Marianne Dreams by Catherine Storr

Marianne Dreams by Catherine Storr

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


There are some books you know – or at the very least, think that you know – before you get anywhere near to reading them. Bridge to Terabithia is one for me, and Marianne Dreams is – was – another. I thought I knew it, I thought I understood it, I thought I recognised its place within the world and then, at last finding a copy, I read it and realised I understood nothing. (I especially did not understand how any child reading it could ever draw anything again after reading it, but that’s by the by). This spooky, strange, and viciously tense book is a remarkable thing and I rather loved it.

Marianne is bedridden through illness, and she draws. She draws a world into life and enters it through her dreams – finding everything that she’s drawn on the page coming to strange and peculiar life. A house. A landscape. A world. A boy at a window, looking back upon her. There are connections here to be teased out; who, what, and why, until suddenly things are almost beyond her control and a brave and bold fight against the forces of darkness must begin.

This is one of those deliciously unclassifiable books that the fifties did so well. Children’s literature was entering a phase of peculiar and radical richness (for more on that, Kimberley Reynolds’ Radical Children’s Literature: Future Visions and Aesthetic Transformations in Juvenile Fiction is a treat) and Marianne Dreams sings of power in every inch. The children are no virtuous angels; they are unhappy and peevish and angry and true, and they learn that even in their isolation, they are not alone. They learn that actions have consequences, that events can spiral out of their control, and that – even when all seems lost- they have an agency and a power that can work against it.

And we, as the reader, learn to never look at a sketch in quite the same way again. The unnerving wildness of this book!

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