A Series of Fortunate Events
I’m long overdue in my accolades for MacDonald’s At the Back of North Wind since I finished the book weeks ago. I’ve since finished several more books that I want to recommend.
But first, another word about audio books. Our life is presently (how should I say it?) … rich. Several major changes are in progress and my home/business project list has never been more backlogged. I’ve tried to keep up a discipline of recreational reading 15 minutes a day, but am hopeless at maintaining it. Audio books on my PDA have been tremendously enriching, following me while I’m stripping wallpaper, moving furniture, boxing up books and papers. I can even hear them over the noise of power tools (earbuds make pretty decent earplugs).
The purist in me still says, “But you’re not getting the full mental exercise of reading.” No, but I have time for this. My favorite quote this week is from my wife: “I don’t want to simplify my life, I just want more time.” I found more time, in the unused streams of my brain. I could choose to occupy my ears with music or talk radio during manual chores, but I’m finding much more enjoyment getting acquainted with classic stories. The books that have nagged me and shamed me as they’ve sat gathering dust on our shelf are becoming great friends without my even touching them.
Our life will eventually slow down some and I look forward to reading these books aloud with my son. I romanticize about settling down in a chair with a cup of coffee and a good book by a window, and I believe those days will come, but I won’t spend the meantime being frustrated over the demands of our present schedule. Audio books are, for the moment, a great coping mechanism and are enabling me to enjoy the pace of our life.
It’s only the most brilliant mind that can conceive a story you continue to ponder for weeks afterward. I admit it helps that Focus on the Family Radio Theatre is currently broadcasting a radio adaptation of the story, but this book had already set in my mind many profound ideas I’m eager to explore further. It is no surprise to me that C.S. Lewis once said that MacDonald’s stories “baptized” his imagination as a child, imprinting it with deeply Christian principles of which Lewis was unaware until they resurfaced many years later during his journey from atheism to faith.
The little boy, Diamond (who was named after a favorite horse and does not even know what a real diamond is), is a picture of innocence, goodness, and selflessness. He is not ignorant of evil and recognizes it when he sees it, but his heart is always drawn to the victim, even the victim who is unaware of the evil. He is remarkably fearless, but his courage is derived not from self-confidence, but trust in higher powers.
Many times Diamond is asked, "Aren't you afraid?" and his answer is always, "No. Why should I?" This reply is for him honest, not defiant. He has a seemingly delusory peace about him that causes some to consider him simple. They call him, “God’s baby.” His difference from other characters in this regard suggests that fear results from the need to control one’s circumstances. Peace, on the other hand, comes in surrender to one in whom trust is warranted.
This “one,” for Diamond, is an agent of Providence known as North Wind. She is both beautiful and dangerous, good but not always comforting, benevolent but not always predictable. She is to be trusted, but she will not always be understood. I recognized these characteristics as resembling Lewis’ Aslan, of whom one of the Narnian creatures said, “He's not safe, but he is good.”
Much is said about dreams in the story. Many times Diamond is tempted to believe his adventures with North Wind were a dream, but MacDonald seems to suggest that dreams and reality are not so separate as we think. Dreams are, for some, impressions of a higher reality. In a child’s imagination there may be a transcendent reality, and in a child’s nonsense there can be the most profound wisdom. I actually got lost several times in some of Diamond’s (or MacDonald’s) metaphysical wanderings in nonsensical poetry and dreams, but for the benefit of the reader, he always returns to the narrative in time.
The most interesting statement about dreams, I thought, was when North Wind explained to Diamond that a lying person dreams lies, but the dreams of a truthful person contain truth. That really set me to thinking about the thoughts I dwell on as I drift off to sleep. A friend of mine once suggested to me, during a time I was struggling with a series of disturbing nightmares, that I ask God to govern my dreams. I’ve since fallen into the notion that dreams are nothing but the brain emptying its trash and showing it to you as it goes. MacDonald’s suggestion is more intriguing and worth considering.
The tone of the story overall is mysterious, but never dark. Diamond’s goodness is increasingly supernatural, derived from his longing to return the country at the back of the North Wind, a near-heavenly place he visited while, unbeknownst to him, he was near death. Here MacDonald’s influence on Lewis is again evident when, in Mere Christianity, Lewis says: "If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world."
