I Remembered the Ice Dragon, but Not the Book

I need a bedtime audiobook with a very particular level of quality.

It has to be good enough that I actually want to put it on, familiar enough that losing consciousness halfway through a chapter is not a disaster, and preferably not so compelling that I suddenly decide at half past eleven that listening to it in seven-minute instalments is an insult to literature.

Audiobooks send me to sleep almost embarrassingly quickly. I can set a thirty-minute timer and be unconscious within five or ten. This became particularly irritating with Spotify because Spotify remains professionally committed to counting my listening allowance after I have ceased to be a listener. The following night I then have to rewind through twenty minutes of perfectly good narration trying to locate the last sentence at which I was technically conscious.

I had already revisited the Bartimaeus books and the Inheritance Cycle this way, and I am currently working through Skulduggery Pleasant again. So I started trying to remember the fantasy books I had read as a child whose broad shape I still knew.

The problem was that I often did not remember the book.

I remembered an ice dragon. I remembered somebody moving the internal parts of a lock with her mind. I remembered a powerful female being and a brother and sister, then supplied myself with the wrong brother and sister entirely. I remembered wolves and an ending that upset me. I remembered an illustrated fantasy society in which the women became enormous and violent.

Names, plots and titles had gone missing while these oddly specific pieces remained. Pulling at them started to reconstruct a shelf I had not thought about properly in years.

The ice dragon was not actually an ice dragon

The smallest clue produced one of the largest recoveries.

Ice dragon. That was it.

It eventually led me back to Chris d’Lacey’s Icefire, the second book in The Last Dragon Chronicles. Once I had the title, other things began turning up: the Pennykettles, clay dragons, hidden dragons and a mythology that became considerably larger than the fairly domestic beginning I remembered.

There is a slight problem with this triumph of memory.

I cannot find the ice dragon.

The Pennykettles are surrounded by hundreds of clay pottery dragons. David is researching whether dragons existed, with an Arctic research trip as the prize, and the story builds connections between dragons, the Arctic and the mysterious icefire. There are plenty of ingredients from which a child could later remember an ice dragon. There just does not seem to be the neat literal creature my memory supplied.

So I had retained Icefire, dragons and the Arctic, then apparently compressed all three into one extremely efficient animal.

I remembered enough to find the book and not enough to describe it correctly. Memory had done some editing.

That makes the clue better, really. If I had remembered “Chris d’Lacey, Icefire, second book, the one where David researches dragons”, there would be no article. I would simply have remembered a title like a functional adult.

Instead I had an ice dragon that seems to have been assembled somewhere behind my eyes twenty years later.

I had a lot of books available to forget

From roughly 2001 until 2009, before I turned fifteen, I read constantly.

I read under the desk at school. I sometimes skipped rugby or hockey matches and hid in the library instead, which proved to be an excellent arrangement because apparently no teacher sees a child voluntarily spending extra time in a library and thinks, This is clearly truancy. If I had hidden behind the bins there would presumably have been a search party. Put a book in front of me and the whole thing acquired educational respectability.

A lot of the books I was reading were current series rather than old children’s classics inherited complete. I caught up with what existed and then had to wait for authors to write the rest. That is one reason several series simply stop in my memory after three or four books: sometimes I lost interest, but sometimes there was no next book yet. Later, I deliberately went back for endings. I sought out Inheritance when I was older, and at about nineteen I returned to Michael Grant’s Gone series for Light because apparently unfinished fictional business can survive adolescence perfectly well.

Of course I read Terry Pratchett and Harry Potter, but nobody forgets those — which is exactly why they’re not in an article about what memory lost.

The stranger omissions are books I once spent hours inside and then reduced to one mechanism, one picture or an emotional bruise.

The lock survived better than Obernewtyn

One of the clearest fragments was this: a girl could open locked doors by using her mind to move the workings inside the lock.

I particularly remembered the tumblers.

I could not remember Obernewtyn.

The girl was Elspeth Gordie, protagonist of Isobelle Carmody’s Obernewtyn. She is a Misfit with mental abilities that have to be hidden under threat of death, and she is sent to the remote mountain compound that gives the book its name. In chapter nineteen of Obernewtyn, Elspeth uses her mental abilities to work her way through several locks, including the Doctor’s particularly difficult one and a locked cupboard.

That is absurdly close to what remained in my head.

I had lost Elspeth’s name, the name of the series and most of the immediate plot, but apparently the internal mechanism of a fictional lock had secured permanent tenancy.

Other parts of my Obernewtyn memory were less disciplined. I associated it with travelling groups and a dry, sandy landscape. That belongs to the series, but not neatly to the first book. Obernewtyn centres on the mountain compound; in Ashling, Elspeth leaves the mountains and eventually travels into the desert region of Sador.

Two memories had been filed together. The lock stayed where it belonged; later geography wandered backwards.

I also remembered the broader sense of gifted outsiders being persecuted by an oppressive authority and finding other people like themselves. That part was sound. The Misfits really are people with forbidden abilities living under a totalitarian order. What I had done was keep the social shape of the series while moving some of its scenery about.

For something I had supposedly forgotten, my brain had been oddly conscientious about the locksmithing.

