Maggie Blue and the Dark World

Maggie Blue Brown’s world in North London suburbia is grey and joyless. Her mother is elsewhere, listless and self-absorbed, simmering with fury towards a husband who has abandoned both her and her daughter. Twelve-year-old Maggie has been despatched to share the one-bedroom flat of her elderly Aunt Esme, whom she’s barely met before. But she likes Esme’s gentle eccentricities; and she also is fascinated by her antique ring formed by a serpent eating its own tail – which is to prove central to the plot. Maggie has started at Fortlake School where no-one notices her unless it’s to bully her, often making fun of her name. She retaliates with her fists, earning sharp words from the remote Miss McCrab, a Head with little inclination to talk, let alone listen, to individual students. The only person who does show interest is the new Guidance Counsellor, Miss Cane; it’s not long before Maggie discovers that she’s not to be trusted.
Maggie’s loneliness is relieved to some degree by an odd couple of new contacts: Dot, one of Esme’s even more eccentric friends; and Hoagy, an ageing, street-wise, one-eyed cat who, it turns out, is a drily witty conversationalist. Maggie knows she’s good at reading people, but she is understandably surprised to find that not only can she understand Hoagy, she can also engage in spirited exchanges with him; when Hoagy can be bothered, that is. Readers will surely welcome every time the cat stalks onto the page, since Hoagy is the well-spring of comedy in this debut novel. He is the essence of feline intelligence, independence and testy impatience with human folly. Playing to her strengths, Anna Goodall occasionally switches focus from Maggie’s adventures to join Hoagy’s equally hazardous path through the plot. If he goes astray, Hoagy resorts to cat-nav.
Things fall apart for Maggie when Ida, her chief tormentor in school, disappears in the mysterious Everfall Woods, adjoining the school grounds. Maggie is suspected of being involved. As readers used to find in the early fantasies of Alan Garner, characters discover entrances to slip swiftly between our everyday world and an alternative universe – the Dark World of the title. North London may have been lonely and unkind, but the Dark World is fraught with serious risk and malice. It’s a dying habitat, where only the return of The Great O, “protector of nature and nature itself” might bring healing. Those in control are ruthless and duplicitous, driven only by self-interest, to the point of kidnapping humans from Maggie’s suburbia so that they might literally drain the happiness from them for re-use by the privileged and powerful in the Dark World, where any kind of sustaining joy is in short supply. Maggie’s search confirms that Ida is one such victim; once the physical removal of her happiness is complete, Ida will be summarily ‘ended’.
Goodall is very good at danger and violent action, both physical and psychological; the tension in the Dark World sections of the story should make for headlong and excited reading. Often, cruel power is met with sacrifice, loyalty and courage by creatures hardly equipped to confront such threat. Some loose ends are left unresolved, so it’s no surprise to learn from Guppy Books – welcome newcomers to publishing for young readers in the UK – that the return of Maggie Blue Brown is expected in 2022.