What the reader sees in Diamond is not a child struggling to do right and stay alive while surrounded by evil people and circumstances (see the Lemony Snicket stories), but a boy who is good and wise and spreads goodness to everyone he meets. There is no villain, save for Diamond’s ambiguous illness, which serves only as the doorway to the place he wants to go anyway. There is danger, adventure, and many, many, moral lessons. It is not a tale of good versus evil, but a compelling journey toward goodness and final enlightenment.
In the end, the story made me want to become a better person. It's a great thing when a story does that. It gave me a greater appreciation for my son’s mind and a desire to learn from him while I teach him and guide him. I want to be a teacher like North Wind and I want his life’s journey to be as wondrous as Diamond’s.
This struggle of a noble miner boy and a gentle young princess against a plot by a race of sinister goblins to overthrow a kingdom must have influenced Tolkein’s Lord of the Rings trilogy. MacDonald’s goblins are described very similarly to Tolkein’s orcs. The scope of the story is much smaller, of course, and clearly aimed at a younger audience. The story is cleverly woven with a series of exciting and clever fights and a brilliant climactic battle.
The young princess is named Irini, and the supernatural assistant in this story is a mysterious and beautiful woman who calls herself Irini’s great-grandmother. I was struck by MacDonald’s use of beauty in this story as well as in North Wind. MacDonald’s moral guides are gloriously angelic, projecting a beauty that is inexplicably sublime, supremely feminine and yet, I noted, not sensual. Their beauty is a manifestation of their goodness. Even so, they warn their subjects against being deceived by false beauty. MacDonald seems to imply that beauty is not mere vanity, nor is it superficial. Beauty is the nature of goodness.
This is not to say that what is ugly cannot be good, for we live in a fallen world, and MacDonald addresses this. As North Wind said, some things beautiful are in the process of becoming bad and it may take a long time for their badness to spoil their beauty. Conversely, some things ugly are in the process of becoming good. I found this very refreshing, given the complete confusion, even ridiculing of this notion in modern fairy tales like Shrek. MacDonald’s use of beauty is akin to the muses of Greek mythology: beauty as a glimpse of heaven that inspires and guides mankind to great things.
This entertaining sequel to The Princess and the Goblin is a story about true nobility. Curdie is the young miner boy introduced in the previous book. Although he was offered training for knighthood following his heroics in the first story, he chose to stay, considering himself not quite ready to leave home. This story picks up several years later, as Curdie is becoming a man, his youthful idealism and goodness beginning to wither under the hardening crust of a miner. He faces a crossroad at which he is confronted with what he has become and given the opportunity to right his path before he strays altogether. Then he gets to meet Irini’s “great-grandmother” who gives him a gift of supernatural discernment and a mission to rescue the kingdom from an insidious coup from within.
The story is quite different from its predecessor in that the good and evil are much less apparent by physical appearance. Where Curdie’s strength and cunning were useful in the previous story, now he needs wisdom and insight to uncover a conspiracy that even the King’s daughter, Irini, failed to see.
MacDonald’s themes are definitely more complex in this book and seem to be written for a teenage or adult reader, where the first book is suited to pre-teens. The intended audience of each book seems to be a reader of Curdie’s age in each book.
MacDonald makes several social commentaries about class warfare, educational elitism, personal responsibility, cultural moral upheaval, and is not above a brief slam at insincere dogma in the church. After a fascinating and surprising battle for the kingdom, the story concludes with what seem to be two endings, the first heartwarming and fairytalish, after which it should be perfectly acceptable to stop reading. Those who continue on will find what seems to be a dismal, perhaps prophetic, warning against the seduction of prosperity and materialism.
All said, I still highly recommend both Princess stories. I have greatly enjoyed MacDonald’s fantasies and want to read (okay, hear) more. The story that C.S. Lewis cited often was MacDonald’s Phantastes, which I have so far found for $50 in audio book form. I’m just a little too cheap and find that too steep a penalty for having only enough time to listen. At present, I am enjoying some Jules Verne books that I will review in a later post.
