Favourite Children's Authors: Rudyard Kipling

Rudyard Kipling: Puck of Pook's Hill (1906)

Some would say that I've written too many posts about Rudyard Kipling already. They include an extensive discussion and a complete-as-I-can-make-it bibliography of his eleven books of short stories for grown-ups; there's also an account of his rather equivocal attitude towards séances and spiritualism in general. I ended up reprinting a revised version of the latter in my 2019 book Ghost Stories.

Rudyard Kipling: The Jungle Book (1894)
[cover by John Lockwood Kipling]

While it's simple enough to separate his books for adults from the books meant unequivocally for children - The Jungle Book (1894), Stalky & Co. (1899), Just So Stories (1902), Puck of Pook's Hill (1906) - the overlap between the two goes far beyond that. What, for instance, are we to make of 'Captains Courageous', his 1896 novel about the adventures of a spoilt rich kid picked up by a fishing boat off the Grand Banks? Is it a book about a boy, or a book for boys? It depends on how you read it, I suppose.

Rudyard Kipling: Captains Courageous [US Edition] (1897)

And then there are the legions of other stories about children scattered throughout his 11 major short story collections. Stories such as "Muhammad Din" (1886) and "They" (1904) are harrowing expressions of sorrow at the loss of a child, clearly not meant for younger readers. But what of a story such as "The Brushwood Boy"? About but not for children, once again, I would have to conclude, despite such enticing features as the hand-drawn map of George Cottar’s dream country.

Rudyard Kipling: The Brushwood Boy (1895)

I remarked in an earlier piece on the children's books of Kipling's younger contemporary John Masefield, that the latter:

was not perhaps so well suited to the form as ... Kipling, who found it the ideal way to convey his somewhat reactionary views without the full apparatus of authoritarianism and militarism which pervades so much of his writing for adults.

That's certainly the case with the four books I've mentioned above: the ideas are all there, and readily detectable by adult readers, but they're agreeably disguised and softened for children (though the public school stories in Stalky & Co. test those boundaries almost to breaking point).

Rudyard Kipling: The Stalky Stories Complete (1929)

The least successful of his efforts in the genre, perhaps for this reason, has to be the little-read Land and Sea Tales for Scouts and Guides. Here Kipling tries to blend his imperial enthusiasms with childish diction, and collects a series of simplistic and condescending stories unpalatable to either interest group. Interestingly enough, I see that the American edition was entitled Land and Sea Tales for Boys and Girls, but that doesn't really help with the central problem.

Rudyard Kipling: Thy Servant a Dog: Told by Boots (1930)

As for Thy Servant a Dog, in its various editions and expansions, it's hard to know just what audience it was meant for: too allusive for children and too mawkish for grown-ups. Mind you, there's no doubt that Kipling's affection for dogs was entirely whole-hearted, and it's hard not to respect a writer so willing to admit it. As a cat-worshipper myself, I don't really get it, but I can try to empathise by analogy with the superior species.

Roger Lancelyn Green: Kipling and the Children (1965)

A good summary of all this can be found in Roger Lancelyn Green's biographical study Kipling and the Children. Though outdated in parts - for example, his insistence that political readings of Kipling's ideology through his writings are no longer viable in the go-ahead 1960s - it remains a good guide to the nuts-and-bolts of Kipling's career as a writer in this form.

I can't resist including this one example of the blatantly racist things you could apparently get away with saying back then, though:

... in India servants were even more plentiful than in England and notoriously apt to 'spoil' the young people committed to their charge, treating them as 'little godlings' and slavishly obeying their every command. Also, with the strange dichotomy of loyalty and selfishness typical of their race [my emphasis], they were in the habit of putting fractious children to sleep quickly by administering opium hidden in a finger-nail - yet another reason for sending children home to England as young as possible. [p. 20]

Green appears to have had a number of old Sahib relatives who filled him in on such details of life in the Raj: the "slavish" devotion of the natives to their masters, their "selfish" desire to have a bit of time to themselves, etc. etc. A Passage to India (1924) must have sounded like dangerous radical propaganda to R. L. Green and his rellies ...

Peter Hopkirk: Quest for Kim: In Search of Kipling's Great Game (1996)

Kipling himself begins to seem quite liberal by comparison with these old India hands, which does have the beneficial effect of reminding us just how much of an outsider he always was, in every walk of life he explored. He may have made terrible mistakes: sending his short-sighted son John off to die in the trenches, when he'd already been rejected as medically unfit by both the Army and the Navy, but at least Kipling never tried to dodge the responsibility for his own folly:

If any question why we died,
Tell them, because our fathers lied.

is only one, and not the most bitter, of his heart-wrenching war epitaphs.

So it's perhaps not so surprising, after all, that Mowgli, Stalky and Co., The Cat That Walked by Himself, and Puck of Pook's Hill - along with their various friends and rivals - are the only characters among the oh-so-many created by Kipling who seem fated to endure. His multi-layered later stories, and some of his catchier poems will always have their fans, but it's the kid's books which continue to be read - often without any reference to the man who actually wrote them.

Elliot L. Gilbert, ed.: "O Beloved Kids" (1984)

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Rudyard Kipling: Something of Myself: For My Friends Known and Unknown (1937)

The section on the writing of Kipling's "Puck" books is one of the most interesting parts of his self-consciously reticent autobiography, Something of Myself, published posthumously in 1937.

They were a crucial aspect of the very elaborate return from India, America, and the larger Empire to his native England staged by him in the early 1900s - then consolidated with his retreat to the Jacobean manor house Bateman's in rural Sussex after the death of his six-year-old daughter Josephine.

