Can we believe in magic and spells? Can we put our faith in science?
Too Many Magpies is about a young woman. She is married to Richard, a scientist specialising in nutrition and they have two sons, the younger she is still breast-feeding. As the novel develops, cracks appear in the fabric of her secure and ordered world. She begins to feel unsafe and suffers anxiety, disquiet, fear, as if the world around her is turning bad. When she goes back to work she meets an un-named man. He is the antithesis of her husband, disordered, relaxed, a chain-smoker with rotting teeth and yet she finds herself falling under his spell. They meet in hidden places just off a busy motorway. Her journeys to and from this place are full of fear and danger and yet she cannot resist his enchantment.
Too Many Magpies is a short novel, elegantly told; it’s intense and unsettling. The prose is spartan, but powerful. This, incidentally, is how I define ‘literary fiction’. Not flowery, self-indulgent indigestible stuff that many people will insist it is. But it does more than tell a story.
“We bought a big plastic bowl, Danny and I, with little feet like opaque bubbles, and filled it up with the silky, slippy grey-brown mountain of flour. In the cupboard under the stairs, where the central-heating boiler constantly purred and now and then gave a cough like an extra-strong heartbeat, we set the creamy-beige yeast to turn into a quietly hissing balloon. Just like magic; though of course it was metabolism that was all that was going on.”
Later on, the language is mesmeric, dreamlike and in places nightmarish. The absence of names of people and places is unnerving. Despite its physical brevity, Too Many Magpies poses huge questions about life today and a woman’s fear for her children; about whether relying on science is any more safe than heeding irrational fears.
That’s my view for what it’s worth. But there's more. I am delighted that Elizabeth has agreed to reveal more.
S. I headed my feature with the quote from the back cover of the novel: about the divide between science and magic. I wonder if magic is too strong a word—isn’t it more sense versus sensibility? I also felt it was more about the way in women’s whole psyche changes after becoming a mother—becoming more intuitive, more aware of danger.
E. Well, I suppose it depends what you mean by magic. The novel is indeed about that opposition: sense versus sensibility, intuition versus rationality etc, and also about charm, which the woman's lover stands for, versus the more plodding sincerity and carefulness which her husband represents. But the novel is also I think about the longing we can have for magic in the more literal, Harry-Potter sense, and the way it can shift responsibility from our shoulders: some kind of outer force or luck that just makes things turn out all right for us. And my protagonist does of course have that longing (a longing which she hasn't ever really acknowledged to herself) for some more miraculous kind of relief and way out of her cares (which do indeed include the greater sense of danger that comes with motherhood). For this reason she is primed to fall in love with the stranger, though of course it seems to her that it happens out of the blue. And of course falling in love out of the blue can seem like magic - something that just happens, is bestowed on us, and is maybe going to solve everything. The lover himself seems to espouse the idea of real magic, and right at the start of the novel this is deliberately linked with her own child's concept of literal magic. And of course it is this aspect of the lover, with its hints of the transcendent and association with the supernatural, which has the potential to slip over into the sinister.
S. In the short video on Salt Publishing’s website you say Too Many Magpies is about naming; that giving something a name doesn’t make us understand it and that your protagonist ‘loses her faith’ in names. Again, could you expand?
E. There's a tremendous power in naming things, and of course traditional magic is very much tied up with this. Look at the Rumpelstiltskin story: by withholding his name the dwarf Rumpelstiltskin has sinister power over the miller's daughter, but once she guesses his name she is freed from it. This power of naming is very strong in our society, to the extent, I think, that we can have too much faith in names, especially in the fields of pseudo- and applied science, and this is what TMM is concerned with. There's a doctor in my family and he often comments on the fact that, while to all intents and purposes his profession operates as though it understand most medical conditions they treat, the truth is that there's much that they have not yet understood at all, but have simply named. So the protagonist in TMM sees through this problem with names and is no longer comforted by them. She sees and experiences how names can in fact be a closing down, and a denial of the mystery or complications in things - and indeed of her own experience as a mother.
S. When the protagonist first meets her lover, she says, ‘He has the power.’ I took this to mean he has the power to change her world, her perception of safety.
E. Well, yes, it does mean this, but there is another subtler power: he understands both the power and the limitations of names and words: He knows 'too much about words to squander them'. This is her connection with him and the way in which he seems to have the power to comfort and release her by acknowledging her reality, and so the thing that makes her fall in love with him.
S, Is he the personification of her fears?
E. Yes, once he comes to seem sinister, he does paradoxically become a personification of her fears.
S. And do her later rejection of him and the effect this has on him mean that a battle has been won?
E. Not at all!
S. You also say in your short video on Salt’s website that Too Many Magpies is a mystery. Can you expand on this—or do you wish the mystery to remain?
E. Hm. Well, I don't want at all to give away the mystery. But I am happy to say that the obvious one concerns the stranger - the mystery of who and what he really is - but there are other levels of mystery concerning the protagonist's fate.
S. And finally. What does writing fiction mean to you?
E. My whole life - that's what it means! Or maybe not, actually, at the moment, since marketing a book means you don't have time to write! But on the more literary level: it means sinking into language and dreams to look for the emotional and psychological truth.
S. Thank you.
Elizabeth Baines was born in South Wales and lives in Manchester. She has been a teacher and is an occasional actor as well as the prize-winning author of plays for radio and stage, and of two novels, The Birth Machine and Body Cuts. Her award-winning short stories have been published widely in magazines and anthologies. Her first story collection, Balancing on the Edge of the World, was published by Salt in 2007, Too Many Magpies in November 2009 and is available at a discounted price (at present) from Salt’s website. Click here to buy.
And you can catch up with Elizabeth here and here and here.




