(1928-2010) UK author whose work, more than a hundred titles, was published exclusively for children and YOUNG ADULT readers; he also wrote as Martin Cobalt, as Dynely James in collaboration with Dick Caesar, and as Charles Molin. His work is sometimes realistic, sometimes – especially in his later career – fantastic; the FANTASIES, however, are treated in so down-to-earth a manner that more often than not they naturalize the supernatural. His style, which is sophisticated and sometimes oblique, was found difficult by some children; others love him, as do some critics who see Mayne as perhaps the most distinguished UK writer of children's fiction in the late twentieth century, regardless of genre. His first book was Follow the Footprints (1953), the earliest of the many treasure-hunt stories he was to write.
Mayne wrote very little pure sf; the Earthfasts sequence, comprising Earthfasts (1966), Cradlefasts (1995) and Candlefasts (2000), is typical in that its sf elements crosshatch with FANTASY readings in a manner that ruthlessly evades any clear generic fix (for Crosshatch, > The ENCYCLOPEDIA OF FANTASY; > also EQUIPOISE). Earthfasts itself is a fine TIMESLIP tale in which an eighteenth-century drummer boy enters a cave to search for King Arthur's treasure deep UNDERGROUND, emerging two centuries later from a the edge of a hill, where he is befriended by modern youths, one a sceptic who feels impelled to interpret this and other fantastic intrusions in scientific terms. The lad soon disappears backwards through time, but his incursion has shaken the structure of reality in the contemporary world, dizzyingly in the second volume, slightly more reassuringly in the third, where much of the distress proves to have been caused by an entity from the FAR FUTURE who has been trapped in our earthfast landscape. Along with Earthfasts, two similarly complexly equipoisal tales – A Game of Dark (1971), whose protagonist travels to an ALTERNATE WORLD to kill the MONSTER whose death allows him to love his monstrous father, and The Jersey Shore (1973), a TIMESLIP meditation on race and destiny (the text was censored in America to gut it of any reference to the possibility of miscegenation) – constitute perhaps his central achievement.
Mayne's fiction typically (in a great variety of ways) depicts the past impinging on the present, often as a kind of mystery to be decoded; his work tends to climax in epiphanies where a chaotic present day is suddenly illuminated in this way; some of his books feature psychic TIME TRAVEL and ESP. A Swarm in May (1955), for the most part a realistic choir-school narrative, introduces a centuries-old talisman whose power to attract bees appears to stem from some pheromonic essence: an INVENTION of past chemistry or alchemy. Eerie noises from a "marsh-dragon" in The Member for the Marsh (1956) are explained as a mere pumping-engine, but usher in the true secret of the marsh, an Iron Age settlement with its associated sense of TIME ABYSS. A Grass Rope (1957), about a unicorn hunt (> SUPERNATURAL CREATURES), won the CARNEGIE MEDAL. The overtly sf Skiffy (1972) and its sequel Skiffy and the Twin Planets (1982) were written for rather younger children, and while interesting – especially the latter – are not the equal of his best work.
Among Mayne's other more highly regarded books, mostly for older children, all of them containing fantastic elements (some very obviously, some crucially but near-invisibly), are The Glass Ball (1961 chap), Over the Hills and Far Away (1968; vt The Hill Road 1969 US), A Year and a Day (1976), IT (1977), All the King's Men (coll 1982), Gideon Ahoy (1987), Antar and the Eagles (1989), The Farm That Ran Out of Names (1990 chap), Low Tide (1992), and Cuddy (1994) – the last again featuring repeated supernatural TIMESLIPS and some SHAPESHIFTING. Some books written ostensibly for younger children – like The Book of Hob Stories (omni 1991), which assembles four earlier pamphlets: The Blue Book of Hob Stories (coll 1984 chap), The Green Book of Hob Stories (coll 1984 chap), The Red Book of Hob Stories (coll 1984 chap) and The Yellow Book of Hob Stories (coll 1984 chap), followed by Hob and the Goblins (1993) and Hob and the Peddler (1997 US); or single titles like The Blemyah Stories (coll 1987 chap) or Every Dog (2009 pod) – are no more conventional children's literature than was the late work of Alan GARNER.
Mayne's later work was increasingly pared to the bone and fantasticated. From this period, The Animal Garden (2003) is of specific sf interest: its two young protagonists, separated from their scientist fathers by rebel action in an unidentified Middle Eastern country, find a tiny tribe of monkey-like beings (> EVOLUTION) that their parents had surgically modified, giving them the power of speech (> APES AS HUMAN); the Animal Garden itself, an ancient zoo now desiccated, suddenly flowers with life after the removal of a blockage allows water to flow again. Soon after,Mayne's life and work were tragically darkened – a tragedy first and foremost for his victims – when he was charged with child abuse in 2004. His conviction and imprisonment effectively ended his career. His death may have the effect of allowing his books to live again. [PN/DRL/JC]
see also: CHILDREN'S SF.
born Kingston-upon-Hull, Yorkshire: 16 March 1928
died Thornton Rust, North Yorkshire: 23 March 2010