The Girl Green as Elderflower

Randolph Stow's The Girl Green as Elderflower (1980) is one of the oddest novels I have encountered in years. And I do not mean the term "oddest" to be a putdown. Rather, it's a bit of an attraction, for how often does one encounter a book, a personal vision, that is completely unexpected to the reader at almost every turn? For me the oddness of this book extends from its contours to its incidents and its plot.  Meaning: I never knew in which direction the story might turn, nor did I feel secure in knowing where the story had been. Details unfold slowly and often subtly 

The author, Randolph Stow (1935-2010), was born and raised in western Australia. He wrote poetry and novels, settling in the 1960s for over a decade in Suffolk, England, where his ancestors had lived. During this time he wrote The Girl Green as Elderflower, which takes inspiration from many elements in Stowe's own life. 

On the surface, the novel is centered on a young man Robin Clare, who after some time in the tropics, settles for a while in Suffolk, near some very distant cousins who befriend him. He is recovering from some kind of illness, possibly after a suicide attempt. In playing with his young Clare cousins, he learns of an invisible sprite named Malkin who knows all sorts of local secrets. Clare himself is also enamored with Suffolk's medieval past, which includes stories of a similar sprite at Dagworth, a wild man at Orford, and the more famous story of the two green children of Woolpit. The novel is mainly set in the early 1960s, with four sections dated January, April, May and June. In between these four sections are three historical sections, interlacing the modern Clare family with the medieval legends. The reader gradually comes to understand that these are writings by Robin Clare. The dislocations in time, both in the modern sections as well as the legendary ones, gets a bit confusing, and the story really only comes to vibrant life in the long, penultimate section, "Concerning a boy and a girl emerging from the earth," reworking the green children story.  Stow helpfully includes as an Appendix four of his own translations of the twelfth or thirteenth century legends--three from Ralph of Coggeshall, one from William of Newburgh. 

A second reading of The Girl Green as Elderflower would doubtless help to better understand what Stow was up to, but for now, the first of his eight novels, The Haunted Land (1956) looks intriguing, as does his final novel, The Suburbs of Hell (1984), after whose publication Stow ceased writing. Perhaps these will afford clues to a better understanding how Stow's art worked.