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 ...

which MacDonald intended as literal truth, although, of course, truth perceived from the imaginative perspective of the young boy Diamond. Catherine Persyn has shown how numerous images in the book are identical with esoteric carvings in Gothic cathedrals and churches depicting stages on the soul's journey. At that level the story is very carefully constructed and not "rambling" at all.

Well, perhaps. Nevertheless, in order to make the story work as a radio drama for a family audience, we had to embark on some radical pruning. (If you don't clear a path through the forest, you can't see the wood for the trees.) But we were determined to retain the book's utterly distinctive dreamlike atmosphere. As W. H. Auden wrote, "To me, George MacDonald's most extraordinary, and precious, gift is his ability, in all his stories, to create an atmosphere of goodness about which there is nothing phony or moralistic. Nothing is rarer in literature."

Above all for At the Back of the North Wind, we wanted to underscore that—as Colin Duriez asserts—it is a story of two worlds, natural and supernatural: "It vividly portrays the 'real' world of Victorian London, but into it, MacDonald shows the other real world that we do not normally see, constantly flowing into it, bringing out the real meaning of everyday events, people and things."

Our challenge was to establish MacDonald's two worlds in audio terms, so that the little boy driving with his coachman father through the very real streets of London is the same boy who is caught up into the heavens with the enigmatic North Wind. These two worlds intertwine: North Wind carries Diamond through the London skies during a storm, pointing out a little girl in distress and giving the boy an opportunity to help her.

Only the boy, Diamond, can hear North Wind speak. So all their scenes together have a particular intimate sound quality, enhanced with evocative, specially composed music. Our director, Norman Stone, was well-versed in the lore of MacDonald and Lewis, having directed the original TV movie of Shadowlands (starring Joss Ackland and Claire Bloom) and also the recent television docudrama, C. S. Lewis: Narnia and Beyond. Norman's key audio concept was to make North Wind sound as if she were always on the move. This was a fascinating problem for the sound design team, and indeed for the actress who would also be called on to convey a vast array of emotions, sometimes tender or maternal or playful when conversing with little Diamond, sometimes brisk and terrible when she was about her business of sweeping the skies or sinking a ship.

We were thrilled when Juliet Stevenson was able to accept the role among her many filming and theater commitments. Her performance is one of the most magical I've ever heard on radio, along with David Suchet's Aslan in the Radio Theatre dramatizations of The Chronicles of Narnia.

Our sound design team also rose to the test in magnificent style, creating a swirling Surround Sound mix for both worlds in Dolby ProLogic II (for those of a technical bent), with an intricate pattern of dialogue, musical underscore, sound effects, and "Foley" (naturalistic sounds like footsteps).

Through exhaustive auditions at youth groups and stage schools, we found a remarkable child actor called Pax Baldwin. Miraculously, he manages to sound like a real Cockney stable-boy, while also conveying Diamond's innocence, goodness, and otherwordliness. Nanny, the street urchin he rescues, describes him thus: "He's a bit simple, if you know what I mean—what they call one of God's babies. He's very well-meaning, but he's not quite right in the head."

But why, you may ask, do we seek to dramatize a Victorian fairy story for today's audience? C. S. Lewis provides a compelling answer in The Weight of Glory: "Remember your fairy tales. Spells are used for breaking enchantments as well as for inducing them. And you and I have need of the strongest spells that can be found to wake us from the evil enchantment of worldliness which has been laid upon us for nearly a hundred years."

Through story, and especially through fantasy, we can hint at the possibility of other realities beyond the workaday world. Fantasy has our permission, even our willing consent to deal in mighty themes such as life and death, good and evil. Aslan the great lion is slain and reborn. An invalid stable-boy is given a glimpse of paradise. Story goes straight to the heart, speaking to us at far deeper levels than the intellect alone.

MacDonald may have resisted attempts to interpret his stories as parables: "Let fairytale of mine go for a firefly that now flashes, now is dark, but may flash again." But as Lewis said, "The quality that had enchanted me in his imaginative works turned out to be the quality of the real universe, the divine, magical, terrifying and ecstatic reality in which we all live." Today, more than ever before, we need to be reminded of that reality, sometimes elusive but finally unmistakable, in the sound of the north wind.

Philip Glassborow is a writer and director working with Focus on the Family Radio Theatre and with bbc radio and television. His credits include several award-winning dramatizations and documentaries as well as original plays and musicals for the stage.

Copyright © 2005 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.
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