Books: 'Queen of Stones' by Emma Tennant (1982)

Lady Arlen alerted me to Tom Cox’s novel Villager, set somewhere that might be Dorset or might be Devon but isn’t quite either, and out last month. He mentions it in a brilliant evocation of a visit to the Isle of Portland and, in passing, called attention to a far older book located in that bleak and wondrous landscape – Emma Tennant’s Queen of Stones from 1982, in which a schoolgirls’ sponsored walk ends in ‘sacrificial rituals in the dark places beneath the clifftops’. I had to get it after that, hadn’t I?

Class, scorn, sexuality, jealousy and dreadful violence mingle in this short book (it seemed more coherent on a race-paced second reading that took about an hour, than spread across several bleary-eyed bedtime sessions) which is a sort of reknitting of Lord of the Flies, in the same way that Emma Tennant mangled a variety of classics in a feminist direction – more superficially as time went by, some critics argued. The girls vary from Class Four of Melplash Primary, who function as a chorus (average age: six and two months), to Bess Plantain, elegant and apparently superior but deeply mixed-up nearly-thirteen-year-old who indentifies rather too closely with Elizabeth I. Suddenly engulfed in ‘the thickest fog ever seen in West Dorset’, the party are separated from their adult leader and wander catastrophically off-course, going missing for the better part of five days. They spend the last bit of this ordeal isolated in a quarry on Portland, where the tensions and fantasies they have brought with them culminate in a terrible, cathartic resolution. Returning to reality, none of them can quite remember how it came about, or choose not to. What happens in the fog, stays in the fog.

Queen of Stones is brilliant – provided you can take such strong stuff – yet impossible, really, to swallow. Mingled with the elliptical main text which prises beneath the girls’ reactions and experiences are authoritative comments on them by a psychiatrist, a social worker, and a bishop, delivered in their own idioms. The narrative is as fragmentary as the text is intense, and you have to concentrate; you also have to deal with two of the characters being the objects of adult sexual interest in a way which I suspect nobody would dare to write now. The overall effect is still dazzling, but you can’t help wondering if it’s all a trick. The unnamed author was, they state, ‘staying with friends nearby … recovering from an illness’ at the time of the case and decided to occupy their time ‘attempting to reconstruct’ the events. By the end they claim vindication for their version of what happened, but it’s clear that its details are speculation. No 12-year-old could possibly write Laurie Lelandes’s journal; and even the newspaper article on the girls’ disappearance which opens the narrative seems like no local journalism I’ve ever read. Then there is the setting. Now, Emma Tennant had a house in Netherbury for many years, so she knew the area well; and that raises questions about how it is intended to be understood in the book. The girls are on a walk from Beaminster to Melplash, which would be demanding enough for six-year-olds; they disappear on the lane to Mapperton, and wind up ten miles away at Abbotsbury (albeit they make part of that journey in an abandoned landrover). From there they go by boat to Portland and, right at the end, resurface at exactly the point they got lost in the first place, without anyone on the ground having encountered them. Anyone familiar with the landscape knows this is impossible. Did Emma Tennant intend it to be taken literally, or is it merely a set of elements to hang a narrative from, its representation connected only loosely with the real places? Dorset natives will find it hard to suspend their disbelief.

Queen of Stones was critically very well-received in 1982; Emma Tennant’s Tess, a recasting of Thomas Hardy’s great novel twelve years later, less so. But I think I may have to get that too!