Inspiring Young Readers
posted on 16 Mar 2023
Stag Boy by William Rayner
We continue our exploration of 1970s fiction for young adults (see links below) with Stag Boy, a little known novel by William Rayner from 1972.
In the late-60s and 1970s writing for younger readers, especially fantasy writing, was entering new territory, becoming darker and more challenging. It was a high-water mark of creativity too as writers such Alan Garner, Penelope Lively, Susan Cooper and John Gordon, to name just a few found new ways to fuse English folklore, magic, myth and fantasy. William Rayner’s Stag Boy deserves to be remembered in this company.
One of the myths appearing most frequently in the fiction of that period was that of Herne the Hunter, the wild, stag-headed spirit of the hunt, said to haunt the old Royal hunting forests such as Windsor, and the bleak moors and heathlands, such as Exmoor. It features in Susan Cooper’s The Dark is Rising sequence, in John Gordon’s The Giant Under the Snow, and of course in Penelope Lively’s The Wild Hunt of Hagworthy. It is also central to the story of Stag Boy and to my mind William Rayner uses the myth as adventurously as any of these writers – and arguably more ambitiously.
Fifteen year-old Jim Hooper is asthmatic and recovering from a long illness. His mother has sent him to convalesce at the Exmoor farm of the Yeandles family, where Jim and his family once lived and his father worked until his sudden death a few years earlier. Following the death of his father Jim and his mother moved to Wolverhampton where Mrs Hooper had found a job.
Jim considers himself weak and convalescent and as well as grieving his father he is lonely and also rather prey to self-pity. He desperately wants to rekindle an old friendship with his closest childhood companion, Mary Rawle, the daughter of another local farming family. Her enterprising father is experimenting with new, intensive farming techniques such as battery hens and has also branched out into tourism, starting a very successful camping and caravanning site on his land. The family are suddenly wealthy and Mary has caught the eye of the young, handsome, public school educated Edward Blake – Jim’s superior in every way.
Both Mary and Edward ride and belong to the local hunt and deer hunting – with all its implications of landowning, privilege, ritual and social superiority – is at the heart of the book. While despising the socially privileged world of the local hunt members theirs is also a world Jim longs to be part of – not to ride and hunt, exactly, but to share ‘the challenge and excitement…to be a match for the hard-bodied farmers, just as sound in wind as them, as bold on the steep slopes, as resolute in a punishing chase’.
In one of his solitary walks across the moor Jim finds that a tree has been toppled during a gale, partly breaking open a neolithic burial barrow. In the narrow grave chamber Jim finds an iron-work helmet on which majestic stag antlers have been mounted.
The central story concerns what happens to Jim once he begins to wear this enigmatic and frightening helmet. It puts him increasingly in communication with a huge black stag, a pack leader that the local hunt is eager to kill. But the helmet also puts Jim more closely in touch with other animals too and he begins to develop a almost obsessive sensitivity regarding not just the cruelty of the hunt but society’s wider industrial exploitation of animals and the natural world. As the novel progresses it becomes apparent that Jim is no longer entirely in control of the black stag: as much as he is able to direct the stag and to a large degree ensure its safety he is also increasingly at the stag’s command.
As well as writing an exciting fantasy novel for younger readers that makes brilliant use of English folklore motifs, Rayner also considers wealth, class, pre-history and the burgeoning erotic relationship of the two teenagers. Indeed, this may be part of the problem: despite being a very brief 160-pages, Stag Boy arguably tries to do too much. It is clear that Rayner is an extremely accomplished writer, but as a consequence of trying to do so much so briefly the novel suffers a little from underdevelopment. For example, the characters – both the teenagers and perhaps even more so the adults – are ‘types’ rather than rounded personalities, and some of the incidental themes would have benefitted from fuller development.
While I was aware of these faults as I was reading they did not detract from the enjoyment of what remains a quite extraordinary novel. What most impressed me was not that Rayner was able to combine the real and the magical worlds convincingly – this was after all very much a hallmark of quite a lot of children’s fiction at that period – but that he was able to do this while also weaving in other social, economic and environmental considerations. It makes me wonder what Rayner might have achieved had he focused more on novels for young adults. As it is, this was one of the only two that he wrote; his other books are all historical fiction for adults. He seems to have published nothing after 1980 and died in 2006.
The jacket, by the way, is illustrated by Michael Heslop whose excellent artwork graced many covers during that period. The inclusion of a face that looks startlingly like the young David Bowie seems somehow appropriate.
If you can find a reasonably priced secondhand copy or borrow it from the library then do give it a try. It is an injustice that Stag Boy is out of print and largely forgotten.
Alun Severn
March 2023
1960s and 70s fiction for young adults elsewhere on Letterpress:
John Gordon, Dennis Hamley, Penelope Lively: More children’s fiction from the 1960s & 70s
Susan Cooper’s The Dark is Rising sequence and The Dark Is Rising by Susan Cooper
The Stone Book Quartet by Alan Garner
A Candle in the Night by Robert Swindells
Small Shadows Creep, selected by Andre Norton
A Pair of Jesus-Boots by Sylvia Sherry
Dawn Wind by Rosemary Sutcliff
A Handful of Thieves by Nina Bawden
The Ghost of Thomas Kempe by Penelope Lively