Outsiders

Kevin Crossley-Holland writes. No really writes. I'm not a one for whether something is “literature” or not. For me does it “read” do I enjoy it, perhaps it fires or engages something in me, imagination, intellect, heart or soul and I find a place for it in my memory and enters a special category. I have yet to read something of his that hasn't hammered on the door to my memory palace.
His prose he gears for the form of his stories. Here telling tales from antiquity, British folk tales, in origin which would have been oral and handed down in oral forms, he tries to invoke the spirit of that oral telling. Does it work. Depends on the ear of the reader and a reverence for the attempt. Like the writings of Alan Garner one “takes” to them or not I suspect.

“One story has haunted me all my life: that of the two green children discovered at Woolpit in Suffolk at the end of the 12th century. I've revisited it several times and, in the version published by OUP, told the story from the viewpoint of the green girl. The way in which one retells a tale is of course crucial, and I have subsequently retold several tales as monologues. These are gathered in Outsiders (Orion), and in this book ‘Sea Tongue' is a kind of sound-story, a fractured narrative spoken by all the different elements in the tale.”

These tales have the theme of the Outsider and are taken I think from an earlier collection of his simply entitled British Folktales.