National Trust: Bateman's (built 1634)

As the National Trust article on the history of the house puts it:

The record of previous owners is not complete and is complicated by stories invented by Kipling ... There is no record of anyone living at Bateman’s called ‘Bateman’.

What could be more tempting for a fantasist like Kipling? The first thing he published after moving in was the Just So Stories, written in the wake of his daughter's death. After that, though, the house itself (and its environs) began to intervene:

These things [about the repairs to Bateman's] are detailed that you may understand how, when my cousin, Ambrose Poynter, said to me; ‘Write a yarn about Roman times here,’ I was interested. ‘Write,’ said he, ‘about an old Centurion of the Occupation telling his experiences to his children.’ ‘What is his name?’ I demanded, for I move easiest from a given point. ‘Parnesius,’ said my cousin; and the name stuck in my head ...

H. R. Millar: Parnesius the Centurion (1906)

Then, it pleased our children to act for us, in the open, what they remembered of A Midsummer-Night’s Dream. Then a friend gave them a real birchbark canoe, drawing at least three inches, in which they went adventuring on the brook. And in a near pasture of the water-meadows lay out an old and unshifting Fairy Ring.
You see how patiently the cards were stacked and dealt into my hands? The Old Things of our Valley glided into every aspect of our outdoor works. Earth, Air, Water and People had been — I saw it at last — in full conspiracy to give me ten times as much as I could compass, even if I wrote a complete history of England, as that might have touched or reached our Valley.

Which is not to say that the process was as easy as this makes it sound. Irritating though Kipling's tricksy reminiscences can be at times, they're of considerable value to other writers (though whether the same is true for literary critics, I couldn't say). Here are a couple of those fausses pistes:

I went off at score — not on Parnesius, but a story told in a fog by a petty Baltic pirate, who had brought his galley to Pevensey and, off Beachy Head — where in the War we heard merchant ships being torpedoed — had passed the Roman fleet abandoning Britain to her doom. That tale may have served as a pipe-opener, but one could not see its wood for its trees, so I threw it away.

Having tried (and rejected) this method of the echo direct of the past on the present, he tried another approach, à propos of a casual remark of his father's about needing to look up his references "rather more carefully."

This led me on another false scent. I wrote a tale told by Daniel Defoe in a brickyard ... of how he had been sent to stampede King James II, then havering about Thames mouth, out of an England where no party had any use for him. It turned out a painstaken and meritorious piece of work, overloaded with verified references, with about as much feeling to it as a walking-stick. So it also was discarded, with a tale of Doctor Johnson telling the children how he had once thrown his spurs out of a boat in Scotland, to the amazement of one Boswell. Evidently my Daemon would not function in brickyards or schoolrooms. Therefore, like Alice in Wonderland, I turned my back on the whole thing and walked the other way.

First it sounded too allusive and indirect, now it was too documentary and referenced. However, by choosing to turn his back on the problem:

H. R. Millar: Puck appears to the children (1906)

... the whole thing set and linked itself. I fell first upon Normans and Saxons. Parnesius came later, directly out of a little wood above the Phoenician forge; and the rest of the tales in Puck of Pook’s Hill followed in order.

Not only that, but the freedom of invention allowed him by the idea of having all the stories curated by Shakespeare's "shrewd and knavish sprite" Puck (or Robin Goodfellow) ended up enabling Kipling to make some "prized petty triumphs" of conjecture:

I had put a well into the wall of Pevensey Castle circa A.D. 1100, because I needed it there. Archaeologically, it did not exist till this year (1935) when excavators brought such a well to light. But that I maintain was a reasonable gamble. Self-contained castles must have self-contained water supplies. A longer chance that I took in my Roman tales was when I quartered the Seventh Cohort of the Thirtieth (Ulpia Victrix) Legion on the Wall, and asserted that there Roman troops used arrows against the Picts. The first shot was based on honest ‘research’; the second was legitimate inference. Years after the tale was told, a digging-party on the Wall sent me some heavy four-sided, Roman-made, ‘killing’ arrows found in situ and — most marvellously — a rubbing of a memorial-tablet to the Seventh Cohort of the Thirtieth Legion! Having been brought up in a suspicious school, I suspected a ‘leg-pull’ here, but was assured that the rubbing was perfectly genuine.

H. R. Millar: Parnesius on the Great Wall (1906)

Alas, it appears that the "leg-pull" hypothesis is now in the ascendant. Contemporary archaeologists no longer credit the validity of the inscription on this memorial tablet:

The ‘primary’ inscription read ‘Legionis XX V(aleriae) V(ictricis) coh(ors) VII’, ‘the Seventh Cohort of the Twentieth Legion Valeria Victrix (built this)’. The editors comment ‘The first x is a later insertion in Roman times’ ... R. S. Tomlin adds the following:

This stone was found six years after Kipling published Puck of Pook’s Hill (1906), with its centurion of the Seventh Cohort of the Thirtieth Legion. The suspicion that the ‘secondary’ inscription (the inserted X) is modern has been discussed by A. L. F. Rivet in his inaugural lecture, Rudyard Kipling’s Roman Britain: Fact and Fiction (University of Keele, 1976), but he reluctantly accepts it as coincidence.

In other words, it is a forgery, but (it would seem) an ancient rather than a modern one. Poor Kipling! Dished again. At least he didn't live to find out ...

