Description
Aelfraeda and the Red City is made up of 13 closely woven stories, beginning when Aelfraeda is 16 years old, escaping from the confines of the walled-in Red City. Before she was born, Aelfraeda’s brutal, despotic step-father had seized power, turning the Red City, into a walled-in nightmare. Aelfraeda’s story is a feminist, and ecological version of the hero-journey, delving into the power of difference and diversity. Once she escapes the Red City, Aelfraeda moves among multiple relationships, cultures and languages. She sheds the binary categories that might originally have shaped what she could become. Not solely male or female, but gender-fluid. Not separate from the landscapes she travels through, but integral to them. Those landscapes, themselves, have life and power. The wetlands she travels through, and the forests, are alive with humans/elves/dragons/indigenous people, each profoundly affecting each other. Through her relations with others, and her ability to respond to them, and to listen to them, Aelfraeda learns new languages, and her capacity to listen is what eventually enables the Red City to become an extraordinary place of healing and openness, under her leadership as the elven matriarch.
admin –
‘Well, I don’t know how long I spent immersed. I have
been in this story all day. It is now five o’clock and
cutting dark, and Kaleb is four hundred and seven years
old, and I feel quite old too, and am now in tears, in the
living room.
‘This story is extraordinary, enthralling, and the images
are beautiful too, though I am glad most of the characters
are left in my mind’s eye. I have a very vivid image
of Alfraeda’s cloak, for instance, and also of the remains
of Merthyr and Lance on their ledge, and of the dinner,
and the dungeon. I know exactly what Charlie looks like.
‘I woke up today wondering why this story lingered so
much in my mind. I was definitely in the Red Forest
in my dreams, wandering about. I think it’s because
there is no single narrator or species of narrator, and as
I’m reading, I’m worlding from different places in the
story – I’m human/part-dragon/dragon/part-tree at
different moments in the reading/becoming, and that’s
why it lingers, I think. This is the skill Philip Pullman has
as he draws children in.’
Emeritus Professor Jane Speedy,
University of Bristol