Eden (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
wilderthan) wrote2010-08-30 07:40 pm
wilderthan) wrote2010-08-30 07:40 pm
Entry tags:
Reviews - The Borrowers series
The Borrowers (Mary Norton)
Oh, how I adored this book, as a child. It's not my favourite of the series, or it wasn't then, but it's the point where everything begins, and I love it for that. The books were published in the fifties, so they sometimes have a somewhat old-fashioned turn of phrase, and somewhat old-fashioned ideas. I suppose it's a book that couldn't really be written set in the modern day, either: we're too sceptical, for one thing, and all the rules that governed a big house in the Borrowers' days no longer apply. Everything about this book is just perfectly suited for the setting, both in time and in place.
The thing that I loved most about it, I think, is that for a child it was just within the realm of possibility. Things do go missing like that -- there's never a safety pin or a darning needle when you need one, and scraps of paper are always vanishing, and wherever did that last little corner of toast go? Somebody ate it, or threw it away. Why not a Borrower? And yet I liked the uncertainty, too, the idea that one ten year old boy could have invented this story, because that made it feel more real, too.
The inventiveness of the Borrowers is a delight, too. Writing this book must have been so much fun: figuring out how tiny people would use human-sized implements. A ring for a crown, coins for plates, a flower for a parasol, safety pins to hold gates shut... I had a friend, at that age, who was very good at doing things like that for teddies. The ring pull from a can of coke could be a CD player/cassette player, an empty Ferrero Rocher box could be a boat or a glass display case or a wardrobe or... I've always loved that kind of inventiveness.
Thinking about this book in terms of my children's literature course is kinda interesting, too. I never realised, as a child, that there was a level of wry humour for adults, here. Aunt Sophy with her madeira, thinking that Pod came out of the bottle; her hints to Mrs Driver that the way to keep the Borrowers away was to keep a cork in the bottle; the way Pod escapes Homily to speak to Aunt Sophy, and it's a sort of 'men's club' for him.
It's still fun to read now. Mostly out of nostalgia, I suspect, and a lingering wish that someday me and Arriety might meet, and talk about books and her own adventures.
The Borrowers Afield (Mary Norton)
I love the way these books have such an awareness of unreliable narrators, and of oral stories, for all that they're written down. First of all The Boy through Mrs May through Kate, and then Arriety through Tom Goodenough through Kate... There's so much uncertainty about whether it is or isn't a story. I imagine that frustrates some people, but I do like it.
I remember, all of a sudden, as a child, carefully leaving things on the lower shelves, for Borrowers. They never did take it, but maybe I was overestimating them. Or maybe they knew what I was doing, and never wanted to let on to a giant girl like me that they really were there. Who knows?
Anyway, I remembered The Borrowers Afield very fondly. It suffered more than the first book, I think, from my nostalgia for it: it just wasn't as good as I remembered, as the image the years of thinking about the Borrowers had made. Not enough really happens until the very end of the book.
Still, it's still wonderful to revisit this world, and there's also something satisfying about the way normal human feelings still play out in the books, as large as life -- Homily's insistence that she's teetotal until it's a matter of life and death, for example, and her bristling up at the Hendrearies having some of her furniture, etc.
Really, really happy I bought these again.
The Borrowers Afloat (Mary Norton)
Nothing much really happens in this instalment: having found the Hendrearies, they more or less have to turn around and leave again. Having done that, they decide to go to a mythical (to Borrowers) model village, where they'll be safe. A sort of paradise, for them. And while they wait for Spiller to take them there, they get carried off in the current, in his kettle-home, and have a run in with an old enemy.
Definitely not my favourite of the series. Arriety doesn't do much, and we see little of Kate or Mrs May, except to begin the story. Somehow, I'm rather fond of them, too, and their belief.
I remember liking the next book best: I hope that's still the case. But I'm starting to suspect that the magic just built up and up for me, through all the books, and then got varnished, so to speak, by my imagination.
The Borrowers Aloft (Mary Norton)
I found this one so unsatisfying to reread. It goes nowhere, and it's becoming ridiculous how often the Borrowers just have to move on and move on and move on, never satisfied. I did like the touch of romance between Spiller and Arriety -- I hope the final book doesn't take that away -- and I do like the little details of the world Mr Pott and Miss Menzies create.