In Praise of Audio Books
But first, another word about audio books. Our life is presently (how should I say it?) … rich. Several major changes are in progress and my home/business project list has never been more backlogged. I’ve tried to keep up a discipline of recreational reading 15 minutes a day, but am hopeless at maintaining it. Audio books on my PDA have been tremendously enriching, following me while I’m stripping wallpaper, moving furniture, boxing up books and papers. I can even hear them over the noise of power tools (earbuds make pretty decent earplugs).
The purist in me still says, “But you’re not getting the full mental exercise of reading.” No, but I have time for this. My favorite quote this week is from my wife: “I don’t want to simplify my life, I just want more time.” I found more time, in the unused streams of my brain. I could choose to occupy my ears with music or talk radio during manual chores, but I’m finding much more enjoyment getting acquainted with classic stories. The books that have nagged me and shamed me as they’ve sat gathering dust on our shelf are becoming great friends without my even touching them.
Our life will eventually slow down some and I look forward to reading these books aloud with my son. I romanticize about settling down in a chair with a cup of coffee and a good book by a window, and I believe those days will come, but I won’t spend the meantime being frustrated over the demands of our present schedule. Audio books are, for the moment, a great coping mechanism and are enabling me to enjoy the pace of our life.
At the Back of the North Wind
It’s only the most brilliant mind that can conceive a story you continue to ponder for weeks afterward. I admit it helps that Focus on the Family Radio Theatre is currently broadcasting a radio adaptation of the story, but this book had already set in my mind many profound ideas I’m eager to explore further. It is no surprise to me that C.S. Lewis once said that MacDonald’s stories “baptized” his imagination as a child, imprinting it with deeply Christian principles of which Lewis was unaware until they resurfaced many years later during his journey from atheism to faith.
The little boy, Diamond (who was named after a favorite horse and does not even know what a real diamond is), is a picture of innocence, goodness, and selflessness. He is not ignorant of evil and recognizes it when he sees it, but his heart is always drawn to the victim, even the victim who is unaware of the evil. He is remarkably fearless, but his courage is derived not from self-confidence, but trust in higher powers.
Many times Diamond is asked, "Aren't you afraid?" and his answer is always, "No. Why should I?" This reply is for him honest, not defiant. He has a seemingly delusory peace about him that causes some to consider him simple. They call him, “God’s baby.” His difference from other characters in this regard suggests that fear results from the need to control one’s circumstances. Peace, on the other hand, comes in surrender to one in whom trust is warranted.
This “one,” for Diamond, is an agent of Providence known as North Wind. She is both beautiful and dangerous, good but not always comforting, benevolent but not always predictable. She is to be trusted, but she will not always be understood. I recognized these characteristics as resembling Lewis’ Aslan, of whom one of the Narnian creatures said, “He's not safe, but he is good.”
Much is said about dreams in the story. Many times Diamond is tempted to believe his adventures with North Wind were a dream, but MacDonald seems to suggest that dreams and reality are not so separate as we think. Dreams are, for some, impressions of a higher reality. In a child’s imagination there may be a transcendent reality, and in a child’s nonsense there can be the most profound wisdom. I actually got lost several times in some of Diamond’s (or MacDonald’s) metaphysical wanderings in nonsensical poetry and dreams, but for the benefit of the reader, he always returns to the narrative in time.
The most interesting statement about dreams, I thought, was when North Wind explained to Diamond that a lying person dreams lies, but the dreams of a truthful person contain truth. That really set me to thinking about the thoughts I dwell on as I drift off to sleep. A friend of mine once suggested to me, during a time I was struggling with a series of disturbing nightmares, that I ask God to govern my dreams. I’ve since fallen into the notion that dreams are nothing but the brain emptying its trash and showing it to you as it goes. MacDonald’s suggestion is more intriguing and worth considering.
The tone of the story overall is mysterious, but never dark. Diamond’s goodness is increasingly supernatural, derived from his longing to return the country at the back of the North Wind, a near-heavenly place he visited while, unbeknownst to him, he was near death. Here MacDonald’s influence on Lewis is again evident when, in Mere Christianity, Lewis says: "If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world."