The enormous women were Termagant Trogs

The Edge Chronicles came back differently because I remembered the pictures almost as strongly as the books.

Chris Riddell’s illustrations were dense enough to inspect rather than merely look at. Skyships, creatures, buildings, clothes and bits of invented machinery had the sort of detail that allowed you to spend time on a page after the prose had moved on.

The fragment I retained was an underground society in which the females changed dramatically when they reached adulthood. In my memory they became huge, frightening and violent.

I was expecting that one to have become hopelessly exaggerated.

It had not.

The official Edge Chronicles site names them as the Termagant Trogs: underground cave-dwellers ruled by females who become fearsome warriors at thirteen after their Blooding, when they drink the sap of a bloodoak tree.

That is not my adult brain tidying up something vague. It is essentially the thing I remembered.

What disappeared was the terminology. What stayed was the social rule.

That seems to happen repeatedly with these books. Proper nouns are apparently expendable. A strange mechanism or cultural detail is not. I could lose an entire fictional country and retain the local administrative procedure for turning an adolescent cave-dweller into a terrifying adult.

I found the right brother and sister in the wrong books

One fragment seemed to contain two things: a powerful female being I remembered as a goddess, and a brother and sister.

I thought I had solved it with William Nicholson’s Wind on Fire trilogy. Kestrel and Bowman Hath are twins, and once I started checking the books, other things came back as well: wolves, a five-year gap between the first two books, the Morah and an ending that had upset me.

It was an excellent answer, and it was wrong.

The name that eventually came back was Lady Ardina, from Alison Croggon’s The Gift — published in the United States as The Naming. Ardina is not a goddess but an Elidhu, one of the ancient beings in Pellinor’s world. And Pellinor contains the brother and sister I had actually been reaching for: Maerad and Hem. The later books make their connection central enough that The Singing explicitly turns on whether the two siblings can reunite and release the music of the Elidhu together.

I had remembered part of one series and completed it with another series that I had also read.

The particularly treacherous bit was that Wind on Fire kept rewarding the mistake. Kestrel and Bowman really were siblings. The time jump really was there. Kestrel really does die at the end of Firesong.

. Every correct detail made the original identification feel safer.

I had solved the wrong memory correctly.

The recovered shelf has a fairly obvious personality

Once enough titles came back, the pattern was difficult to miss.

I liked supernatural powers, outsiders, persecuted groups, secret societies, authoritarian institutions, gods, rebellion, strange cultures, magical rules, war, sacrifice and worlds whose mythology kept getting larger the longer I stayed in them. I also liked long series. Once I had decided a fictional world was worth entering, I saw very little reason to leave merely because one plot had finished.

That explains the Doctor Who and Buffy tie-in novels as neatly as it explains Pendragon, Obernewtyn or The Inheritance Cycle. I did not always need another new world. Sometimes I wanted another door into one I already knew.

Apparently I was not especially interested in fantasy where everybody had a pleasant woodland problem.

I had remembered The Deptford Mice as the talking-animal series I could not get into. Then I saw the cover of The Dark Portal while rebuilding this shelf and immediately realised I had blamed the wrong mice. I liked The Deptford Mice. It was Redwall I could not get into.

Which is rather an efficient demonstration of the problem.

I did not need the darkness to be solemn. Bartimaeus, Skulduggery Pleasant, Buffy and Robert Rankin all gave me worlds in which horrible things and jokes were permitted to occupy the same room.

I read several Rankin novels young enough that The Hollow Chocolate Bunnies of the Apocalypse introduced me to references to a hangover before I actually knew what a hangover was. I have no idea why my mum let me borrow some of these books.

That is one of the stranger pleasures of reading slightly above your age. Entire layers of drinking, sex, satire and adult stupidity can pass directly over your head and you carry on without feeling that anything is missing. Nobody has told you there is another level to misunderstand.

When I moved into Sookie Stackhouse, Cassandra Palmer and House of Night, it looked superficially as though my taste had changed into teenage paranormal fiction. Looking back at the shelf, the move was hardly revolutionary. Hidden supernatural societies, dangerous institutions, magical politics, powers, outsiders and lore that required increasingly elaborate mental filing systems were already well established.

I write fantasy myself now. I am wary of drawing a straight line backwards and announcing that these books made me write what I write; influence is not a receipt, and I have no reason to pretend I can separate twenty years of reading that neatly.

The smaller observation is more convincing. A surprising number of things I still find interesting were already present in the books I chose when I was ten.

Back to the Audiobook

None of this was what I set out to discover.

I wanted an audiobook I already knew well enough to lose consciousness during.

Instead I recovered a shelf by working backwards from a lock, a group of terrifying women, the right memories attached to the wrong siblings, somebody’s death and a dragon that apparently never existed.

I now have rather more options.

Seven minutes should do it.

Does any of this look familiar?

Swipe through the shelf. I’ve picked one book from each series that turned up while I was rebuilding it, including one I still can’t prove I read.

Keep reading

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Five lesser-known creatures from folklore, plus one supposedly ancient Shetland wolf-man who turns out to be rather more recent than advertised.