I'm sad that there's no sign of Mrs May or Kate anymore: they've vanished out of it, even though as far as I'm concerned they were as important to the story as the Borrowers, in their way. And the questioning element about their existence is totally gone. It isn't a story being told, but facts being laid out. The Borrowers are really captured, really about to be put on display... It could still have worked, with the right narrator to tell the story, but this book isn't framed that way. And somehow, it takes the uncertain enchantment out of it, rather than making it feel more real.
I do love the details of the world Mr Pott creates, and the loving attention he puts to it, and even the kindness of him and Miss Menzies. I always love the attention to detail, the thinking put into figuring out how these tiny people would survive, but...
Thinking about it now, in one way, the ending of this book is satisfying for that very reason. The harsh electric light in the Clocks' house that Mr Pott made, it isn't right for them, for the story. They have to go away and begin somewhere anew, somewhere they can make themselves, with their own hands and using their own skills. They have to go back to where they won't be seen, where they can flirt with the boundary between reality and fantasy.
It's nice to think of it that way.
The Borrowers Avenged (Mary Norton)
Not a very satisfying end to the series, somehow. It's nice to end with the Borrowers all set up in a new home, but the Platters aren't really satisfactorily got rid of, and Miss Menzies doesn't (yet?) have closure about the Borrowers, and we don't know if Arriety and Spiller ever get together...
All the setting up home stuff reads a bit like a happily ever after, and yet it's unsatisfying, because so little happens. And again, like the fourth book, it's not a story being told anymore, but is presented more factually, and that makes it seem less real, not more.
And everything just ties up a bit too neatly. The Clock family are still altogether, the Hendrearies are nearby, and they're all settled in and have homes again, and the Platters leave the country, and Arriety stops talking to humans...
Mind you, I don't know how you could end this series to my satisfaction.
Poor Stainless (Mary Norton)
This one's a short story, really. Just Homily telling a story to Arriety, from the days when there were many Borrowers in the house. It's nice to see so many, and more of their customs -- though you have to wonder how they come to be so few -- and it ends as a sort of cautionary tale about eating too many sweets. It's not long enough to be satisfying as a story, really, but it adds juuuust a little detail.
Oh, how I adored this book, as a child. It's not my favourite of the series, or it wasn't then, but it's the point where everything begins, and I love it for that. The books were published in the fifties, so they sometimes have a somewhat old-fashioned turn of phrase, and somewhat old-fashioned ideas. I suppose it's a book that couldn't really be written set in the modern day, either: we're too sceptical, for one thing, and all the rules that governed a big house in the Borrowers' days no longer apply. Everything about this book is just perfectly suited for the setting, both in time and in place.
The thing that I loved most about it, I think, is that for a child it was just within the realm of possibility. Things do go missing like that -- there's never a safety pin or a darning needle when you need one, and scraps of paper are always vanishing, and wherever did that last little corner of toast go? Somebody ate it, or threw it away. Why not a Borrower? And yet I liked the uncertainty, too, the idea that one ten year old boy could have invented this story, because that made it feel more real, too.
The inventiveness of the Borrowers is a delight, too. Writing this book must have been so much fun: figuring out how tiny people would use human-sized implements. A ring for a crown, coins for plates, a flower for a parasol, safety pins to hold gates shut... I had a friend, at that age, who was very good at doing things like that for teddies. The ring pull from a can of coke could be a CD player/cassette player, an empty Ferrero Rocher box could be a boat or a glass display case or a wardrobe or... I've always loved that kind of inventiveness.
Thinking about this book in terms of my children's literature course is kinda interesting, too. I never realised, as a child, that there was a level of wry humour for adults, here. Aunt Sophy with her madeira, thinking that Pod came out of the bottle; her hints to Mrs Driver that the way to keep the Borrowers away was to keep a cork in the bottle; the way Pod escapes Homily to speak to Aunt Sophy, and it's a sort of 'men's club' for him.
It's still fun to read now. Mostly out of nostalgia, I suspect, and a lingering wish that someday me and Arriety might meet, and talk about books and her own adventures.
