(read at Pindari cabin, Yeranda Cottages, Dungog, 2-9 January 2024)
When stories are well and truly seared into the popular consciousness, as is the case for many fairytales, it can devilishly hard, and yes, that descriptive word has been used quite deliberately, to take another run at them and give them your own spin, substance and gloss.
Some might almost impossible.
But that clearly has not daunted Australian author Kell Woods, who has not only taken on the exciting challenge of enlarging the story of Hansel and Gretel but taking it to places so breathlessly imaginative and emotionally substantial that it becomes something far, far beyond the simple morality tale of old.
Her novel, After the Forest, is so good in fact at what it sets out to do that there are many times you will simply stop reading so you can bask in the glow of superlatively lovely prose, richly-realised characters who fairly sing with authentic humanity and twists and turns that are at once supernaturally special and beautifully, affectingly grounded.
It’s a masterful wrought piece of writing that will make you realise that it is possible to take a story with which many people are intimately familiar, and to do something so spectacularly wondrous with it that a story that until now had often glanced off us with its oft-told familiarity becomes a tale that captures the heart, stokes the imagination and has you turning the pages so fast it is a wonder the whole book doesn’t simply burst into quite magical flame.
‘I couldn’t say.’ Anna’s gaze flicked over Greta with interest. ‘Is anything amiss?’
‘Not at all,’ Greta muttered, forcing a weary smile of her own.
‘Not at all.’
After the Forest is, quite simply, utterly remarkable.
It embeds the tale of Hansel and Gretel, a German fairytale which first emerged in Late Middle Ages Germany (1250-1500) and which attained renewed prominence in 1812’s Grimm’s Fairy Tales, in 1650 Europe with the two titular characters living and working in a Black Forest village in Württemberg some 15 years after the traumatic events of the story.
And when you think about it, their experience of being abandoned in the forest by their father before being imprisoned and almost killed and eaten by a witch in a gingerbread house which quickly lost any of its initially wondrous properties, is about as traumatic as it gets.
No surprise then that Hans has now developed a major gambling addiction and has reached the sort of age where he should well and truly married a stalwartly single man and Greta is practically alone, save for her brother and close family friends the Muellers, her only real source of income the addictively rich, magical gingerbread she bakes from the grimoire aka spell book which she took from the witch’s house as they fled for their lives.
She knows she shouldn’t be using the magic which comes with a lingering sense of evil and darkness but it’s either make the gingerbread which the villagers can’t help but buy or starve and with their fate hanging by a gossip-caked thread as it is, Greta is willing to take her chances.
(courtesy Harper Collins Publishers Australia)
So, as After the Forest opens, things are not good for the blighted brother and sister duo.
They are the subject, Greta in particular, of rampant suspicion by smallminded, superstitious villagers, an horrifically dark magic seems to be stalking the ruined countryside around them, still troubled by the aftereffects of the Thirty Year War, and what they assumed might be a shaky but somewhat certain future is looking less and less like a sure thing all the time.
In this climate of distrust, looming loss and less than wonderful outcomes, Greta is increasingly forced to ask herself what it is she’s willing to do to avert the kind of catastrophe that seems to be looming.
She is not without some friends, including the mysteriously capable and undeniably handsome Matthias who adds a luscious Beauty and the Beast flavour to the narrative, and she has magic of her own which is rising within her and which she must decide to use or not to secure her future, assuming that can even be done, but it’s a tough road ahead and much of the time in After the Forest‘s compellingly intense and expansively emotional narrative, which balanced adroitly between history and myth, it’s an even way bet whether Greta will land with her feet on the ground.
While there is a sense Greta may get her happy ever after, because if anyone deserves it, it’s her, that is by no means assured, and it is testament to the glories of Woods’ superbly good writing that at no time is Greta’s fate ever assured of a positive sheen.
Greta looked back at him, standing there in the yard. Expecting her to nod meekly and do as he bid. Expecting her to do nothing.
But she was tired, of nodding meekly and doing as she was bid. So tired of doing nothing.
She kept walking.
What captures the heart so completely about After the Forest is how richly, magically imaginative it is and yet how profoundly, universally human it is.
Fairytales, for all their innate humanity, can often feel a little remote and magically far off, but After the Forest never feels that way and though it is far removed from 21st century life in time and sensibility, there is something deeply, affecting accessible about it.
Vivaciously rich with language and alive with the very worst and best of humanity, After the Forest feels like a tale that has not simply been renewed but improved upon and added to in such a way that it is a far richer and more gorgeously moving literary beast that the fairytale of old.
While you are willingly swept up in the book’s fantastical narrative underpinnings and its deep absorption and articulation of both historical fact and literary heritage, you also feel tied to how real much of it feels especially its exploration of trauma’s lingering stain and how the small, bigoted minds of others do not provide necessary solace and comfort but actually makes the brokenness of past pain and loss all the more unbearable.
Filled with darkness but awash with light, After the Forest is a gem of a novel, a vividly alive story of what happens when the past and the present collide, when destiny must reckon with past pain, and a person who has endured so much much and could be inclined to fall back into the limiting faux comfort of the shadows, has to make a decision about whether she will succumb to the pain of what went before or rush out and embrace a possible future no matter the attendant risk involved.