Rudyard Kipling: Rewards and Fairies (1911)

The account in Something of Myself goes on as follows:

I embarked on Rewards and Fairies — the second book — in two minds. Stories a plenty I had to tell, but how many would be authentic and how many due to ‘induction’? There was moreover the old Law; ‘As soon as you find you can do anything, do something you can’t.’
My doubt cleared itself with the first tale, ‘Cold Iron,’ which gave me my underwood; ‘What else could I have done?’ — the plinth of all structures. Yet, since the tales had to be read by children, before people realised that they were ‘meant for grown-ups'; and since they had to be a sort of balance to, as well as a seal upon, some aspects of my ‘Imperialistic’ output in the past, I worked the material in three or four overlaid tints and textures, which might or might not reveal themselves according to the shifting light of sex, youth, and experience.

It's hard to imagine a clearer account of just what he was trying to accomplish with these two books: writing for adults in the guise of writing for children, and thus setting a seal on "some aspects of my ‘Imperialistic’ output in the past". I don't know if the latter statement meant that he regretted any of this output, or simply that he felt it had been misunderstood.

Certainly the later, post-war Kipling, seems to have felt considerable doubts about the extreme ways in which some of his earlier work was interpreted: "The White Man's Burden" (1899), for instance. W. B. Yeats recorded a not dissimilar disquiet in his 1938 poem "The Man and the Echo":

Did that play of mine send out
Certain men the English shot?

In any case, whatever Kipling's intentions, most readers of the Puck stories then and since have agreed that:

It was glorious fun; and I knew it must be very good or very bad because the series turned itself off just as Kim had done.

It's not given to many writers to have made additions to that list of immortal characters who continue to fascinate mankind long after the rest of their work has become the preserve of fans and specialists. Count Dracula, Peter Pan, Sherlock Holmes, Tarzan of the Apes ... Mowgli - along with Akela, Bagheera, Baloo, Kaa, Shere Khan, and even the Bandar-log - would certainly have to be counted among their number.

Puck of Pook's Hill and Stalky and Co. are probably now more recondite references, but the Just So Stories are, I think, still widely read. Roger Lancelyn Green's attempt to equate them with the Alice books does point up their limitations, though. They do sound awfully didactic to a modern taste, whereas the most wonderful thing about Alice is that she continues to be subversive more than a century and a half since she first went down that rabbit-hole.

But it's nice to have both. As Alice so sagely observed - and it remains true of the work of both authors - "what is the use of a book ... without pictures or conversations?”

Companion Classics: The Jungle Book / Treasure Island / Alice in Wonderland

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Rudyard & Josephine Kipling

Joseph Rudyard Kipling
(1865–1936)

Children's Books:



Rudyard Kipling: The Jungle Books (1894-95)
[cover by Stuart Tresilian (1955)]



1. The Jungle Book (1894)
   1. Mowgli’s Brothers
   2. Kaa’s Hunting
   3. ‘Tiger! Tiger!’
   4. The White Seal
   5. ‘Rikki-Tikki-Tavi’
   6. Toomai of the Elephants
   7. Her Majesty’s Servants
2. The Second Jungle Book (1895)
   1. How Fear Came
   2. The Miracle of Purun Bhagat
   3. Letting in the Jungle
   4. The Undertakers
   5. The King’s Ankus
   6. Quiquern
   7. Red Dog
   8. The Spring Running
   • The Jungle Books. 1894 & 1895. Illustrated by Stuart Tresilian. 1955. London: the Reprint Society, 1956.
   • Animal Stories from Rudyard Kipling. Illustrated by Stuart Tresilian. 1932. London: Macmillan & Co. Ltd., 1961.
   • All the Mowgli Stories. 1933. St. Martin’s Library. 1961. London: Macmillan & Co. Ltd., 1962.
3. The Brushwood Boy (1895)
   • The Brushwood Boy. [from The Day's Work, 1898]. Illustrations by F. H. Townsend. 1907. London: Macmillan & Co., Limited, 1914.
4. 'Captains Courageous' (1896)
   • ‘Captains Courageous’: A Story of the Grand Banks. 1896. Melbourne & London: Macmillan & Company Ltd., 1942.

Rudyard Kipling: Stalky & Co. (1899)



5. Stalky & Co. (1899)
   1. ‘In Ambush’
   2. Slaves of the Lamp – Part I
   3. An Unsavoury Interlude
   4. The Impressionists
   5. The Moral Reformers
   6. A Little Prep.
   7. The Flag of their Country
   8. The Last Term
   9. Slaves of the Lamp, Part II
6. The Complete Stalky & Co. (1929)
   1. ‘Stalky’
   2. The United Idolaters
   3. Regulus
   4. The Propagation of Knowledge
   5. The Satisfaction of a Gentleman
   • Stalky & Co.: Complete. 1899 & 1929. Ed. Isabel Quigley. The World’s Classics. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987.
7. Kim (1901)
   • Kim. 1901. London: Macmillan & Co. Limited, 1940.

Rudyard Kipling: Just So Stories: For Little Children (1902)



8. Just So Stories (1902)
   1. How the Whale got his Throat
   2. How the Camel got his Hump
   3. How the Rhinoceros got his Skin
   4. How the Leopard got his Spots
   5. The Elephant’s Child
   6. The Sing-Song of Old Man Kangaroo
   7. The Beginning of the Armadilloes
   8. How the First Letter was Written
   9. How the Alphabet was Made
   10. The Crab that Played with the Sea
   11. The Cat that Walked by Himself
   12. The Butterfly that Stamped
   • Just So Stories for Little Children: A Reprint of the First Edition. Illustrated by the Author. 1902. New York: Weathervane Books, 1978.

