The Magician's House Quartet — (1990-1992) Ages 9-12. Publisher: Thirteen-year-old William Constant and his two younger sisters, Mary and Alice, have come to ancient, mysterious Golden House in Wales for the holidays. Their lives will never be the same once they enter the Magician's House — and discover their destiny.
What evil lurks in Golden House?
The children know... William knew something was wrong from the moment they arrived at the railroad station on the border of Wales. First came the stranger who said his name was Steven. "Remember me," he said. Then he vanished. By the time they reached Golden House, even Mary and Alice felt something odd. Who — or what — are the strange animals... a fox, a dog, an owl... that seem to be able to read their minds? Why is it that sometimes the children even see out of the eyes of the animals and hear with their ears? And what is that prickling sensation pulling them toward the secret steps up the chimney? Nothing can stop them as they are drawn deep into the old house, into the realm of the Magician.
   
 The Steps up the Chimney:
A Mixed Bag of Magic and Flatness
The Steps up the Chimney is the first in four books that accumulate into The Magician's House Quartet, revolving around three children who come to stay at their uncle's strange house, and Stephen Tyler, a time-traveling wizard who befriends the children on their stay at Golden Valley.
In The Steps Up The Chimney, the children arrive at the house after already experiencing some strange events — Will has meet a stranger at Druce Coven station who mysteriously disappeared and a fox seems to popping up everywhere they look. Within the house and grounds however, things become even more strange — Alice finds footprints in the snow that end abruptly in the middle of a clearing and Mary notices an extra window in the house that shouldn't be there. By researching the house's near-ancient origins and searching high and low, the children eventually come across an amazing discovery — that there are steps up the chimney...
These books are highly original — there was little in these books that I had run across before in other novels. Among other things the books include time traveling, alchemy, animals that can communicate with the children and the more mundane occurrences of the children's relationship with their uncle and his pregnant girlfriend Phoebe. Although the entire story is set within the valley, the story draws on larger themes that are not only world-wide, but stretch throughout Tyler's time to the present day, the main one being the nature of greed and its evils.
William Corlett shows a good knowledge and interest in English history, and is always adding in tidbits of information when describing the building or architecture of the house or grounds, which he no doubt planned and mapped in great detail.
Characterisation is, on the whole, very good whether it be the somewhat dithery vegetarian Phoebe, the talkative historian Mrs Prewett or the wide variety of animals that roam the ground such as the fox Cinnabar, the owl Jasper or the dog Sirius (or as Alice calls him — Spot). The wizard however, far from being a main character flits in and out of the story very briefly - his role is firmly restrictive to that of teacher, and a distant teacher at that — there is no real warmth in the relationship between him and the children.
Although the title of the book is captivating, many times the story itself falls slightly short of my expectations — often the narrative falls into meaningless history lessons or long-winded descriptions of the nature of alchemy, and much of the story structure relies on the reader having a good visual picture of the house and its features within their head. A map of the house and grounds can be found in each book, but a good idea would have been to include illustrations of many of the diagrams Corlett describes within the book and a family tree to keep track of all the Crawdens, Lewises, Mordens and Tylers that are so often mentioned throughout all four books.
Likewise, I could find very little to like with Corlett's protagonists William, Mary and Alice. If Corlett set out to make them — especially Alice — irritable, annoying, whiny, bickersome children, then he succeeded. If he wanted them to be enjoyable, realistic characters than he failed. To illustrate my point, read the passage where the children are getting into Jack's car for the first ride back to Golden House — it spans only two pages but within it Alice and Will fight over the front seat, Will sits on Alice and Alice moans about not getting her way; Alice says to Mary: 'Oh Mary, the last thing we want is one of your history lessons. They're so boring.' and Mary says: 'They're always squabbling. And that's really boring.' Once inside the car Mary talks with Jack about the length of her hair and Alice says: 'Ugh! Stop flirting, Mary. Be careful, Uncle Jack. She's man-mad!'
Mary: Honestly, you're such a baby, Alice.
Alice: You're blushing! Mary's blushing!
Mary: Shut up Alice!
