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BOOKS
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I talk about Bath in a great pool of mist and that mistiness – the hot waters, the steam, the cloud, the valley – is just so chillingly beautiful
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meaning is an eternal journey; one that will always tether us to our past and our future.
A linocut illustration, created by Amy Jeffs, from the chapter Bath and Bladud’s Fall
Titled Columba and the Ness, Amy Jeffs looks back at the earliest written reference to a monster in Loch Ness
reimagining of this particular story is that it is depicted through the eyes of Bladud’s son, Prince Leir – Shakespeare’s King Lear – which adds another layer of complexity to the narrative as we think about what and who ‘Leir’ became in later life. “I suppose with choosing to tell it through the eyes of Prince Leir – I was interested in what parental pride looks like through the eyes of a child because, of course, children trust and believe their parents, and so maybe there is a disjunct between what Leir sees and what the reader sees. “I was also interested in how you might extrapolate from that something of his behaviour – thinking how that childhood trauma might have impacted his actions as an adult and his own approach to parenting.” Beyond Bladud, Bath itself provided Amy with the inspiration to create this world of mythical wonders. “When I imagine the
world of Storyland, it’s a misty one in the sense that it is in the mists of time. At one point in the commentary I talk about Bath in a great pool of mist and that mistiness – the hot waters, the steam, the cloud, the valley – is just so chillingly beautiful and sometimes you can hardly tell that there is a city there at all. There are places in Storyland that when I visited them, I thought ‘I’m so not surprised that this was a setting for a story, for a marvellous event’ in the same way you look at Bath on an autumn morning and you think ‘yeah, I get it’.” Themes of parenthood, homeland, migration, defiance, love and loss are woven through the novel from the outset and it is lost on neither the writer nor the reader that these issues are ones that we still grapple with today in modern society. Despite technology now pervading every moment of our waking lives, Storyland points out that the human quest for true belonging and
The power of music A life-long lover of music, Amy turned to the medium in an attempt to help her complete the final stages of illustrating the novel. Through song-writing, she hoped to find the emotion in each story so that her illustrations would become a motif, comprehensively depicting the overall plot line in one piece. “Coming to the end of illustrating Storyland I was feeling myself getting complacent in producing the images. When I started off, there was this adrenaline to it and it was fading as I got 45 illustrations in and having to do a lot of other things at the same time. And then one day I sat down at the piano and I thought, ‘well maybe I could think through some of the emotions in the scene that I’ve got to illustrate by coming up with songs about them’, so I wrote several songs – five of which we have put as an EP on Spotify – they’re called Songs for Albion.” With her musical creations equally as enchanting as her other work, there is no doubt that Amy is a multi-talented artist and author with plenty more to come. Ultimately, Amy’s retellings open up a remarkable world brimming with wonderous tales of giants, legends and magical myths; one that is hard to put down and everenthralling to explore. ■
Storyland: A New Mythology of Britain, published by Quercus Publishing, £25, Topping & Co. Booksellers; toppingbooks.co.uk
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