Rudyard Kipling: All the Puck Stories (1935):
Puck of Pook's Hill (1906) & Rewards and Fairies (1911)



9. Puck of Pook's Hill (1906)
   1. Weland’s Sword
   2. Young Men at the Manor
   3. The Knights of the Joyous Venture
   4. Old Men at Pevensey
   5. A Centurion of the Thirtieth
   6. On the Great Wall
   7. The Winged Hats
   8. Hal o’ the Draft
   9. Dymchurch Flit
   10. The Treasure and the Law
   • Puck of Pook's Hill. 1906. London: Macmillan & Co. Ltd., 1957.
10. Rewards and Fairies (1910)
    1. Cold Iron
    2. Gloriana
    3. The Wrong Thing
    4. Marklake Witches
    5. The Knife and the Naked Chalk
    6. Brother Square-Toes
    7. A Priest in Spite of Himself
    8. The Conversion of St Wilfrid
    9. A Doctor of Medicine
    10. Simple Simon
    11. The Tree of Justice
    • Rewards and Fairies. 1910. Macmillan’s Pocket Kipling. London: Macmillan & Co. Limited, 1920.
    • All the Puck Stories. With Illustrations by H. R. Millar & Charles E. Brock, R.I. 1906 & 1910. London: Macmillan & Co. Ltd., 1935.

Rudyard Kipling: Land and Sea Tales for Scouts and Guides (1923)



11. Land and Sea Tales for Scouts and Guides (1923)
    1. Winning the Victoria Cross
    2. The Way that he Took
    3. An Unqualified Pilot
    4. His Gift
    5. A Flight of Fact
    6. “Stalky”
    7. The Burning of the Sarah Sands
    8. The Parable of Boy Jones
    9. The Bold ‘Prentice
    10. The Son of His Father
    11. An English School
    • Land & Sea Tales for Scouts and Guides. 1923. Macmillan’s Pocket Kipling. London: Macmillan & Co. Limited, 1935.

Rudyard Kipling: 'Thy Servant a Dog' and Other Dog Stories (1938)



12. Thy Servant a Dog, Told by Boots (1930)
    1. Thy Servant a Dog
    2. The Great Play Hunt
    3. Toby Dog
    • Thy Servant a Dog, Told by Boots. Illustrated by G. L. Stampa. 1930. London: Macmillan & Co. Limited, 1931.
13. 'Thy Servant a Dog' and Other Dog Stories (1938)
    1. Thy Servant a Dog
    2. The Great Play Hunt
    3. Toby Dog
    4. A Sea Dog
    5. Teem — a Treasure-Hunter
    • 'Thy Servant a Dog' and Other Dog Stories. Illustrated by G. L. Stampa. 1938. London: Macmillan & Co. Limited, 1960.

Secondary:


14. Carrington, Charles. Rudyard Kipling: His Life and Work. 1955. London: Macmillan Limited, 1978.
15. Green, Roger Lancelyn. Kipling and the Children. London: Elek Books Ltd., 1965.
16. Gilbert, Elliot L., ed. “O Beloved Kids”: Rudyard Kipling’s Letters to his Children. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson., 1983.
17. Hopkirk, Peter. Quest for Kim: In Search of Kipling's Great Game. Illustrations by Janina Slater. London: John Murray (Publishers) Ltd., 1996.
18. Ricketts, Harry. The Unforgiving Minute: A Life of Rudyard Kipling. 1999. Pimlico. London: Random House, 2000.

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Rudyard Kipling: Ten Stories (1947)

Tim Powers (2): My Brother's Keeper

Tim Powers: My Brother's Keeper (2023)

It's roughly ten years since I wrote a post about American fantasy novelist Tim Powers. I did make a further brief mention of him in a piece on psychogeography a few years ago, but nothing much since. Am I my brother's keeper, after all?

Tim Powers: Alternate Routes. Vickery & Castine #1 (2018)

He's not been idle in that time: that's putting it mildly. Anyone would think he was doing it for a living! He's published a trilogy of books (with, apparently, a fourth yet to come) about a couple of Mulder and Scully-like investigators - Vickery and Castine - and their explorations of the Los Angeles motorway system and other haunted sites around the city.

Tim Powers: Forced Perspectives. Vickery & Castine #2 (2020)

"The Ghosts of the Freeway are rising," as the cover of the first of them proclaims.

Tim Powers: Stolen Skies. Vickery & Castine #3 (2022)

He's also put out a substantial collection of his short stories and novellas to date: Down and Out in Purgatory. As you can see from the listings at the bottom of this post, it's not complete, but still a pretty comprehensive selection of his work in these forms over the years.

Tim Powers: Down and Out in Purgatory (2017)

The main event in these years, however, would have to be his new novel about the Brontës, My Brother's Keeper.

Tim Powers: My Brother's Keeper (2023)

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Tim Powers: The Stress of Her Regard (1989)

Set - more or less - in the same magical universe as his earlier books The Stress of Her Regard and Hide Me Among the Graves, My Brother's Keeper continues the conceit of an underlying occult explanation for the odd behaviour of various constellations of closely related Romantic poets and artists: the Shelley circle in The Stress of Her Regard, the Pre-Raphaelites in Hide Me Among the Graves, and now the three visionary sisters of Haworth Parsonage ...

Tim Powers: Hide Me Among the Graves (2012)

Perhaps Charlotte, Emily, Anne and their hapless brother Branwell are not quite so well known among fantasy readers as they are to fans of Victorian fiction, however, given the bold legend:

Howarth.
Yorkshire.
1846

on the back of my paperbook copy of the book. I suppose "Haworth" might well look like a misprint for "Howarth" if you hadn't been brought up on the arcane lore of the Brontës.

Frances O'Connor, dir.: Emily (2022)

I wrote an earlier post about about what sceptical historian Lucasta Miller called "The Brontë Myth" à propos of Frances O'Connor's 2022 film Emily.

