1 of 3
At the Back of the North Wind: Audio CD
by George MacDonald |
If the north wind had a voice, how would it sound? In his novel At the Back of the North Wind, George MacDonald gives us some helpful clues. North Wind appears as a mysterious visitor to a young invalid boy, Diamond, in his attic room over a stable:
Leaning over him was the large beautiful pale face of a woman. Her dark eyes looked a little angry, for they had just begun to flash; but a quivering in her sweet upper lip made her look as if she were going to cry. What was most strange was that away from her head streamed out her black hair in every direction, so that the darkness in the hayloft looked as if it were made of her hair; but as Diamond gazed at her ... her hair began to gather itself out of the darkness, and fell down all about her again, till her face looked out of it like a moon out of a cloud.
North Wind takes the boy on a series of extraordinary adventures, sometimes in the guise of a little child, other times as a mighty force who carries him up into the heavens and away to a far-distant land.
So why did we wonder what her voice would sound like? Recently, we had the privilege of adapting MacDonald's novel for Focus on the Family Radio Theatre, a weekly drama series.
"Story always tells us more than the mere words," as Madeleine l'Engle has observed. This is one of the key reasons Focus on the Family is committed to retelling great stories through its Radio Theatre series. A story like Silas Marner or Les Miserables or Billy Budd, Sailor may not include any overt Christian message. Yet it conveys a great deal more than the "mere words" and events of the plot. George Eliot's themes of reward and redemption, the underlying battle Victor Hugo reveals between law and grace, Melville's themes of innocence and sacrifice: all of these hint persuasively at a Christian worldview.
Dramatizing such classics is a delight, and each story presents a different challenge. Les Miserables, which was distilled into seven half-hour episodes, offered an embarrassment of riches, whereas adapting Billy Budd entailed painstakingly extracting dialogue and action from Melville's dense, oblique, and allusive prose.
Yet working with Murray Watts and the Radio Theatre team on At the Back of the North Wind was possibly my most intriguing assignment to date. First and foremost—even before we came to work on the sound of North Wind's voice—was the problem of reshaping the work for radio. Although I love the book, it was originally written in serial parts for Victorian readers with plenty of leisure. It seemed more like a treasure-chest or a jewel-casket than a novel: brim-full of storylines, subplots, lengthy asides and digressions, as well as many poems.
My impression was that the good Doctor occasionally had some space to fill in his latest episode for the magazine, Good Words for the Young. So he would add a poem or even an apparent detour such as the "Little Daylight" chapter—a self-contained short story which seems to have precious little to do with the main narrative.
Recently, however, John Docherty, editor of the MacDonald Society's excellent scholarly journal, North Wind, gently corrected me when I referred to the book as rambling. "Over the past decade," Docherty wrote,
contributors to North Wind, particularly the brilliant young French researcher, Catherine Persyn, have discovered a great deal about the story and its Christian Neoplatonic background. This background is perhaps most obvious in the poem: Where did you come from, baby dear?
Out of the everywhere into here ...
share this page
RSS Feed
