By Ann Pilling
Collins. 190 pages. £9.99 (hardback)
ISBN 000185727 4
Ann Pilling is one of a handful of Christian writers whose reputation is more as a writer who is a Christian than as a Christian who writes. Henry's Leg won her the highly distinguished Guardian Award, and her children's stories have established her as one of Britain's leading authors in the genre.
Collins have pulled out all the stops for her latest children's novel, Amber's Secret - a splendid cover illustration by Michael Gillette, and a reading experience enhanced by beautiful typography and illustrations by Victor Ambrus, himself a very well-known illustrator. The book is a delight to handle and a joy to the eye.
Coronation year
Not that these pleasurable but minor details distract you for long after the first paragraph, which plunges you into a story set in Coronation year, against a background of post-war bleakness. Sally has a problem, a 'terrible thing' has happened. Such is the author's storytelling power that when I read about it, it was quite some time before I could bear to read on.
I don't think I am spoiling the story (in any case the cover picture gives a big clue) if I tell you that the terrible thing concerns Sally's accidental near-destruction of a valuable and cherished grandfather clock. The story deals with her efforts to put matters right before her father (absent abroad) and her mother (in hospital with a worrying undiagnosable disease) return home. In the course of her efforts she meets a collection of characters who are magically drawn; in fact they sometimes appear to be literally magical figures, until we find out who and what they really are. This sense that the magical and the supernatural are hovering on the fringe of the narrative is a major element in the story, as for example when the wonderful Charlie Bates seems to appear out of nowhere from a row of derelict houses. (To tell you much more of the story than that really will spoil it for you. Let's just say that it is a gripping, absorbing story that most children will find hard to put down.)
Not quite as it seems
The book - which I understand is based on real events - draws on a number of traditions. There is even a touch of Patricia St. John in Amber, the gypsy child on the first page, who knows a telephone number for God. But in this novel nothing is ever quite what it seems, and the telephone number is not for God at all. Or is it? - a question echoed throughout the book.
Ann Pilling, commendably, is able to introduce talk of God without embarrassing author or reader. Yet the book communicates spiritual truth in much deeper ways than in dialogue. The minor and major miracles that help Sally - none of them in any way cop-outs - force the story to function at several levels simultaneously; and there is a sense throughout the novel that redemption is at work. The clock needs to be mended and people need to be healed. And not merely (suggests the author, in a quite wonderful passage) to be made what they were, but to be made what they should have been. If you know the gospel you will find yourself nodding with recognition, time and time again.
And yet there is no explicit theology in the book. Nobody gets saved. None of the subtle hints, the allusions, the reverberations of the gospel, are ever spelt out. No attractive, mature Christian arrives at the end of the book to lead Sally to the Lord. 'Have you ever seen Him?' 'Not exactly', is as far as it gets. But in Ann Pilling's hands, that is a very long way.
Explicit clues
Some readers are going to find this novel unsatisfying, feeling that vital questions have been raised and left unanswered. If so I hope that they will read the book again. In all her books Ann Pilling has planted explicit clues towards the redemptive gospel, and this is no exception. In Amber's Secret she has succeeded, miraculously, in presenting a child with a picture of the world as it really is: touched at every point by grace, glowing with glory, alive with answers and solutions. Her world is one in which God is active; a world full of highly mystical and intensely practical possibilities.
If it makes you feel more comfortable, you can call it pre-evangelism. But I believe it is much more than that. It deals with what Christian art critic Calvin Seerveld calls 'nuance' and 'allusion'. If you want a familiar version of it, read C. S. Lewis's Narnia stories. But Ann Pilling is writing at a more allusive level still, and in some ways makes her point better. This is a book that should be read by adults as well as children, and read more than once.