Emily, the fiercest and most enigmatic of the three sisters, is at the heart of Tim Powers' novel, too, and the similarities between the two projects are quite revealing. Both O'Connor and Powers gift Emily with an illicit love affair: O'Connor with timid young curate William Weightman, Powers with surly (albeit reformed) werewolf Alcuin Curzon.

Both authors are at a bit of a loss at how to deal with Emily's elder sister Charlotte, so O'Connor turns her into a tedious, uncreative nag, while Powers makes her the only one of the Brontë children not to make a childish pact with the powers of darkness by smearing their blood on a rock in a nearby cavern.

Both take considerable liberties with the well-documented realities of the Brontë's lives, but in O'Connor's case this involves rewriting history to a startling degree, whereas Powers sticks to his usual artistic principle of feeling free to invent reams of extra supernatural action just as long as he's governed by the actual canonical timeline of his subjects' lives.

Branwell Brontë: Anne, Emily & Charlotte Brontë (1834)

I guess it's a matter of taste, but I myself found O'Connor's inventions more intrusive because they had the cumulative effect of somehow normalising the oddities of Emily's personality. As I said in my previous post:

I share director (and script-writer) Frances O'Connor's fierce appreciation of Emily's genius - she is, for me, the pick of the bunch, and her novel a masterpiece on a quite different level from Charlotte's and Anne's more numerous works ... She's the only one of the three sisters who's ever been regarded as a poet of distinction, and the ... clockwork machinery of her sublime Gothic novel belies any attempts that have been made since to write it off as hysterical melodrama.

However, "the film's decision to show Charlotte sitting down to write her own novel in the wake of Emily's death, and thus - in a sense - carrying on her work, just doesn't seem a necessary fiction to me." I don't see what it adds to our sense of Emily's deep strangeness as a human being to invent a lot of belittling lies about the other sisters.

As Carrie S. remarks in her enthusiastic review of Tim Powers' phantasmagorical reinvention of the Brontë saga:

I love my Brontës and I get so annoyed when either adaptations of their work or stories based on their lives get EVERYTHING WRONG ... My Brother’s Keeper is an eerie story involving the Brontë family, werewolves, and warring cults, and, darn it, it gets everything just absolutely perfect.

- Smart Bitches, Trashy Books (6/3/2024)

She goes on to quote a comment by fantasy illustrator Michael Hague to the effect that "the more outlandish the the things he wanted to represent, the more convincingly realistic the mundane details must be":

The story works because, first of all, the mundane details feel correct. Things that ought to be heavy do, in fact, cause the characters difficulty when they try to lift them. People have to eat and drink and sleep. Much mention is made of potatoes, either eating them or peeling them or cutting them up. Struggles are as much mundane as mystical. For instance, the characters make frequent references to their efforts to convince local government to move the town’s well uphill from the cemetery –- a real-life problem for the residents of Haworth ... was that the cemetery drained directly into their drinking water.
Secondly, the story works because, to me, the portrait of the Brontës, specifically Patrick, Branwell, Charlotte, Emily, Anne, their housekeeper Tabitha and Emily’s dog Keeper, is spot on. Everything they do and everything they say is perfectly in character. As bizarre as the plot is, it actually makes aspects of the Brontës’ lives make more sense rather than less.

The plot is definitely as busy and complicated as in any of Powers' other novels, but it somehow feels more weighty and serious this time. It was a little difficult to credit that he actually believed in the existence of his Dr. Polidori vampire (in Hide Me Among the Graves) or his stone-disease cursed poet Percy Shelley (in The Stress of Her Regard).

Branwell Brontë: Emily Brontë (1833)

I don't feel the slightest doubt that he's fallen in love with his own fearless Emily Brontë, though. As she strides across the moors, shooting at lycanthropes and guarding her worthless brother Branwell from the consequences of yet another betrayal, she gradually assumes the larger-than-life status which her admirers (myself among them) have accorded her all along.

If there could ever be such a thing as a human being whose ethical judgement and moral courage is definitively beyond question (for us true believers, at least) it's Emily Brontë - and Powers sets out to substantiate this view. Anne comes out pretty well, too - far better than in the O'Connor film. Admirers of Charlotte will probably be a little disappointed, but there's a good deal of Jane Eyre in Powers' story, too, so they won't feel as disgusted as they did by the lies and calumnies included in in the Emily film.

Emily Brontë: Keeper (1838)

Nor is it the smallest virtue of Powers' book that Emily's faithful dog has such a big part to play in the story. As Carrie S. succinctly expresses it:

He is a Very Good Dog.

Overall, I'd say that My Brother's Keeper is Powers' best book since his defining fantasy novel The Anubis Gates some forty years ago. And given that this one made me cry - though Emily's death tends to do that to me, even in O'Connor's film - I think that it's very probably better.

Chapeau bas, messieurs! as old Doctor Rieux in Camus' La Peste dreams that his readers may someday say when they read the opening sentence of his own novel: "Hats off, boys!"

Tim Powers: The Anubis Gates (1985)

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Emily Brontë: The Annotated Wuthering Heights (2014)

Another surprisingly difficult feat which Powers pulls off with style and panache is weaving so many vital details from Wuthering Heights into the even wilder action of My Brother's Keeper.

"Heathcliff's lost years" is the approach many writers have taken to the problem of how to continue - or supplement - the storyline of Emily's masterpiece. Powers takes the opposite tack. He makes the character Heathcliff a dim avatar of the actual demon "Welsh", who has haunted the Brunty family (renamed Brontë, accordingly to Powers, not by analogy with Admiral Nelson's title as Duke of Bronte, a commune in Sicily, but as an invocation of Brontes, one of the three Cyclopes who forged Zeus's thunderbolt) for three generations.

