The Magic Stone by Penelope Farmer

First published: 1964; illustrated

Type of work: Fantasy

Themes: Family, friendship, nature, social issues, and the supernatural

Time of work: The mid-twentieth century

Recommended Ages: 11-13

Locale: The countryside outside London

Principal Characters:

• Caroline, a thirteen-year-old girl who is soon going off to boarding school
• Alice, a fourteen-year-old girl who lives in a housing project
• Stephen, Caroline’s pugnacious younger brother, who is the leader of a gang
• Johnny, Alice’s younger brother, who leads a rival gang
• Philip, a member of Stephen’s gang who dislikes violence and, of all the gang members, is Caroline’s chief friend
• Alice’s Great-Grandmother, who, at ninety, is tart and alert and is believed to have second sight

The Story

The Magic Stone opens with the finding of a stone whose magical properties propel the story through an undercurrent of mystery. At first glance, it appears to be an ordinary stone, but further inspection reveals a blade of metal wedged in a groove. Caroline and Alice find the stone independently, leaving it where it lies and returning, as though in turn, yet both feel an inexplicable excitement in its discovery. Each, to her disappointment, is unable to loosen the metal. Eventually, they meet at the spot, and while struggling over the stone, they tug at the metal together and wrench it loose. Mutually suspicious, they nevertheless plan to return to repeat the “magic.”

Caroline broods that she wants the stone all to herself. She resents the effort of being friends with Alice to have access to the stone’s secrets, particularly since she suspects Alice will not be easy to get to know. The two girls are strikingly different: Dark-eyed Alice has relocated from the slums of London to a housing project in the country, where fair-haired Caroline has lived all of her life; Alice, fourteen, is the oldest of five children, for whom she must help her parents care, while Caroline, thirteen, and her brother live with a widowed father, an aunt, and a nanny. The time of year is “between winter and spring and not quite either, and so it was with them.” Their conversations tend to lapse into sparring matches. The stone links them in a way that perplexes them both.

Alice speculates that the metal may once have been part of a sword, and the two girls are reminded of King Arthur’s pulling of the sword from the stone when no one else could. A greater mystery than the stone’s origin, however, concerns the nature of its magic. Alice and Caroline experience extraordinary powers only intermittently, and even then are unsure of how “magical” these powers are.

The “magic” that the stone fitfully performs intensely heightens their sensory awareness. At first, they seem to have X-ray vision, which penetrates the very essence of natural objects, such as grass, animals, and rocks. Progressively, the two girls seem to merge with other entities: clouds, wind, and waves. These transformations terrify them as the sense of possession threatens to overwhelm them. They long for the magic to return, however, once it flees them. They also delight in coming to comprehend each other and the natural world that surrounds them, in exploring the power of their senses. Yet they cannot entirely shut out the world of family and society: They each perceive the impending gap between their respective future lives, with Caroline planning for boarding school and Alice anticipating earning her own living; they think also of their brothers’ growing enmity against each other as leaders of rival gangs.

Finally, the girls have the opportunity to ask Alice’s great-grandmother, whom they believe to have second sight, to help them uncover the stone’s mysteries. Mercurial and imperious, the old woman is able to remove the metal by herself. Yet there seems to Caroline to be as much common sense in her answers as magic. She chides the girls for expecting the stone’s magic to be tame and predictable. She reminds them that, through it, they became friends instead of enemies and had their senses awakened. She also warns them that evil exists in their world, which they have been careless to ignore.

This evil entails the gang warfare that has been seething in their neighborhood. It finally erupts in violence, in which Philip and a boy from the opposing gang are seriously injured. On the last day of their school holiday, following which they must separate, Alice and Caroline decide to persuade their brothers to remove the metal together, as they had done, in hopes of the boys’ reconciliation. A final time the “magic” works to reveal their lives to them: Caroline’s in a sheltered, insular room, and Alice’s in a prison exposed to the world. Yet there is also a sense of hope in their ability to share the vision.

Context

British author Penelope Farmer’s other works of fantasy for children include The Summer Birds (1962), Charlotte Sometimes (1969), Dragonfly Summer (1971), and A Cattle of Bone (1972). According to critic Peggy Heeks, Farmer has “classified herself as a writer of introvert fantasies, concerned with ’the process of consciousness or of dreams.”’

Her characters’ inner lives are illuminated even as their senses are “magically” awakened. She remains true to the often painful complexity of conscious life—its shifting borders and competing voices. The loyalties of her protagonists divide between the familiar, yet limiting, world of convention and the compelling, yet threatening, world of the unknown. The focus, then, is psychological—and social. Critic Hugh Crago sees Farmer as a “realist trying to work within fantasy.”

As a stylist, Farmer demonstrates in The Magic Stone her gift for description, which is almost hallucinatory in its detail. She grew up in the Kent countryside and admits to a “great feel for this country.” She writes with passion about the natural world, never domesticating it for her young readers but instead inviting them to explore its mysteries without preconceptions.