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The Limits of Enchantment: A Novel, by Graham Joyce
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Everything Fern Cullen knows she's learned from her Mammy -- and none of it's conventional. Taught midwifery at an early age, Fern grows up as Mammy's trusted assistant in a small English village and learns through experience that secrets are precious, men can't be trusted, hippies are filthy and people should generally mind their own business.
But when one of Mammy's patients allegedly dies from a potion prescribed to induce abortion, the town's people rally against her outdated methods, and Mammy ends up hospitalized, due to a bad fall and a broken heart. Now the county is threatening eviction if Fern can't come up with the overdue rent, and a bunch of hippies and a woman with hoop earrings with a mysterious connection to Mammy seem to be the only people with any answers. As Fern struggles to save her home and Mammy's good name, everything around her begins to transform, and she soon uncovers a legacy spotted with magic.
The Limits of Enchantment is at once a story of two women: one with a deep past and one who finds her history in the other. It is a tale of midwifery, alchemy, magic, truth and identity, from an author with the extraordinary ability to blend literature and fantasy with surprising dexterity.
- Sales Rank: #1350744 in Books
- Brand: Brand: Atria Books
- Published on: 2005-02-22
- Released on: 2005-02-22
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 9.00" h x .90" w x 6.00" l, .92 pounds
- Binding: Hardcover
- 272 pages
- Used Book in Good Condition
From Publishers Weekly
Shaped by reverence for the feminine mystique and leavened with a dash of fantasy, this enthralling novel from British author, Joyce (The Facts of Life) offers a poignant appraisal of an English household steeped in folk traditions and its uneasy transition to contemporary times. Although it's 1966, Mammy Cullen, a beloved midwife in rural Hallaton, still dispenses a kind of herbal medicine that women have practiced since time immemorial. But times are changing and prejudices are building. When one of her remedies appears to kill a patient, the locals turn on Mammy. Her practice falls to Fern, her adopted daughter and apprentice, who soon finds herself confronting contemporary reality in several forms: Arthur, an amorous biker with marriage on his mind; an intrusive commune of feckless hippies who settle next door; and a devious landlord who schemes to evict her from her cottage. Fern's dilemma over whether to pack it all in under these pressures or contrive ways to continue with hedgerow medicine invests the tale with both pathos and humor. Joyce tackled some of this story's themes in his 1992 debut, Dark Sister, but his treatment here is more seasoned and sensitive. Likewise, his ability to write convincingly from a female point of view only improves, and Fern is one of his best realized characters to date. This novel's old-fashioned sense of values and heartwarming depiction of customs of home and community are sure to charm fans and new readers alike.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
From Booklist
Fern is being raised by Mammy, a midwife and "wise woman" in rural England circa 1960. She is also her apprentice, learning the skills and lore that will enable her to carry on the traditional medicine that Mammy practices. But after Mammy is injured in a personal attack and hospitalized, Fern must fend for herself. She is linked to the past, in which there was a place for Mammy's way of life, but times are changing; and Fern has to cope with modern-day problems, such as the need to earn a living. With naive wisdom, she discovers her own place in the world, using common sense and guile but also a good dose of what can only be called magic. In desperate times she finds strength and good friends who come to her rescue. Joyce's tale is a coming-of-age novel, a fantasy, and a romance filled with charm and enacted by intriguing characters who should appeal to a wide variety of readers. Danise Hoover
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
Review
"A master storyteller."
-- Kirkus Reviews
"Joyce delve[s] deeply into the human soul and examine[s] it with surgical precision, while keeping its magic alive."
-- Rocky Mountain News
"[An] enthralling novel...shaped by reverence for the feminine mystique and leavened with a dash of fantasy."
-- Publishers Weekly (starred review)
Most helpful customer reviews
9 of 9 people found the following review helpful.
A minor offering from an author capable of much more
By Kelly C. Shaw
Graham Joyce's fiction mingles fantasy with the mainstream, which, like Jonathan Carroll, often leaves him labeled, for lack of a better description, as a magic realist. Joyce's early books, particularly his masterworks Requiem (1995) and The Tooth Fairy (1996), were templates for how to expertly blend the magical with the mundane. His passion and edginess and willingness to embrace the fantastic in these books deservedly brought him multiple World Fantasy Awards and, more importantly, an avid cult following in genre circles - of which, I happily call myself an acolyte.
My first Joyce novel, Requiem - a modern, religious-themed fantasy - took me unsuspectingly by storm, leaving me anxiously awaiting each of his new novels. His following novel, The Tooth Fairy, upped the ante, and proved Joyce's versatility, tackling childhood superstition and coming-of-age themes with a plaintive, albeit, optimistic eye. The reason I continue to diligently read Graham Joyce is because of these two novels.
Then there are his post-Tooth Fairy books: Dark Sister (1999), Indigo (1999), Smoking Poppy (2002), and The Facts of Life (2003), all deeply satisfying, although also deeply flawed and well short of Requiem and The Tooth Fairy. Now, Joyce gives us The Limits of Enchantment, which is a long way from Requiem with its very mainstream, very accessible first-person narrator, Fern Cullen. Her story is one of a young woman grappling with the moribund rituals of her magical ancestry as they clash with the burgeoning culture of rock 'n roll, drugs, and science in a late 1960s English village. It's the kind of episodic, predictable story that delves too deeply into unforgivable melodrama - when Fern's Mammy grows ill and Fern's sanity is questioned by the town's people, the plot unfolds in expected fashion.