The Borrowers Afield (Mary Norton)
I love the way these books have such an awareness of unreliable narrators, and of oral stories, for all that they're written down. First of all The Boy through Mrs May through Kate, and then Arriety through Tom Goodenough through Kate... There's so much uncertainty about whether it is or isn't a story. I imagine that frustrates some people, but I do like it.
I remember, all of a sudden, as a child, carefully leaving things on the lower shelves, for Borrowers. They never did take it, but maybe I was overestimating them. Or maybe they knew what I was doing, and never wanted to let on to a giant girl like me that they really were there. Who knows?
Anyway, I remembered The Borrowers Afield very fondly. It suffered more than the first book, I think, from my nostalgia for it: it just wasn't as good as I remembered, as the image the years of thinking about the Borrowers had made. Not enough really happens until the very end of the book.
Still, it's still wonderful to revisit this world, and there's also something satisfying about the way normal human feelings still play out in the books, as large as life -- Homily's insistence that she's teetotal until it's a matter of life and death, for example, and her bristling up at the Hendrearies having some of her furniture, etc.
Really, really happy I bought these again.
The Borrowers Afloat (Mary Norton)
Nothing much really happens in this instalment: having found the Hendrearies, they more or less have to turn around and leave again. Having done that, they decide to go to a mythical (to Borrowers) model village, where they'll be safe. A sort of paradise, for them. And while they wait for Spiller to take them there, they get carried off in the current, in his kettle-home, and have a run in with an old enemy.
Definitely not my favourite of the series. Arriety doesn't do much, and we see little of Kate or Mrs May, except to begin the story. Somehow, I'm rather fond of them, too, and their belief.
I remember liking the next book best: I hope that's still the case. But I'm starting to suspect that the magic just built up and up for me, through all the books, and then got varnished, so to speak, by my imagination.
The Borrowers Aloft (Mary Norton)
I found this one so unsatisfying to reread. It goes nowhere, and it's becoming ridiculous how often the Borrowers just have to move on and move on and move on, never satisfied. I did like the touch of romance between Spiller and Arriety -- I hope the final book doesn't take that away -- and I do like the little details of the world Mr Pott and Miss Menzies create.
I'm sad that there's no sign of Mrs May or Kate anymore: they've vanished out of it, even though as far as I'm concerned they were as important to the story as the Borrowers, in their way. And the questioning element about their existence is totally gone. It isn't a story being told, but facts being laid out. The Borrowers are really captured, really about to be put on display... It could still have worked, with the right narrator to tell the story, but this book isn't framed that way. And somehow, it takes the uncertain enchantment out of it, rather than making it feel more real.
I do love the details of the world Mr Pott creates, and the loving attention he puts to it, and even the kindness of him and Miss Menzies. I always love the attention to detail, the thinking put into figuring out how these tiny people would survive, but...
Thinking about it now, in one way, the ending of this book is satisfying for that very reason. The harsh electric light in the Clocks' house that Mr Pott made, it isn't right for them, for the story. They have to go away and begin somewhere anew, somewhere they can make themselves, with their own hands and using their own skills. They have to go back to where they won't be seen, where they can flirt with the boundary between reality and fantasy.
It's nice to think of it that way.
The Borrowers Avenged (Mary Norton)
Not a very satisfying end to the series, somehow. It's nice to end with the Borrowers all set up in a new home, but the Platters aren't really satisfactorily got rid of, and Miss Menzies doesn't (yet?) have closure about the Borrowers, and we don't know if Arriety and Spiller ever get together...
All the setting up home stuff reads a bit like a happily ever after, and yet it's unsatisfying, because so little happens. And again, like the fourth book, it's not a story being told anymore, but is presented more factually, and that makes it seem less real, not more.
And everything just ties up a bit too neatly. The Clock family are still altogether, the Hendrearies are nearby, and they're all settled in and have homes again, and the Platters leave the country, and Arriety stops talking to humans...
Mind you, I don't know how you could end this series to my satisfaction.
Poor Stainless (Mary Norton)
This one's a short story, really. Just Homily telling a story to Arriety, from the days when there were many Borrowers in the house. It's nice to see so many, and more of their customs -- though you have to wonder how they come to be so few -- and it ends as a sort of cautionary tale about eating too many sweets. It's not long enough to be satisfying as a story, really, but it adds juuuust a little detail.
no subject
no subject