Mistress of Magic

Griffin and Sabine by Nick Bantock isn't an easily forgettable book. If one has the pleasure to read it, it won't fail to mesmerize! The first book, called Griffin and Sabine is followed by two sequels called Sabine's Notebook and The Golden Mean and they can be enjoyed together as a trilogy. However, each book is very unconventional and it is this unconventionality that makes it stand out. The story is told through a series of fantastical pictures on post cards, and letters that the protagonists exchange between one another (which incidentally we, the readers, will find enclosed in beautifully decorated envelopes glued between the pages). In such a way, we are drawn into a most intimate correspondence that provokes our voyeuristic desires, for we are caught in the trap of the forbidden act of reading someone else's letter, and enjoying it in the process.

The premise of the story is that Griffin Moss, an artist living in modern day London receives a post card in the mail from a woman called Sabine Strohem who lives in an island in the South Pacific. What is puzzling is that she seems to know all about Griffin and his work while he does not at all know of her existence, and moroever, has never met her. As their correspondence takes flight, and each wishes to learn more of, and visit each other, they find obstacles on their paths to unite with each other, leaving them unable to be with each other in the same place and point in time, until the end, which I will not give away.

What struck me about this book is the depiction of the female protagonist. The author, a male, has sought to portray her as a Creature of Magic instead of an earthly human being. It is Sabine who contacts Griffin first, and not the other way round. While Griffin had normal parents and was brought up as any other human being, Sabine is a mystery from the very beginning. She lives in an island, whereby we are introduced to her exotic nature. Moreover, she does not know of her parents or how she even came to exist, for her adoptive island parents had found her one day as an abandoned baby. It is Sabine who can see Griffin and his work, while Griffin cannot see hers, although she too is a talented artist, if not prolific as he is. As the story progresses, we learn that Griffin is enchanted with Sabine, and eventually, cannot go on without corresponding with her. He claims that she becomes his only source of joy in his otherwise lonely existence.

Griffin is seduced by Sabine, by whatever she represents, whether Magic, Art, Reality, or Desire. By the end of the third book, we feel a sense of eeriness and unease about Sabine. We are more confused about her identity and her purpose. My question is, why did the author make Sabine, a woman, as the creature who seduces a man? Why couldn't it have been the other way round whereby a Man of Magic seduces a human woman? Though she is given supernatural gifts, she is filled with mystery and elicits fear so that we are not sure if she is the ideal lover or the ideal nightmare.

In this sense, Grffin and Sabine resembles the demon lovers of the Romatic poems, such as Coleridge's Christabel and Keats' La Belle Dame Sans Merci. It seems that men were (and are still) obsessed with the different extreme shades of women. According to them, a woman can be just as beautiful as she can be vicious. But I wonder why they view women as creatures composed of these extremes. Can a woman not be a little of both? Can a woman not be allowed to have a moderation of feelings? Can the woman not be beautiful without having evil tendencies? Can the woman not be viewed as good without being evil?

If men were scared of magic, then why were they (primarily such poets) fascinated with ethereally beautiful women? If they wanted to stay away from magic, thinking it is wrong, why not marry a woman who is less beautiful? It seems to me that these men chased after what they believed to be Beauty, which according to Keats, is truth. However, absolute Beauty does not exist, for Beauty is mixed with its opposite; It is impossible to "unperplex bliss from its neighbour pain". And so, when poets imagine an ideal woman, they intially desire her to be beautiful, but this overwhelmes them in some manner and so she is imagined as a demon.

But what is the casue of this uncertainty in men? Why should men create a demon of a woman? Are they afraid of women? What about women frightens them? Are they afraid of women or of their own natures? Perhaps they cannot get what they desire for themselves (for example, ambition) and so blame the woman as the source of their failure. This story is not unfamiliar, beginning with the Biblical tale of the Original Sin.

Ironically Griffin needs Sabine just as much as she needs him. The books will not exist without Sabine, without her Magic. We would not know of Griffin's art if it wasn't for Sabine. Sabine is the source of a man's Art. Men need women to fuel their imaginations, to fuel their Art, to live. In the same vein, the poems about demon lovers by the Romantics would not exist without the mystery women, for these women weild such power, the power to transcend men's impulse to vilify them, as well as the power to transcend time.