I won't go into all the ins-and-outs of the foreshadowings and connections Powers manages to excavate from Emily's plot, but suffice it to say that a rereading of Wuthering Heights, perhaps in Janet Gezari's 2014 annotated edition, might help to appreciate that aspect of his work.

For the rest, I'm a little surprised to see that Powers has managed to produce yet another novel since My Brother's Keeper, set - this time - among the American expatriates in 1920s Paris. I suppose when you're on a roll it pays to keep going. In any case, I look forward to reading what mayhem he's managed to wreak amongst Ernest Hemingway, Gertrude Stein and the other Moderns:

Tim Powers: The Mills of the Gods (2025)

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Tim Powers (2013)

Timothy Thomas Powers
(1952- )

Novels:


1. The Skies Discrowned [aka Forsake the Sky, 1986] (1976)
   • Included in: Powers of Two: The Skies Discrowned & An Epitaph in Rust. 1976, 1986, 1989. Framingham, MA: The NESFA Press, 2004.
2. An Epitaph in Rust (1976)
   • Included in: Powers of Two: The Skies Discrowned & An Epitaph in Rust. 1976, 1986, 1989. Framingham, MA: The NESFA Press, 2004.
3. The Drawing of the Dark (1979)
   • The Drawing of the Dark. 1979. London: Granada, 1981.
4. The Anubis Gates (1983)
   • The Anubis Gates. 1983. London: Triad Grafton Books, 1986.
5. Dinner at Deviant's Palace (1985)
   • Dinner at Deviant's Palace. 1985. London: Grafton Books, 1987.
6. On Stranger Tides (1987)
   • On Stranger Tides. 1987. New York: Ace Books, 1988.
Polidori series:

The Stress of Her Regard (1989)

• The Stress of Her Regard. 1989. London: HarperCollins, 1991.

Hide Me Among the Graves (2012)

• Hide Me Among the Graves. 2012. Corvus. London: Atlantic Books Ltd., 2013.

Fault Lines series:

Last Call (1992)

• Last Call. Fault Lines, 1. 1993. New York: Avon Books, 1996.

Expiration Date (1995)

• Expiration Date. Fault Lines, 2. London: HarperCollins, 1995.

Earthquake Weather (1997)

• Earthquake Weather. Fault Lines, 3. 1997. London: Orbit, 1998.

7. Declare (2001)
   • Declare. 2001. New York: HarperTorch, 2002.
8. Three Days to Never (2006)
   • Three Days to Never. 2006. William Morrow. New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 2013.
9. Medusa's Web (2015)
   • Medusa's Web. 2015. Corvus. London: Atlantic Books Ltd., 2016.
Vickery and Castine series:

Alternate Routes (2018)

• Alternate Routes. Vickery & Castine, 1. A Baen Books Original. Riverdale, NY: Baen, 2018. [Uncorrected Proof Copy]

Forced Perspectives (2020)

• Forced Perspectives. Vickery & Castine, 2. A Baen Books Original. Riverdale, NY: Baen, 2020.

Stolen Skies (2022)

• Stolen Skies. Vickery & Castine, 3. A Baen Books Original. Riverdale, NY: Baen, 2022.

10. My Brother's Keeper (2023)
    • My Brother's Keeper. 2023. Head of Zeus. London: Bloomsbury Publishing Plc, 2024.
11. The Mills of the Gods (2025)

Short Story Collections:


12. Night Moves and Other Stories (2000)
    1. Itinerary (1999)
    2. Night Moves (1986)
    3. Pat Moore (2004)
    4. The Way Down the Hill (1982)
    5. Where They Are Hid (1995)
    6. [with James P. Blaylock] The Better Boy (1991)
    7. [with James P. Blaylock] We Traverse Afar (1995)
13. [with James P. Blaylock] The Devils in the Details (2003)
    1. Introduction (Tim Powers)
    2. Through and Through (Tim Powers)
    3. Devil in the Details (James P. Blaylock)
    4. Fifty Cents (James P. Blaylock and Tim Powers)
    5. Mexican Food: An Afterword (James P. Blaylock)
14. Strange Itineraries (2005)
    1. Itinerary (1999)
    2. The Way Down the Hill (1982)
    3. Pat Moore (2004)
    4. [with James P. Blaylock] Fifty Cents (2003)
    5. Through and Through (2003)
    6. [with James P. Blaylock] We Traverse Afar (1995)
    7. Where They Are Hid (1995)
    8. [with James P. Blaylock] The Better Boy (1991)
    9. Night Moves (1986)
    • Strange Itineraries: The Complete Short Stories of Tim Powers. Introduction by Paul Di Filippo. San Francisco: Tachyon Publications, 2005.
15. The Bible Repairman and Other Stories (2011)
    1. The Bible Repairman (2006)
    2. A Soul in a Bottle (2006)
    3. The Hour of Babel (2008)
    4. Parallel Lines (2010)
    5. A Journey of Only Two Paces (2011)
    6. A Time to Cast Away Stones (2008)
    • The Bible Repairman and Other Stories. San Francisco: Tachyon Publications, 2011.
16. Down and Out in Purgatory: The Collected Stories of Tim Powers (2017)
    1. Salvage and Demolition (2013)
    2. The Bible Repairman (2006)
    3. Appointment at Sunset (2014)
    4. [with James P. Blaylock] The Better Boy (1991)
    5. Pat Moore (2004)
    6. The Way Down the Hill (1982)
    7. Itinerary (1999)
    8. A Journey of Only Two Paces (2011)
    9. The Hour of Babel (2008)
    10. Where They Are Hid (1995)
    11. [with James P. Blaylock] We Traverse Afar (1995)
    12. Through and Through (2003)
    13. Night Moves (1986)
    14. A Soul in a Bottle (2006)
    15. Parallel Lines (2010)
    16. [with James P. Blaylock] Fifty Cents (2003)
    17. Nobody's Home: An Anubis Gates Story (2014)
    18. A Time to Cast Away Stones (2008)
    19. Down and Out in Purgatory (2016)
    20. Sufficient Unto the Day (2017)
    • Down and Out in Purgatory: The Collected Stories of Tim Powers. Foreword by David Drake. Introduction by Tony Daniel. 2017. Riverdale, NY: Baen, 2019.

