The Physics of Magic…

Isn't it strange what you find yourself focussing upon?  Today I'm pondering on how fairy wings attach to their bodies.  Wings are modified limbs, so it would have to have a ball and socket joint where it joins the body, (like an arm or hip bone). 

The classic ball bit of such a joint is heavy and clublike - shades of the opening scenes of 2001 A Space Oddity, where the apes use one as a tool to smash other bones - it's a brutal shape, and I think a socket joint would look far more elegant on the end of a delicate wing.   Yet a ball joint gives the wing strength and flexibility in flight.  Natural selection has decided which bit should be the cup, and which bit should be the ball, and the ball joint is always on the limb, not the body.   

Okay, in fairness, I have already played fast and loose with the laws of physics in my book, so I shouldn't worry too much about the laws of biology, but this is proving to be a conundrum.  

In trying to visualise what would be left if the wing parted from the body, a ball joint sticking out would be a lot less messy than a cup joint…

Okay, so why am I agonising over such a detail?  I'd better put all this in some kind of coherent context…   

I have been fired up by looking at the extraordinarily beautiful work of Wendy Froud.  She has contributed an amazing body of work to the fantasy film world over the years; remember 'Dark Crystal'?  She made Kira - yes, and other characters - but I loved Kira. 

Her baby son was the baby in 'Labyrinth' - here he is, chilling with David Bowie... 

All grown up now, and expecting to be a father himself very soon, Toby has been working on The Hobbit. 

 

Wendy's husband, Brian Froud, is the breathtakingly accomplished fantasy artist - if you don't know his work, (chances are you will), he's this century's answer to Arthur Rackham - with loads of extra edge.

A reader suggested The Last Changeling might appeal to the Froud's, as the creatures I call metahominids are a close match to their visuals, and I found myself speaking to Wendy just yesterday.  I say speaking, but I was a breathless puddle of adoring fandom, so I have no idea what I actually said… 

…but long after talking to her, I began pondering on how I could possibly construct something 'fey', in this case, a fairy wing.  The jewellers in Llangollen, The Oak Chest, are planning a display niche for the book, and I will need something really amazing to go in it.  Hence my pondering on how to construct a wing like this one:

            Then, Gnat caught sight of something he recognised.  His eyes grew huge as he stared up at it.  This one was faded, its colours dulled by a yellowish cast, but it was still breathtakingly beautiful. The one he had hidden at home was probably a third bigger, and far more vibrant.

This one was just over a metre long, and took up nearly half a shelf, but Gnat knew it was as light as a feather - it was indeed a wing.

Looking as if it had belonged to the biggest dragonfly that ever lived, it was clear but veined with pale green, and tinted with the faint iridescence of a fire-opal. It reminded him of a peacock’s breast, and butterfly wings and kingfishers' feathers: it looked like someone had captured a living rainbow in wafer-thin ice.

                                                                                  From:  THE LAST CHANGELING

 

So I need to go now, and ponder again the physics of bone, sinew... and magic!

P.S:

 I have set myself a challenge to make anything approaching this, but I'm handy and I like a challenge, so hey, I will let you know how I get on

 

Peter Pan in Liverpool!

Sunday was spent filming in brilliant sunshine in Sefton Park, Liverpool.  The park is home to a recently restored statue - a direct copy of Frampton's figure of Peter Pan that stands in Kensington Gardens. 
 

It's the same image Margaret Tarrant used in her picture 'Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens.'  Clearly enchanted, the two children gaze on... it perfectly captures childhood idyll and celebrates a lost age...

Anyone who's read 'The Last Changeling,' will immediately recognise the innocents are blithely unaware of the danger they are in, and suddenly the scene takes on a far more chilling aspect.  As Kate Bush sang, 'Peter Pan steals the kids in Kensington Park...'

In the novel, The Last Changeling, the Kensington statue is a meeting place, (in 1922), for Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, (a firm believer in the reality of the fey realm), and Jim (JM) Barrie, his cricketing friend - and creator of Peter Pan. 

Barrie disliked the statue, declaring it failed to show the 'devil' in Peter!  His own foster son Michael Llewellyn Davies had been the model for Peter Pan, and upon his untimely death in 1921, his brother, Nico, described him as:

"the cleverest of us, the most original, the potential genius." 

 

 The newness of the restoration suited plans perfectly - a production company is engaged in the arcane art of making a book trailer for The Last Changeling, and a 'newer' looking version of the statue was needed for the forthcoming film. 

 

 

 

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's Infamous Neighbour

In any given crowd, most people will have heard of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the brilliant creator of Sherlock Holmes.  Some may even have heard about his involvement with the infamous Cottingley Fairy photographs.  I doubt if any of them will recognise the name of his equally fascinating neighbour, Whitaker Wright.  Yet Wright deserves to be just as well known for his own extraordinary creation - the fabulously unlikely, yet mis-named 'ballroom beneath the lake.'

Comprising a dome of riveted iron work, and thick glass plates, it still lurks hidden beneath the waters of its artificial lake. Designed to allow those beneath to look up at swimmers and fish alike, the glass filters an unearthly green glow down into the room beneath, and looks like it owes more to the imagination of Jules Verne than to the mind of a Victorian silver millionaire.

Actually created as a billiard room, this amazing structure played host to more than just a few games of billiards; one Victorian medium claimed to have channelled spirits there in the eerie sub-aquarian structure.  That Wright should have been playing host to mediums without knowledge of his neighbour of less than four miles away, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle - a man whose interest in mediumship cost him his friendship with Harry Houdini, strikes me as unlikely.  Yet, despite an unusual shared interest, and their very close proximity, (to repeat - Conan Doyle's self designed home 'Undershaw' is less than a handful of miles away), it is hard to find mention of any meetings between them. 

This could be due to Wright's spectacular fall from grace.  He got into financial difficulties trying to float The Baker Street and Waterloo Railway, (Baker Street - yet another connection with Conan Doyle surely), and was eventually found guilty of fraud.  On being sentenced, he committed suicide by taking cyanide. 

I have made him one of the villains of my latest novel 'The Last Changeling', but despite his inability to pay his investors, and the ruination of a Marquess, there was a genuine outpouring of grief at his funeral in Lea Park.  Poor Whitaker was hoping for a knighthood from his public spirited attempt at creating an underground railway for the benefit of the people of London, instead all he got was ruin and disgrace.   

Despite my caricaturing him as a villain, I believe he would have made every bit as interesting a dinner guest as his more famous neighbour, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.