What the reader sees in Diamond is not a child struggling to do right and stay alive while surrounded by evil people and circumstances (see the Lemony Snicket stories), but a boy who is good and wise and spreads goodness to everyone he meets. There is no villain, save for Diamond’s ambiguous illness, which serves only as the doorway to the place he wants to go anyway. There is danger, adventure, and many, many, moral lessons. It is not a tale of good versus evil, but a compelling journey toward goodness and final enlightenment.
In the end, the story made me want to become a better person. It's a great thing when a story does that. It gave me a greater appreciation for my son’s mind and a desire to learn from him while I teach him and guide him. I want to be a teacher like North Wind and I want his life’s journey to be as wondrous as Diamond’s.
The Princess and the Goblin
This struggle of a noble miner boy and a gentle young princess against a plot by a race of sinister goblins to overthrow a kingdom must have influenced Tolkein’s Lord of the Rings trilogy. MacDonald’s goblins are described very similarly to Tolkein’s orcs. The scope of the story is much smaller, of course, and clearly aimed at a younger audience. The story is cleverly woven with a series of exciting and clever fights and a brilliant climactic battle.
The young princess is named Irini, and the supernatural assistant in this story is a mysterious and beautiful woman who calls herself Irini’s great-grandmother. I was struck by MacDonald’s use of beauty in this story as well as in North Wind. MacDonald’s moral guides are gloriously angelic, projecting a beauty that is inexplicably sublime, supremely feminine and yet, I noted, not sensual. Their beauty is a manifestation of their goodness. Even so, they warn their subjects against being deceived by false beauty. MacDonald seems to imply that beauty is not mere vanity, nor is it superficial. Beauty is the nature of goodness.
This is not to say that what is ugly cannot be good, for we live in a fallen world, and MacDonald addresses this. As North Wind said, some things beautiful are in the process of becoming bad and it may take a long time for their badness to spoil their beauty. Conversely, some things ugly are in the process of becoming good. I found this very refreshing, given the complete confusion, even ridiculing of this notion in modern fairy tales like Shrek. MacDonald’s use of beauty is akin to the muses of Greek mythology: beauty as a glimpse of heaven that inspires and guides mankind to great things.
The Princess and Curdie
This entertaining sequel to The Princess and the Goblin is a story about true nobility. Curdie is the young miner boy introduced in the previous book. Although he was offered training for knighthood following his heroics in the first story, he chose to stay, considering himself not quite ready to leave home. This story picks up several years later, as Curdie is becoming a man, his youthful idealism and goodness beginning to wither under the hardening crust of a miner. He faces a crossroad at which he is confronted with what he has become and given the opportunity to right his path before he strays altogether. Then he gets to meet Irini’s “great-grandmother” who gives him a gift of supernatural discernment and a mission to rescue the kingdom from an insidious coup from within.
The story is quite different from its predecessor in that the good and evil are much less apparent by physical appearance. Where Curdie’s strength and cunning were useful in the previous story, now he needs wisdom and insight to uncover a conspiracy that even the King’s daughter, Irini, failed to see.
MacDonald’s themes are definitely more complex in this book and seem to be written for a teenage or adult reader, where the first book is suited to pre-teens. The intended audience of each book seems to be a reader of Curdie’s age in each book.
MacDonald makes several social commentaries about class warfare, educational elitism, personal responsibility, cultural moral upheaval, and is not above a brief slam at insincere dogma in the church. After a fascinating and surprising battle for the kingdom, the story concludes with what seem to be two endings, the first heartwarming and fairytalish, after which it should be perfectly acceptable to stop reading. Those who continue on will find what seems to be a dismal, perhaps prophetic, warning against the seduction of prosperity and materialism.
All said, I still highly recommend both Princess stories. I have greatly enjoyed MacDonald’s fantasies and want to read (okay, hear) more. The story that C.S. Lewis cited often was MacDonald’s Phantastes, which I have so far found for $50 in audio book form. I’m just a little too cheap and find that too steep a penalty for having only enough time to listen. At present, I am enjoying some Jules Verne books that I will review in a later post.
posted by StarBittrune | 2:37 PM
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