The demise of the fairy folk and their tales has been announced for centuries. The Wife of Bath, looking backward nostalgically to the time of King Arthur when the elf-queen danced upon the green, complains that the ecclesiastics have driven away the “fayere” and “now kan no man se none elves mo.” The medieval church tried to do away with them. Nineteenth-century educational theorists banned them. Disney cutesified them. But fairies know how to lie low and how to transform their shapes and they keep popping up. Joan Bodger’s latest offering, The Forest Family, is evidence that fairies are alive and well and living in fiction.

The Forest Family is a collage of folktales combined to make an original story. The template of the book is the Grimm story “Snow White and Rose Red.” Under and around this story are woven elements from another Grimm story, “Bearskin,” the English folk tale “the King of the Cats,” the Biblical story of Ruth and Naomi, English mummers’ plays, “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight,” a Vietnamese story called “The Tiger’s Whisker,” and the Wife of Bath’s tale, among others.

Did I recognize all these stories myself? No, I cannot tell a lie. But Joan Bodger appends a very helpful, fascinating afterword on sources. Will the child reader be interested in this material? Likely not. But the audience for folklore is never just children and Joan Bodger’s notes led me to a happy half-day of fossicking around in the 398s among old friends and new discoveries.

As a folklore fancier, what I enjoyed most about The Forest Family was the illumination of one story by another. The plot begins when Bernardo, the woodcutter father, is called away to war, leaving his wife, Sylvania, and two daughters to live alone in their cottage in the forest and manage as best they can. There follows a kind of rural idyll of gleaning, the turn of the seasons, family love, and above all storytelling. But then the father returns a changed man, deeply damaged by war. Into this triptych of dark, light and dark, Bodger weaves three bear stories. First is the lovely tame bear of “Snow White and Rose Red,” the gentle giant who gambols with the two girls. Second is the bear of “Bearskin,” a fearsome pathetic man turned beast. Finally, Bodger transforms the Vietnamese tiger into a bear to provide the test that Sylvania must pass in order to retrieve her husband. What joins the three bears thematically is the pity of war. This kind of thing doesn’t work at all if it is self-conscious but in this case, one feels the solid sustaining weight of Bodger’s immersion in folklore. The Forest Family is a treat for storytellers and folklorists.

What about the book as story, as a created fiction with its own shape and trajectory? Here we encounter some challenging narrative issues. To turn a fairy tale into a novel involves moulding its nature into something else, as Robin McKinley did in Beauty. McKinley took the plot of “Beauty and the Beast” and built from it a full-blown novel, with all a novel’s attributes such as psychological realism, a narrative technique of showing, not telling, resolution of the problem through the efforts of the protagonist, and so on. She smoothed out folklore’s rough edges and created something smoother, designed to be read, not heard.

Part of what Bodger is doing in The Forest Family involves this transformation. The character of Sylvania, for example, and her relationship with her husband, is more psychologically naturalistic than one would find in a folktale. In the very first chapter, for example, Bernardo calls his wife and daughters “my three girls.” This adds a slight note of dissonance to the otherwise idealized portrayal of family life. We wonder how Sylvania feels about being called a girl. And, as it turns out later, we should be wondering. This is novel stuff. But Bodger doesn’t confine herself to the novel’s demands. The girls, for example, are pure folktale. Daisy is fair and domestic. Rose is dark and outdoorsy. This is all we know about them and all we need to know.

The narrative voice also shifts between fiction’s convention of the invisible narrator and the storytelling reality of the teller standing right there in front of you. In the embedded stories Bodger has a rhythmical roll-along decorative bounce: “As they came closer, King Arthur looked and looked again, increasingly aware that the Green Knight’s green hair fell in curls down his back; that it sprouted like vine tendrils from his ear and from the corners of his mouth. And that his eyebrows were like tufts of emerald moss.” In the framing narrative the voice is much more spare, even at times halting and tentative.

The other big difference between fairy tales and fiction is the way that we believe them. In realistic contemporary fiction we skate along on familiarity. Our belief in fairy tales is more complicated. Northrop Frye described it in his study The Secular Scripture: The child should not “believe” the story he is told; he should not disbelieve it either, but send out imaginative roots into that mysterious world between “is” and “is not,” which is where ultimate freedom lies.

As a reader I felt this freedom most in Bodger’s stories-within-the-story and it was a bit of a wrench to move from that to the framing story. I was more at ease on a second reading, however, and it may be that what Bodger is doing demands a new way of reading and we just need to get the hang of it.

Fans of Joan Bodger’s Clever Lazy will find The Forest Family a dark book,with Mark Lang’s black and white woodcut illustrations perfectly suiting its mood. This feels like a book written by someone who sees death on the horizon. It is much more questioning and tentative than the earlier book, unwilling to accept easy answers and happy endings and with a tendency to undercut the form itself. There is buoyancy in The Forest Family – the inventive bits such as Daisy making thread from nettles were particularly delightful – but there is shadow at its heart, perhaps encapsulated by its final line: “Dappled light has its own kind of beauty.”