Started: October 6, 2018
Finished: December 15, 2018
Background/ Why I Read This Book
So, I never heard of Edith Nesbit before. Maybe she's more well known in her native England than she is in America? Or is it just me? Did I just miss out, and everyone else knows about her?
I read her because I stumbled across her in a bookstore.
As usual, a lot of my reading list is dictated just by the limited selection of English books in Saigon. The bookstore doesn't have a lot of new releases, but it is stocked with cheap editions of Wordsworth Classics. And there's a whole row of them by E. Nesbit.
You can read about E. Nesbit (Edith Nesbit) on Wikipedia HERE. She lived from 1858 to 1924, and was a very popular children's author in her day. And also seems to have been a general all around interesting person. (co-founded the Socialist Fabian society, personal friends with Russian anarchist Peter Kropotkin).
She was a children's author, so presumably these books are not great literature in the sense of The Brothers Karamazov . But they are definitely old enough to be classics. Most of her books were published before World War 1.
I was looking for some light reading, and I figured I could justify reading a children's author if it also happened to be a classic book. There were several books by E. Nesbit on the shelves, but out of all the titles, The Enchanted Castle seemed to promise a magical immersive fantasy story, so I went with it.
The Review
The title is slightly misleading. I was expecting a fairy-tale esque medieval story about knights, princesses, dragons, fairy godmothers, and goblins. But it was nothing of the sort.
There are some magical elements to the story, but it is much more a "children getting into mischief" type story than it is a fantasy genre.
And the plot of the book revolves around the magic ring, not the castle. Really the book should have been called "The Magic Ring". (I actually strongly suspect that this was actually the working title, but then someone at the publishing house decided "The Enchanted Castle" would sell more books.)
Anyways, the book takes place during modern times. (Or what was modern times when this book was published in 1907. Nowadays I guess we'd call it Edwardian times.)
3 children are away from home on summer holidays, and with nothing else to do, they start exploring. (Shades of Narnia here.) This being England, there's an old castle in every town, and they soon stumble upon one on the outskirts of the town.
Throughout the book, there are some wonderful descriptive passages about the beauty of the castle gardens, both during the daytime and in the moonlight. (If you, like me, tend to read these kind of books to vicariously escape from the oppressiveness of city life, than you'll appreciate these sections.) But once the children remove the magic ring from the castle, much of the story actually takes place in their home or in the town. And in that respect, the setting is quite ordinary.
The plot of the book is episodic. The ring will create some sort of magic effect. The children will panic that their governess will find out about the magic, and work very hard to hide the magic from their governess. And then the magic will go away, and then something else magical will happen, and a new crisis will kick in.
The stakes are very low. Most of the time, the only danger is that the governess might find out about the magic ring. Very rarely are any of the characters in real danger.
At first, the ring turns the children invisible. There is considerable panic about how to become visible again. And then, eventually, the spell wears off. And then another child will put on the ring, and become invisible, and the panic will restart.
Later, the ring becomes a wishing ring. Although if you've read any of these types of stories before, you'll know that the magic wishing ring can't distinguish between real wishes and metaphorical uses of the words "I wish". And so the children are constantly creating problems for themselves by accidentally wishing for things they don't really want. This goes on for several chapters. (The children never really do gain control over their metaphoric speech, and are still accidentally wishing for things long after they should have learned not to.)
Again, all of this is episodic. The children will accidentally wish for something, panic that their governess will find out about the magic, work to hide the magic until the spell wears off, and then that's one crisis resolved, and another chapter ended. Until someone else will wish for something else stupid in the next chapter.
Because of the episodic nature of the book, and because of the low stakes throughout, it's hard to really get immersed in this story. But it is readable enough if you take it in small doses. And I was able to slowly chip away at it over multiple lunch breaks.
It wasn't a great book, but it had just enough charm for me to give it a cautious recommendation.
Video Review
Video review HERE and embedded below:
Link of the Day
Noam Chomsky 2013 Rosa Luxemburg and Spiritual Transformation
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