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ALCHEMY AND MEGGY SWANN

Page history last edited by RichiesPicks 13 years, 6 months ago

ALCHEMY AND MEGGY SWANN by Karen Cushman, Clarion, April 2010, 176p., ISBN: 978-0-5472-3184-6

 
You know how you'll be out somewhere and overhear two friends good-naturedly talking trash at one another?  Well, here's what it sounded like in the 1570s:
 
"'I am not your Mistress Swann, you tottering wretch,' Meggy said to Roger as they started down Pudding Lane.  She had to struggle to keep up with him, for, being straight and strong, he was not compelled to stick-swing-drag as she was. 
"'Fortunate that is for me, you mewling, flap-mouthed flax wench,' he responded, slowing down a bit.
"'Gleeking swag-bellied maggot,' said Meggy.
"'Knoddy-pated whey face.'
"'Fly-bitten --' The girl paused.  'You have yet to say cripplesome or crookleg or leaden foot.  Why do you not?'
"He grinned.  'When I look at you, I see not your crooked legs but your black eyes that blaze and snap and those cheeks like apples ripened in the sun,' he said, which irritated but also oddly pleased the girl, which irritated her the more.
""Go to!' she snapped.  'I am right surprised that you required bellows to tend to your master's fire, you bloviating windbag.'"
 
I can just imagine Karen Cushman's own amusement when she first read aloud what she'd written there. 
 
The first thing that you've got to know about Cushman's latest piece of historical fiction -  this one set in London at the dawn of the Elizabethan era -- is that there are wonderful waves of high-spirited discourse providing balance to the dire predicaments in which feisty, different-abled heroine Margaret "Meggy" Swann finds herself. 
 
As Cushman explains in her extensive and illuminating Author Note, Meggy was born with "what is now called bilateral hip dysplasia, an abnormal formation of both hip joints at birth in which the ball at the top of each thighbone is not stable in the socket."  Being that such a condition was not routinely diagnosed nor treated in sixteenth century Britain, Meggy grows up moving slowly with an ever-painful waddling gait and an ever-present pair of walking sticks.
 
Throughout the story we repeatedly encounter a contrasting of the good-hearted versus the ignorant and superstitious in regard to Meggy's very visible condition.  It is that contrast that helps set her tale in motion, for Meggy was raised fatherless at a countryside alehouse by her kindly maternal grandmother who protected the child from a beautiful but cold-hearted mother and instilled in Meggy a love for song.  After the death of the grandmother, when the absent father in London abruptly sends for the child he has never laid eyes on, that mother is apparently all too happy to see the last of Meggy.  And when her father first meets her, he seems all too sorry for having summoned what has turned out to be a daughter, not a son -- a daughter of questionable value who, to top it off, is accompanied by an ill-humored and differently-abled goose named Louise.
 
Meggy's father is an alchemist who is thoroughly obsessed with his work of turning base metals to gold and thereby discovering the secret of achieving physical immortality through chemistry  (I guess we'd now call him a sixteenth century biopharmaceutical entrepreneur of questionable repute.)  He first shuns and ignores Meggy, but in the wake of his former and ill-treated apprentice's (Roger's) departure to become a player in a local performing troupe, Meggy determines to make herself useful to her aloof, preoccupied father and, in the process, will come to find her own voice and path in the world -- and way through the chaotic maze and filth of London.
 
Page after page, the pre-Shakespearian London in which the tale is set is delightfully colorful -- at least if you are having the thrill of reading Meggy's descriptions of it and not actually having to live and breathe and smell and taste and step in it every day.  Eww! 
 
And living amidst today's communications and information revolution -- having myself moved in a ridiculously short stretch of years from acquiring my first personal (desktop) computer and getting online to recently purchasing my now ever-necessary and present iPhone -- it is all the more striking to see and consider the pivotal role being played back in those days by the copy-at-a-time printing press and the story ballads being sung on the streets.
 
"Roger stopped.  'I do believe that the first rule of asking a favor of someone is to call that someone not Oldmeat but instead Roger.'"
 
Ye toads and vipers!  Meggy Swann's coming of age story is way-fun and, thus, my trip through Elizabethan London was come and gone way, way too soon.
 

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