The Limits of Enchantment reveals a writer who has dismissed the kind of inventive and strange fantasy stories that earned him a cult following, in exchange for an easy-to-swallow soap opera with supernatural undertones (undertones that I would have liked to have seen brought to the fore a bit more often). The amazing feat here, is that the book is not bereft of merits: thanks to swift pacing and a very likable narrator, the book has the comforts of an old quilt - one with many holes and flaws.
Joyce's stories once felt dangerous, his storytelling skills boundless. The Limits of Enchantment could not feel more safe, or more like a book by an author who has become too comfortable in his own clothes. Many genre critics have declared this book another Joyce masterpiece, a book that deserves to gain him wider readership, and have named him one of the genre community's best. On his past work, he certainly deserves to be read, but that does not justify giving his latest a free pass. Because The Limits of Enchantment is no great work of literature - it is fun, it is safe, like a 1950s cinematic melodrama. And it is definitely not a Requiem or The Tooth Fairy. This humble critic can only hope that one day the author who wrote these early books will return.
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful.
Delightfully Limitless
By Diana Faillace Von Behren
In his novel "The Limits of Enchantment", Graham Joyce seemingly effortlessly insinuates the manifestation of magic in the everyday world without the need to create an entirely imaginary universe where the laws of classical physics bend and redefine themselves according to rules built solely on the whim of the typical fantasy author. This amalgam of the supernatural with a real point in a timeline (in this case, the pre-moon-landing sixties) positions Joyce on an upper tier of novelists of which few exist----Elizabeth Hand (Mortal Love, Waking the Moon, Black Light) whose clever interventions between folklore characters and mere and haplessly ill-prepared mortals immediately comes to mind as does Keith Donohue whose changeling story in "The Stolen Child" mesmerizes with a similar mix of the inexplicable and the routine. The ability to render a world seen through the somewhat undefined haze of the unexplained while still recounting quotidian events in a thrilling plotline hallmarks Joyce's success as not only a storyteller of great deftness but, a craftsman of almost incomparable skill.
Joyce's artistry consumes the reader with an inside look into the angry changing world of twenty-one year old Fern, adopted daughter to Mammy, the village hedgerow medicine woman. Like us all, Fern perceives that which she has become familiar as natural. Women in pre-legal abortion England in 1966 flock to Mammy with their "problems" and with the aid of a herbal concoction and an unexplained knowledge of the ways of the "Mistress", Mammy launches them back into their lives trouble-free after revealing to her the paternity of the unborn child. Over the years the list of fathers has grown substantially providing an insurance of sorts for this herbalist threatened by the advent of socialized medicine and an overall transcendence from the unexplained great mysteries to the rigid science and technology. Even more, the list hedges all of Mammy's bets as with her seventy-seven years of wisdom she understands sadly that true darkness does not lie beneath a waning moon or in adverse interpretations of cosmology but in the hearts of those who have something less than pure to hide and manifest their desires in the form of brutal inhumanity. Sheltered by Mammy's experience, Fern sits on the fence of a proverbial Age of Aquarius, struggling to find some correlation between the sagacity and necessity of secrecy of an older oral tradition most of which Mammy hints to her about but never reveals and the legitimacy of joining the new establishment where science and a degree in midwifery reign supreme in a more departmentalized world.
As Joyce telescopes in and out from one definition of the world to the other, we discover that we, too, share Fern's confused perspective. We appreciate Mammy and her knowledge and yet we simultaneously scoff at it. We admire our so-called betters and applaud the accolades of those who achieve degrees of professional success on the established "ladder" but we also shake our heads over the mundane conformity of such a routine track. The freewheeling life of the 60s hippie calls to us, but doesn't the lack of structure and functionalism suggest indolence rather than the dawning of a new world? Like Fern and her intimate knowledge of child birthing, we think we know all there is to know about the mysteries of sex---that is until that other sex confronts us with intimacies we are unable to ever fully absorb. How foolish to think one could ever know anyone let alone one's self?
"The Limits of Enchantment" explores the ceilings we impose upon ourselves by challenging what we really believe in. Whether we live an existence where magic is possible or not, we still have to contend with the motivations and machinations of the human heart----in this case a veritable "heart of darkness" propelled by selfish intent to keep those in power in power and disable those of a purer essence with societal rules forged to curb change.
When Fern enters a realm she barely believes in, she teeters precariously towards insanity replete with talking hares and dancing ghosts. Only through a kindness that she finds more substantial than the proverbial thicker-than-water blood does she come of age, defining herself in her own terms as she straddles the past and present to create an interesting future for herself.
Bottom line? Graham Joyce outdoes himself in "The Limits of Enchantment." Not only is his creation of Fern's narration authentically believable in every way, his ability to kaleidoscope from the supernatural to the practical keeps the reader spellbound. His uncanny way of explaining events without fully disclosing every detail imbues the indefinable with a mystical definition that adds dimension to the story and complexity to the characters. Simply wonderfully done! Highly recommended--- more, Mr. Graham, more!
Diana Faillace Von Behren
"reneofc"
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful.
Three Stars
By Amazon Customer
Not bad but not Graham Joyce's best novel. Worth reading if you're a fan.
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