The Horn of Joy by Matthew Maddox

Title: The Horn of Joy

Author: Matthew Maddox

Publisher: Not known 

Source book: A Swiftly Tilting Planet by Madeleine l’Engle

When I was a child I absolutely loved A Wrinkle in Time, the first in Madeleine l’Engle’s Kairos series. I never knew it was a series (a complicated series in two parts) until I was quite grown up and an American friend told me her favourite book was The Arm of the Starfish (book one in the second half of the series), which I then read and didn’t enjoy at all.

Because I never attempted any of the other books, I was quite surprised to come across The Horn of Joy from A Swiftly Tilting Planet: someone somewhere (unfortunately I lost the web page) commented that it was their favourite fictional book. Luckily, there are lots of web pages to tell me, or you, quite a lot about this particular fictional book.

Matthew Maddox lives at the time of the American Civil War. His first book is Once More United (1865), his second, is The Horn of Joy (1868) which also appears in An Acceptable Time.

So it seems that Charles Wallace, who first appears in A Wrinkle in Time as a little boy, has grown up and become psychic and a time traveller or something (what?). And he spends much of A Swiftly Tilting Planet trying to remember the plot of The Horn of Joy. The book is said to be strange, passionately anti-war and including some weird theory that the future can influence the past. Part of the plot involves a Welsh Prince called Madoc who ends up in New England and fights with his elder brother over a Native American girl called Zylle. And then there’s a time travelling unicorn. 

I can quite see why the American people of 1868 weren’t ready for their first ever science fiction book. I’m not sure I’m ready for it either.

Both photographs taken in Berkshire by me