skygiants

It's a book I find hard to believe is coming up fast on its century, because it's still so quietly radical. I've described it to people as The Blue Castle, but with witchcraft instead of a man, and I stand by that.

At Scintillation, a small con in Montreal, earlier this summer, I ran a book club panel on it, and Greer brought her first edition, which has beautiful witch-on-broom silhouettes all over the cover. Noted by various were things such as how very little Christianity there actually is in the book, and how thoroughly obvious it becomes even that her good and pleasant relatives are not people Lolly can live with or near (go for it, that one niece who became an ambulance driver in the war and is probably off in a Mary Renault!), and how obnoxious the man who plays Satan is versus how obnoxious Satan isn't, and how some of the other witches are worthwhile even if the overall coven has... issues. And of course the cat is perfect, Sylvia Townsend Warner always has perfect cats.

Just, so radical... the drift towards Satan is not particularly a moral decision; it has nothing to do with sin. It's about what she can live with, and what she can't, which is a completely different matter, no question of morals about it at all. That's not an attitude towards witchcraft that other things take, and it is not an attitude towards women's lives that other things take anywhere nearly as often as I would like.

I hope Naomi Mitchison read this one, but I can't find proof either way.