A Game of Dark

by William Mayne

A twentieth-century teenager finds himself existing as squire to the lord of a medieval village threatened by a giant predator-worm.

Genres: Fantasy

143 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1971

About the author

William Mayne was a British writer of children's fiction. Born in Hull, he was educated at the choir school attached to Canterbury Cathedral and his memories of that time contributed to his early books. He lived most of his life in North Yorkshire.

He was described as one of the outstanding children's authors of the 20th Century by the Oxford Companion to Children's Literature, and won the Carnegie Medal in 1957 for A Grass Rope and the Guardian Award in 1993 for Low Tide. He has written more than a hundred books, and is best known for his Choir School quartet comprising A Swarm in May, Choristers' Cake, Cathedral Wednesday and Words and Music, and his Earthfasts trilogy comprising Earthfasts, Cradlefasts and Candlefasts, an unusual evocation of the King Arthur legend.

A Swarm in May was filmed by the Children's Film Unit in 1983 and a five-part television series of Earthfasts was broadcast by the BBC in 1994.

William Mayne was imprisoned for two and a half years in 2004 after admitting to charges of child sexual abuse and was placed on the British sex offenders' register. His books were largely removed from shelves, and he died in disgrace in 2010.

Reviews

[Bionic Jean · Rating 2 out of 5]

Well that was not what I expected at all!

A Game of Dark by William Mayne was published by Puffin books (an imprint of Penguin for what at the time were called “juvenile” books) in 1974, 3 years after it had first been published. It looks from the cover like a medieval fantasy adventure, and it is, in part.

However that is very much a subplot.

The story is about a 14 year old boy, Donald Jackson. He has an unhappy home life, knowing that his parents wish he was Cecily, his dead sister. He never knew her, and they seem to avoid ever mentioning her. In addition he feels especially guilty for not loving his severely disabled father, who is a Methodist lay-preacher. Instead, he finds comfort with another family, and adopts a Church of England clergyman Mr. Braxham (who liked to be called Berry) as a kind of father figure. We subsequently discover that the clergyman was indirectly responsible for Donald’s father’s physical condition and his sister’s death .

Because of his unbearable day to day life, Donald retreats into a medieval chivalric world. He finds himself removed from reality at random times, never knowing when this will happen, and when he will be back in the real world.

The fantasy world is primitive and feudal. He begins as a poor servant but makes a friend of a local girl, Carrica, who teaches him the ways of the feudal system. Donald - or Jackson as he is called in this world - gradually works up to being a squire to Sir Percecoeur, and then a knight himself. But there is a devouring monster at large: a huge, preying Worm threatens the village, and it is up to Jackson to kill it. He fails miserably at first, and is banished.

In his home life, Donald’s mother no longer spends all her time at the hospital, and is full of joy at his father coming home. But this seems as bad to Donald as the visits he had made to his father in hospital, when he seemed to either not recognise his son, or to be full of pain and dislike.

Back in the mediaeval village, Donald is an outcast, but knows he must fight to protect the villagers even so. He manages this, but not nobly as a knight should. Instead he uses unfair tactics, stabbing its under-belly from the protection of a hole in the ground. There is no honour in this achievement.

The ending is a strange message. At last Donald feels he can love his father, and can accept reality. When he is near his father’s sickroom at home, his father dies.

There was so much about the difficult relationship between Donald and his father, that I soon felt the book must be partly from personal experience. It completely overshadowed the adventure story, and was described in such a bitter way, with his devout but extremist, Bible-thumping parents. The contrast with the Anglican family, a happy-go-lucky crowd, was marked. However, this is pure surmise. All I could discover of his early life was that William Mayne was a chorister at Canterbury Cathedral from 1937 until 1942, and dropped out of school at 17.

As a child I was aware of William Mayne’s works, perhaps because he was a local author who lived in Yorkshire for most of his life. The “Oxford Companion to Children’s Literature” described him as one of the outstanding children’s authors of the 20th Century. He wrote more than a hundred books, and had won many prestigious awards. However he died disgraced, and it is easy to find out why, if you wish to.

What puzzles me is not the symbolism, but the balance of this book. The famous writer and critic of children’s literature, John Rowe Townsend describes A Game of Dark as “ambitious and harrowing”. The ex-Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr. Rowan Williams admires the book, describing it as “very dark … but an extraordinary novel”.

I find I can’t really agree, and feel it is flawed. My memories of William Mayne’s books are only vague, but I would like to read another fantasy novel by this author, because some of the fantasy passages are very well described. Take this, for instance:

“The worm threw the horse aside and then began to scan with its head. Jackson saw it settle its look in his direction, and hunch itself like a cat. Then it did what he had never seen it do before. It sprang into the air and forward, propelled by a movement of its tail that scooped out a great spray of earth. At the top of its leap it attempted to fly. The left-hand wing came out and held the air, but the right-hand one was missing. The great blue pulsing stain of the heart showed against its belly. The creature coiled in the air, vainly, and fell to the ground. The ground shook. The worm climbed and squirmed in itself and came the right way up. The extended wing folded shut with a dry rustle and was stowed beneath its cover. Then its head sought again, and fixed once more on Jackson.”

What the theme of the book reminds me of most, is a modern fantasy novel from 2011: “A Monster Calls” by Patrick Ness. However the tone of that is not so unremittingly dour, and it is a well balanced work, to which I gave my default rating of 3 stars. I’m afraid A Game of Dark merits only 2 stars from me.

[SmokingMirror · Rating 1 out of 5]

12/12/15
Revision of rating. It would be just a "read" rather than one star. I missed the whole paedophilia scandal with this author, who used to be one of my favorites. No wonder floods of used copies of Earthfasts could be found all over a few years ago. One author I love even alluded to him and the creepy grooming techniques he used as a popular children's author. (In a perverse way, I even wished I could read made up books, "The Sun Battles.") His writing is very skillful, but some of his victims say that he copied things they said and did, and used them in his books, so I'd say that his books represent the high price a large number of children paid so others could be entertained and so he could continue to find victims.
I can't read him anymore.

[Krista the Krazy Kataloguer · Rating 2 out of 5]

As I recall, his writing style was odd, which was why I didn't enjoy the book much. Perhaps I should reread it.

[Kirsty · Rating 3 out of 5]

Well, that was strange.