Chapbooks:


17. Night Moves [novella] (1986)
    • Included in: Down and Out in Purgatory: The Collected Stories of Tim Powers (2017)
18. [as 'William Ashbless', with James P. Blaylock] The Complete Twelve Hours of the Night (1986)
19. [by Phil Garland] A Short Poem by William Ashbless (1987)
20. Where They Are Hid [novella] (1995)
    • Included in: Down and Out in Purgatory: The Collected Stories of Tim Powers (2017)
21. [as 'William Ashbless', with James P. Blaylock] On Pirates (2001)
22. [as 'William Ashbless', with James P. Blaylock] The William Ashbless Memorial Cookbook (2002)
23. The Bible Repairman [novella] (2006)
    • Included in: Down and Out in Purgatory: The Collected Stories of Tim Powers (2017)
24. Nine Sonnets by Francis Thomas Marrity (2006)
25. A Soul in a Bottle [novella] (2006)
    • Included in: Down and Out in Purgatory: The Collected Stories of Tim Powers (2017)
26. Three Sonnets by Cheyenne Fleming (2007)
27. A Time to Cast Away Stones (2008)
    • Included in: Down and Out in Purgatory: The Collected Stories of Tim Powers (2017)
28. 'Death of a Citizen.' In A Comprehensive Dual Bibliography of James P. Blaylock & Tim Powers, by Silver Smith (2012)
29. Salvage and Demolition [novella] (2013)
    • Included in: Down and Out in Purgatory: The Collected Stories of Tim Powers (2017)
30. Nobody's Home [novella] (2014)
    • Included in: Down and Out in Purgatory: The Collected Stories of Tim Powers (2017)
31. Appointment on Sunset [novella] (2014)
    • Included in: Down and Out in Purgatory: The Collected Stories of Tim Powers (2017)
32. Down and Out in Purgatory [novella] (2016)
    • Included in: Down and Out in Purgatory: The Collected Stories of Tim Powers (2017)
33. More Walls Broken [novella] (2019)
34. The Properties of Rooftop Air [novella] (2020)
35. After Many a Summer [novella] (2023)

Secondary:


36. [Katz, Brad. “An Interview with Tim Powers (21/2/96).” Brow Magazine (1996).]

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Tim Powers: The Last Call Series (1992-1997)

Tim Powers: The Vickery & Castine Series (2018-2022)

Pierre Mornet: The Brontës’ Secret (2016)

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Favourite Children's Authors: John Masefield

John Masefield. The Midnight Folk (1927)
[Illustrated by Rowland Hilder (1931)]

When it comes to favourite children's authors, John Masefield's classic kids' book The Midnight Folk, along with its even stranger and more magical sequel The Box of Delights, must certainly have earned him a place in the pantheon.

John Masefield: The Box of Delights (1935)
[Illustrated by Judith Masefield (1935) & Faith Jaques (1984)]

I remember recommending these books to Professor D. I. B. Smith while he was supervising my Masters thesis on the novels of John Masefield. Don couldn't see much in them. "Maybe you had to be there," he said. I suppose he meant that unless you read such books at just the right age, when their mixture of talking animals and ambiguous dreamscapes can be assimilated at face value, they're unlikely ever to exert the same charm.

That may be so. But I was brought up on them, and for me they're just as compelling as Through the Looking Glass or The Wind in the Willows (or, for that matter, Norman Lindsay's The Magic Pudding, another staple of our Antipodean childhood).

What I liked best in The Box of Delights were the little vignettes which could only be reached by means of the mysterious box itself. Riding with Herne the Hunter, observing the aftermath of the Siege of Troy, and visiting the court of King Arthur, were all seemingly real experiences sealed within this strange miniature world created by the (fictional) Medieval Magus Arnold of Todi.

Francisco Ribalta: Ramon Llull (1620)

The Punch-and-Judy man Cole Hawlings, who guides Kay for much of his quest is, we eventually learn, a contemporary of Arnold's, Ramon Lully - or Ramon Llull (1232-1316): a real person this time - who'd attempted to swap his own elixir of life for the box many centuries before.

I'd never heard of Llull before reading The Box of Delights, and when I began to find out more about him years later, reading France Yates's The Art of Memory, I felt as if the hidden depths of Masefield's book were finally beginning to reveal themselves to me.

Renny Rye, dir.: The Box of Delights (BBC, 1984)

If only these mysteries had formed more of a part of the BBC TV adaptation of the book, I would probably have enjoyed it more. As it is, I kept on waiting for my favourite scenes to appear, and was immensely disappointed when they didn't. I'm sure it has its charms for those who watched it as children, but - rather like Don Smith with the book itself - it holds less appeal for me.