See what I mean? If I was Uncle Jack I would have stopped the car and left the little brats to camp out on the train tracks. How we are supposed to find the three of them sympathetic, much less likeable characters I have no idea, and they get even worse as the story progresses.
These thoroughly horrible children aside, the books are thoughtful and original — though not the best of their genre, any fantasy reader should be interested enough by this opening novel to continue the story in the next book: The Door in the Tree. —Rebecca Fisher
The Door in the Tree
This is the second book in The Magician's House Quartet and sees the three children of the previous novel (The Steps Up The Chimney) return to their uncle Jack's Golden House, where the year before they had meet a time-traveling wizard called Stephen Tyler, befriended a number of wild animals and mastered the magical art of sharing their bodies, and helped deliver their uncle's girlfriend's baby when the wizard's assistant Morden had attempted to sabotage the birth.
The children William, Mary and the youngest Alice are delighted to be back during the short spring break, eager to begin living more of the magic, but are slightly disconcerted to find that nothing out of the ordinary occurs. Just as William begins to doubt the reality of the magic of however, Alice once more joins minds with the dog Spot, who leads her to The Door in the Tree...
In this story, the badger sett of the valley is under attack from badger-baiters — a fact the children learn from their new friend, the elderly woman Meg Lewis, who lived by herself in Four Fields where she has appointed herself a guardian of the wildlife in the area — in particular the badgers. When the children discover a dead badger upon the path that Spot calls 'The Dark and Dreadful Path', and find several ominous messages signed 'the Fang', they realize that something indeed is amiss within the Golden Valley, and once more it's up to them to restore balance.
The Door in the Tree is a step up from its predecessor The Steps Up the Chimney — it takes the children further into the woods and grounds of Golden House to discover further beauties — and harsh truths — of the natural world, a pattern that is continued in the next book, The Tunnel Behind the Waterfall, where the children trek even further to find the lake known as Goldenwater. In this second book the children also find new acquaintances — not just Meg, but animals such as Falco the kestrel, Bawson the badger, Merula the blackbird, and re-appearances from Cinnabar the fox and Jasper the owl.
The story is more focused and to the point — in the previous book suspense is built up only for nothing to happen, but here there are several exciting and interesting occurrences of the children's adventures — especially those that occur during the night. Although disappointingly the door in the tree actually plays a very little part in the story (you never actually learn where it came from), other happenings slowly begin to build up and create tension till the children are once more separated and relying only on their individual talents to resolve the problem. Corlett's descriptions of the children entering the animal's bodies are especially vivid, and his greatest strength is action-sequences (seen used to best effect in the final volume — The Bridge in the Clouds). Also worth re-reading is the lovely description of Four Fields, Meg's home.
However, as it was in the first book, the magician and his evil assistant Morden have very little to do in the main plot strand of the book. Morden appears only as a lurking threat at the back of their minds, and the magician himself Stephen Tyler arrives without warning to spout ideas of philosophy, alchemy and human nature that young readers may find confusing and are perhaps better suited to books of a higher age group than these are intended.
There is some more information on the history of the house as told from Meg's point of view - its interesting, but a little hard to piece altogether, especially if you can't quite remember little tidbits of history that were first told in the first book. A timeline or family tree would have been appropriate to chronicle the families that lived in the house — the Crawdens, the Tylers, the Mordens, the Lewises and now the Taylors/Greens.
Luckily the children improve — in the first book I could barely stand them due to their quarrelling and rudeness, but here there is a slight improvement on their manners, though Alice still needs a lot of work to make her even remotely likeable — the fuss she makes over Phoebe breastfeeding her baby is vulgar as well poorly written. Parents might not enjoy reading such passages out loud (Alice shrieks out — "Boobs! Boobs! Will's got a thing about boobs!"). Like the plot strand of Jack and Phoebe's living together without being married, it is too crudely and awkwardly written to belong in a children's book. Other authors have tackled such subject matter with far more sensitivity than Corlett does here.
All in all, its an enjoyable enough book, a good continuation of The Steps Up the Chimney, but nothing overly special, with a few moments that unfortunately drag this series down from what it could have been.
—Rebecca Fisher |
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