posted on 02 Nov 2021

Skellig by David Almond

When I picked up Skellig to read it again after what felt like a very long time, I was astonished to discover that its original publication date was 1998 -  and after rereading it, I find that original release date even more remarkable. Skellig, like other classic children’s novels, seems to be completely timeless and so skilfully written that the simple classification of it as a ‘children’s novel’ seems clumsy and crass.

This is a novel of great beauty and sensitivity that defies entirely logical or rational explanation but is, at the same time, tuned into the very real anxieties of its central 10 year old protagonist. Michael and his family have just moved into a somewhat dilapidated house, dragging him away from his friends and the neighbourhood he grew up in. Although he still goes to the same school, it’s a long journey across town and he feels detached from his mates. To make matters worse, his baby sister has just been born but she’s critically ill, constantly in and out of hospital – a situation that gets gradually worse and colours the relationship Michael has with his mom and dad.

In a ruined shed at the bottom of the garden that’s in danger of falling down, Michael stumbles on the filthy, emaciated figure of someone living in the detritus at the end of the shed – a figure he would later discover is called Skellig. Skellig himself seems close to death and living on insects and scraps of thrown-away Chinese meals that the previous house-owner used to order.

At first Michael thinks he might have made this mysterious character up – especially when he discovers what seems to be wings on the man’s bony back. But when he meets Mina, a young girl who is his new next door neighbour, he takes her to meet Skellig and establishes that he is real.

Mina turns out to be nearly as extraordinary as Skellig. She is home-schooled by her widowed mother, an artist, and seems to know lots about all sorts of things. She’s committed to the mysteries of nature and the beauty in the world – and is a great disciple of William Blake and Blake’s visions of the hidden mysteries of the world. The football-loving, very real-world Michael finds all of this quite a revelation.

As the two children care for and look after Skellig, his strength grows and he begins to reveal mysterious powers that Michael draws on as the crisis with his new little sister deepens. In the end Skellig will leave the two children and move to somewhere else but not before he has changed their lives. Just what is his role in Michael’s little sister’s recovery? We’re not told but we know he had something to do with it.

Reviewing the book, the Kirkus website puts it this way:

“The author creates a mysterious link between Skellig and the infant, then ends with proper symmetry, sending the former, restored, winging away as the latter comes home from the hospital.”

Michael can return to school and to his old friends and to his football – but he’s a very different boy now than he was at the start of the book. He also now has the extraordinary Mina as his friend.

In the anniversary edition of the book that I have just read there is a short essay about the book by David Almond in which he explains that the mystery of Skellig has no answers. The author doesn’t know what or who Skellig was, where he came from or where he went – he is part of the infinite mysteries and wonders the world has in store if you are able to be open and use your sense of wonder and imagination.

Copies can be easily obtained in paperback for very little and it’s a book that should be on everyone’s shelves.

 

Terry Potter

Noveber 2021