school, I left home after one too many arguments with my father, and struggled in poverty for quite a while, trying both to meet the requirements of a tough BA specialising in Middle Welsh, Anglo Saxon, medieval romances, and Icelandic sagas, and to keep food in my mouth by doing all kinds of jobs, from folding clothes in a laundromat (where once a customer, seeing me read in a quiet moment, said to me, What! You work in a laundrette, and you read a book!) to preparing salads in a pizzeria, whilst dodging the lustful owner.

The Stanton Library 

None of these jobs ever earnt more than a pitiful amount. I remember once having to make a decision about whether I'd have a sausage roll for lunch or catch the bus home from Sydney Uni--I lived in Neutral Bay with my older sister. The sausage roll won; and I walked for hours to get back, stopping in on the way at my favourite place, Stanton Library in North Sydney.

What a great place that was, for a desperately poor, proud student who could have been kept in the manner to which she had long been accustomed, if only she had crawled back to her equally proud and stubborn father and his strict rules! There were many days when I felt very much like giving up the struggle; but the library always put new heart into me. Not only was it free entertainment. It also provided information on all kinds of literary possibilities, and I entered many competitions advertised on its noticeboards, and spent many happy hours continuing on with my various enthusiasms.

The library reminded me that there was a world beyond flat wallets and gritty pavements and people who thought laundry assistants must be illiterate. It gave me heart, too, by reminding me that somewhere, sometime, people had cared enough about literature and about their destinies as writers to struggle through even the most difficult periods of their lives. No way did I want to follow the safe and dull careers of routine that had been proposed for me; in the reckless way of youth, I wanted to do what I felt I was born to do--and the library, so quiet and demure in appearance, but with such a multichambered, raging heart of tumult and vision and destiny and heartbreak and magic and joy, gave me the courage to continue, and not to lose hope. Equally, I knew that without those like me who had dared to hope and dream, to stubbornly and quietly keep on going, the library would be just a nice quiet and cheap place to sit out of the cold and the heat.

Libraries in Armidale

Since that time, libraries have continued to be amongst my favourite places. I live in the high cold northern Tablelands of NSW in the university town of Armidale with my family, and am a regular both in our local library and the university library, as well as having a rather large but messy library scattered in all of the rooms in our house, and trawling through the vast virtual libraries that one may find on the net. I continue to follow overgrown, wild, exciting pathways through magical lands and undiscovered countries; many of my novels have started from something seen by chance in a library book.

House of souls

I have had a great deal of very pleasant interactions with librarians, and admire their great dedication, erudition and kindness to me who is often a rather disordered and awestruck traveller in their domains. Though I still love magic and mystery, I have come to understand, as I've grown up, fallen and stayed in love and had children; built a house of our own with my husband and cherished the garden we have made, that the world within the world incorporates all those things, that the flesh and the spirit are tightly woven together, and that the spell cast by the library, the spell that seems to stop time, is the spell not of old paper or old magical formulae, but of imagination, that greatest of all qualities, which makes us both fully human, fully mortal, yet immortal too. The library is the record, the garden, the house of souls; but it is also the place where the soul is helped to emerge from its chrysalis, to spread its wings and be truly free. And there is no price that can be put on that. In a world which all too often seems dominated by shiny newness and the bottom line, the library is a stubbornly ancient symbol, a stubbornly ancient reality, another world which will exist long alter materialistic capitalism has gone the way of theocracy and communism.

In the Middle Ages, illiterate people used to come and gawk at the great chained book, the Biblica Pauperium, on the lecterns of churches; their imaginations nourished, expanded and inspired by its glorious pictures and wellknown stories. Theirs was a truly visual and oral culture, much more so than ours, their traditional stories rich and deep and beautiful. But it was that single book, in all its actuality, its mysterious presence and tangible, yet elusive magic, which represented the vast worldwide library of souls for them, beyond the bounds of their villages. It was that which linked them back to an almost forgotten time, the very literate world of the Romans. That book was not for them a dead manifestation of a lost age, though; it spoke loud and clear to them. And it was partly that experience, the possibility of another world, of a limitless world within the real and rich heart of mundane and customary reality, which made Western culture gain in confidence and complexity.

These days, in a time when many people, including, I'm sorry to note, some librarians, taken either by gungho neologising fervour, or panicked by the Nostradamus like pronouncements of the media, seem determined to misrepresent the literate, indeed rather bookish, net--in my own quite long experience of being on the net, I've `met' as it were, many more people interested in books, reading and writing than in real life--determined, as I said, to make out that it spells the end of book culture and of actual, as opposed to virtual, libraries, don't let's forget the lesson of the chained book on the lectern. A library's being on the net is not going to interest those people who 'are not readers already anyway; but an actual library, with actual books in it, can work real and extraordinary magic. It's not a computer game that has caught the passion and imagination of modern children, no matter how computer-savvy they are; it is a series of books, the Harry Potter books, in which libraries play a very important role indeed, and in which one of the central characters, Hermione Granger, with her love of libraries, is a reflection of the author herself as a child.

