Also by Scarlett Thomas
Worldquake Sequence
Dragon’s Green
Published in Great Britain in 2018 by Canongate Books Ltd,
14 High Street, Edinburgh EH1 1TE
This digital edition first published in 2018 by Canongate Books
Copyright © Scarlett Thomas, 2018
Extract from Galloglass copyright © Scarlett Thomas, 2019
Extract from The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious reprinted by permission of Routledge © C.G. Jung, 1991, second edition
The moral right of the author has been asserted
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available on request from the British Library
ISBN 978 1 78211 932 6
eISBN 978 1 78211 931 9
Typeset in Horley Old Style MT by
Palimpsest Book Production Ltd, Falkirk, Stirlingshire
For Mum & Couze, with love.
And in memory of David Miller.
Contents
‘The “child” is all that is abandoned and exposed and at the same time divinely powerful; the insignificant, dubious beginning, and the triumphal end.’
C.G. Jung
‘Ther saugh I pleye jugelours, Magiciens, and tregetours, And Phitonesses, charmeresses, Olde wicches, sorceresses.’
Geoffrey Chaucer
‘Each mortal thing does one thing and the same:
Deals out that being indoors each one dwells;
Selves – goes itself; myself it speaks and spells, Crying Whát I dó is me: for that I came.’
Gerard Manley Hopkins
1
Orwell Bookend was not a very happy man. At this moment, with a small bat peering at him with its peculiar upside-down eyes, he wasn’t sure if he’d ever been happy. Perhaps he had been happy once, a long time ago, when his first wife Aurelia had still been around. Before his daughter Effie had got so out-of-control. And before he had climbed into this dusty attic without changing out of his work suit.
Where was that blasted child? Probably out dabbling in ‘magic’ somewhere with her deluded friends – that fat, bespectacled boy, and the girl who seemed to wear nightdresses all the time. Well, Effie would certainly be in trouble when she got home. She must have been up here in the attic, Orwell concluded, and taken the book already. The Chosen Ones by Laurel Wilde was nowhere to be found. Which was the main thing currently making him extremely unhappy.
Orwell Bookend’s unhappiness had started, like much unhappiness, when the prospect of happiness had been dangled in front of him and then cruelly snatched away. This had happened approximately forty-five minutes earlier. He had been listening to the radio in the car on his way home from the university when a competition had been announced.
Orwell Bookend loved competitions. He didn’t admit this to most people, but they even made him happy. Well, until he lost. Every Friday he carefully filled in the prize cryptic crossword from the Old Town Gazette and sent it off to a PO Box address in the Borders. The cost of the stamps over the years had far exceeded the value of the prize, which was a fifteen-pound book token, but Orwell would not rest until he had that book token, which he planned to have framed and put up in his office.
The second thing that made Orwell Bookend happy was acquiring money, even though he wasn’t very good at it (as demonstrated by the business with the book token). If he could only find the book – the hardback first-edition of The Chosen Ones that Aurelia had bought for Effie all those years ago – then he would have the chance to enter a competition and make money. That was what it had said on the radio. Anyone lucky enough to own an original copy of The Chosen Ones was to take it to the Town Hall on Friday, where they would be given fifty pounds in cash and a chance