Under Plum Lake

This is the best fantasy tale you've never read

I went down again last night. I go every night now. It's August again, the same time of year, and I know it can still all happen again. If I try hard enough, I can make it happen.

This is the simple beginning to a haunting, wonderful fantasy. I love it so much, I've been tempted to press it on total strangers—but I can't, because I only have one copy and it was difficult to come by. I'm afraid to let it leave the house. In point of fact, I'm almost afraid to write this review—worried that the superlatives I so want to heap upon Under Plum Lake will dim or discourage others' interest in this marvelous book.

The book is presented as a dream journal written by Barry, a thirteen-year-old British boy on holiday in Polziel on the Cornish coast. The previous year in Polziel, something impossible and magical happened to him—something he isn't meant to remember—but he does, and the knowledge is nearly driving him crazy.

Everyone believes that, last summer, Barry went exploring and got trapped in a cliffside cave beside the ocean for three days. For a while, that's what Barry believes as well. But slowly, in a series of vivid and arresting dreams, he begins to recall what really happened during those three days. He remembers a white-haired boy named Dido. He remembers Egon, a world hidden below the sea, where people live for hundreds of years and grow up to be giants. He remembers driving through a city where buildings are shaped like candy stripes or pineapples or sea anemones. He remembers trying fantastic foods like tigra and stardew and ragusas and foam-ice. He remembers talking with super-intelligent beings who can learn all of your language merely by staring at you or touching your head for a moment. Most of all, he remembers his stay at Plum Lake, flying in a purple night, and the accident that allowed him to start remembering everything he was supposed to forget. And despite all the dangers of this hidden world, Barry wants desperately to go back.

Lionel Davidson is much better known for writing thrillers—he has won the prestigious Gold Dagger Award for his mysteries—yet this, his only fantasy novel, is compelling, lovely and utterly unique. It seems only appropriate that Barry begins to gather his forgotten memories through a series of dreams, since much of the writing captures the haunting beauty and internal logic of a dream. The sensations of reading this book linger on long after you have "wakened" out of it and the particulars begin to drain from your memory.

Unfortunately and inexplicably, Under Plum Lake has been out of print since the late 1980s, and it has become increasingly difficult to find reasonably-priced reading copies. If you ever find a copy of this book, either in hardcover or paperback, snap it up at once—you may not get another chance. In our household, it is one of a handful of chained books.

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