Ladies and gentlemen, we don't need libraries renamed as information services centres; we need them recognised as strongholds and gardens of the Imagination.

Sophie Masson -- complete list of books

The House in the rainforest (UQP 1990)

Fire in the rky (children's time slip fantasy, Angus and Robertson/Collins 1990)

Sooner or later (social realism, UQP Young Adult Fiction 1991)

A Blaze of summer (YA fantasy novel, UQP Young adult Fiction 1992)

The Opera club (children's family novel, first in the Seyrac series, Mammoth 1993)

The Cousin from France (second in Seyrac series, Mammoth 1993)

Winter in France (third in Seyrac series, Mammoth 1994)

The First day (YA novel exploring religion, Mammoth 1995). To be published in Spring 2000 by St Mary's Press in the US

The Sun is rising (social realism YA novel, UQP Young adult Fiction 1996)

Lucky break (children's novel, Scholastic 1996)

The Gifting (YA fantasy, Collins Moonstone 1996)

The Secret (fourth in Seyrac series, Mammoth 1996)

Birds of a feather (children's novel looking at bullying, Mammoth 1996)

Carabas (Hodder YA Fantasy and Science Fiction, 1996), to be published in Spring 2000 under the title Serafin, by St Mary's Press, US and UK/Ireland

Illusion (ghost/mystery novel, Mammoth 1997)

The Troublemaker (short children's novel, Hodder Headline 1997)

The Hoax (adult psychological mystery, Minerva 1997)

The Tiger (YA novel set in Java, combining realistic and supernatural elements, Collins 1998)

Red city (YA fantasy, Collins Moonstone 1998)

Cold Iron (Hodder YA Science Fiction and Fantasy 1998), to be published under the title Malkin, by St Mary's Press, US and UK/Ireland, in 2001

Green eyes (short novel, in Best Friends series, Hodder Headline, 1998)

The Knight by the pool, volume I in Lay Lines medieval adult fantasy trilogy, Bantam, Transworld, November 1998

Clementine (Hodder YA Science Fiction and Fantasy), 1999, to be published by St Mary's Press, US and UK/Ireland, in 2001

The Lady of the flowers, vol II in The Lay Lines trilogy, Bantam Books, 1999

Small world (Hodder Children's Books, collection of interlinked stories about a small French village, 1999)

Family business (fifth in Seyrac series, Hodder Headline 2000)

The Green prince (Hodder YA Science fiction and fantasy, September 2000). Is also to be performed as a play

The Firebird (Hodder YA SF and F, to be released in 2001)

Forest of dreams, Bantam Books 2001 (large medieval fantasy/historical/biographical novel on the life and work of 12th century poet Marie de France, for adults, actually an omnibus volume of the Lay Lines trilogy, including the third volume, The Stone of Oakenfast)

Sophie Masson Writer

Received November 2000

Sophie Masson was born in Jakarta, Indonesia, in 1959 of French parents who are themselves of mixed ethnicity--Basque, Portuguese, Spanish and Canadian as well as French. She was sent to live with her grandmother in France when she was a baby. At the age of five, she went with her parents to Australia, where the family lived for the next twenty years, but going back to France every two or three years. So Sophie grew up between worlds, and languages, and cultures, and this has informed all her work.

Sophie's first two novels--one for adults, called The House in the rainforest (University of Queensland Press) and one for children, Fire in the sky (Harper Collins Australia) were published almost simultaneously, in 1990. Since then, she has had more than 25 novels published in Australia, for adults, young adults, and children. Several of her novels are being released in the USA in 2000 and 2001, and she has also had many short stories published, in anthologies, magazines and newspapers in Australia, the UK, the US, and Italy, as well as writing essays for journals and magazines all over the world, including online.

Her books have been shortlisted for many awards, including for the Aurealis Award for Science Fiction and Fantasy (for Cold iron, Hodder Headline Australia 1996--to be published as Malkin by St Mary's Press, US, in March 2001). Some of her novels have also been optioned by film producers, and stories broadcast on radio and released on audio books.

Though Sophie has published some ostensibly `realistic' stories and novels, most of her work is touched with a great sense of the otherwordly, and of the disturbance of mundane reality. Many of her books are set in parallel worlds and draw heavily on fairytale, myth and folklore. Her sense of the Otherworld is not of some place beyond, but within the world itself--the place the Welsh called `Annwfn', or `The In-World'.