Josie George
Faber £14.99
ISBN: 978-0-57138016-9
A long list of letters, all addressed to ‘Dear You have been left for the reader to find. All are from Josie George (the author) but vary from being signed Josie George, to JO, JG or even plan J. I shall refer to her as JG.
The writer claims to have left them in various locations throughout ‘the overplace” which is actually just a dreary suburban location with an old graveyard, graffiti covered underpass, an old railway footpath and a modern maze like housing estate. All quite dreary but also quite normal – something you might like to escape from. The letters are addressed from these primary locations and mostly from a location called ‘the hidden house’, but in reality a plain terraced property not hidden at all – but perhaps overlooked by all that pass.
The rooms have exotic names such as ‘the alchemists window’, ‘the darkest room’ and ‘the laboratory’ with even a ‘secret garden’. As the letters progress you relealise that JG is trying to give you directions to get to Wonderland. What is Wonderland – not an alternative reality or somewhere down a rabbit hole, but more a state of mind. First you are given details of how to find a doorway in a place that you feel suddenly very still for no reason at all (for me under a tree behind the basilica at Fatima) and then to look for everday objects that you can resonate with that will become a key, maybe a stone that took your fancy, a feather etc – we often collect items with no intrinsic value.
The problem is that is just a sort of daydream – shapeshifting is mentioned in a letter, but you are not expected to turn into a dog, cat or bird but just try and experience the sort of feelings that they may have for a short time.
About a third of the way in JG comes clean and lets the reader know that she is an older woman with a nearly adult son and that she is very infirm often spending whole days in bed with a cat curled up beside her. There is a husband referred to as ‘The Toymaker’ who is more often than not away at his work, so there is a carer.
Wonderland is therefore her escape a daydream to escape the grim realities of modern life – indeed she introduces a concept known as ‘The Grim’ so this is her drifting way from hours looking out of the window or enduring pain. ‘The Grim’ is an entity that doesn’t want you to go to Wonderland. You or I might call it common sense but for JG possibly grim reality. Having done an internet search it transpires that JG is indeed an author who has written books from her bed and suffers with chronic pain.
As you progress ‘Tendering’ is introduced which boils down to looking after the bugs in the (not so) secret garden and from there it is a short step to becoming a guardian.
So basically nothing much happens in the book. There are some lovely illustrations of birds, inscts and leaves by Becky Thorne. Even if just a small motif at the top there is one on every page up to a full page hand drawn map of the overplace. It is all beautifully put together, using an old style typewriter typeface, and it’s well written (there is a wonderful snippet called ‘draw like a poet’) but leaves you wanting something more.
So back to the Alchemists window. Traditionally alchemists tried to transmute lead into gold and JG could well have called it that for the time spent looking outside and daydreaming of other places. She is an alchemist of a sort for conjuring a lot out of nothing, but I struggle to imagine the target readership.