In his excellent essay on this particular "musty book" on his Haunted Generation blog, Bob Fischer sees the narrative as one long warning against dwelling too much in the past:

Our collective concept of the past is idealised, even mythologised, and allowing it to intrude into modern life at the expense of the present (no matter how dreary the latter may seem) will inevitably lead to sickness and corruption.

Certainly the temptation to freeze the past in a single small compass - as both Arnold and Ramon have attempted to do - is seen as a vital mistake in Masefield's book. It may not be necessary to go as far as Maria, the youngest of the Jones children, who are staying with Kay for the holidays:

Christmas ought to be brought up to date. It ought to have gangsters and aeroplanes, and a lot of automatic pistols.

This atmosphere of 1930s pulp fiction, too, is shown to have its perils, when Maria is herself kidnapped by the desperate gang who are after the box. If there is an overall theme in the book, it might be the importance of maintaining a live tradition - the tradition of Christmas in the Cathedral, for instance - rather than neglecting it either through soul-sapping nostalgia or blatant greed.

Andrew Skilleter: Cover for The Box of Delights (2024)

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David Llewellyn Dodds, ed. Arthurian Poets: John Masefield (1994)

In keeping with this idea of the need to maintain live traditions, another important creative resource for Masefield throughout his career was the Arthurian legend. There's a definite overlap between his work purely for children, and his work in this particular part-historical, part-fantastic region of the imagination.

The Knights of the Round Table appear in some of Kay's magical journeys in The Box of Delights, and the stories of King Arthur and Camelot also formed a major component of Masefield's fascination with the psychogeography of English places: his birthplace Ledbury, in Herefordshire, for instance, as well as Boar's Hill, near Oxford, where he lived after the First World War.

My own interest in Arthur, sparked by an early reading of the book All About King Arthur by historian (and mystic) Geoffrey Ashe, may seem rather more anomalous, given I was born and brought up in the South Pacific. Whatever the motivations behind it, though, it led me to look out for as many versions as possible of the Arthurian mythos in everything I read subsequently.

The story itself - with its strong underpinning of jealousy, betrayal, and ultimate doom - is, I would have to concede, not one that's entirely comprehensible to children. How are they meant to empathise with characters such as Guinevere, Iseult, or (for that matter) Mordred?

I certainly didn't. But the attempt to do so helped me a lot with my own growing up. Neither Rosemary Sutcliff's Arthur nor Mary Stewart's Merlin - not to mention T. H. White's "Ill-made knight" Lancelot - were straightforward characters, and the stories about them were not especially easy to fathom.

John Masefield: Tristan and Isolt (1927)

Masefield's version of the Arthurian legend was equally curious and offbeat. On the one hand he seemed determined to claw back to the fifth century roots of these stories. On the other hand, he was drawn to the melodrama of Tristan and Lancelot and the preset, fatalistic love stories they seemed doomed to reenact.

Hence his attempt at the first of these stories in the play Tristan and Isolt. Hence also his attempt at a more complete Arthurian cycle in Midsummer Night and Other Tales in Verse.

John Masefield: Midsummer Night and Other Tales in Verse (1928)

This theme in his work would culminate in his last novel, Badon Parchments.

John Masefield: Badon Parchments (1947)

Masefield's fascination with Byzantium was at its height when he wrote this book, so the form that it takes, a series of reports sent back to the Imperial court by Byzantine envoys to the last surviving embers of Roman Britain, in the person of King Arthur and his army, is not as counter-intuitive as it might otherwise appear.

As a novel, though, it's almost nouveau roman-like in its dryness and avoidance of melodrama. Perhaps it was just that he was exhausted with narrative prose by this point - it had, after all, been forty years since he published his first novel, Captain Margaret, in 1908 - or perhaps it was just an experiment that didn't quite come off, but Badon Parchments still seems a curious coda to these two deep fixations of his: Constantinople and King Arthur.

Adam J. Goldwyn & Ingela Nilsson, ed.: Reading the Late Byzantine Romance (2018)

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John Masefield: Martin Hyde: The Duke's Messenger (1910 / 1925)

Which is perhaps as good a reason as any to shift our discussion to that earlier era, when Masefield as a young writer was experimenting with different forms of expression - both in order to define the nature of his own talent, and to make a living in pre-war Grub Street. Children's fiction must have seemed, at that time, one of the more obvious genres for him to try.

It's pretty impressive, even so, that he managed to publish no fewer than four boys' books in the years 1910-1911, before the immense success of his first long narrative poem, The Everlasting Mercy, set him on a more individual path.

The first of them, Martin Hyde, is a rather Henty-esque historical novel about the Monmouth rebellion in the 1680s.

It's an interesting book insofar as it attempts to parallel the romantic atmosphere of Martin's experiences ("We were off. I was on my way to Holland. I was a conspirator travelling with a King. There ahead of me was the fine hull of the schooner la Reina, waiting to carry us to all sorts of adventure ...") with the rather more prosaic nature of everyday life aboard ship:

There you are,' said the mate of the schooner. 'Now down on your knees. Scrub the floor here. See you get it mucho blanco.'
He left me feeling much ashamed at having to work like a common ship's boy, instead of like a prince's page, which is what I had thought myself.

The older Martin, who is narrating the story of his earlier life, has various sage reflections to make on this experience, but is honest enough not to attribute them to his younger self.

I will not tell you how I finished the deck. I will say only this, that at the end I began to take a sort of pride or pleasure in making the planks white. Afterwards, I always found that there is this pleasure in manual work. There is always pleasure of a sort in doing anything that is not very easy.

As for the book itself, its main virtue is the various ingenious ways Masefield finds to undermine the more facile traditions of boys' adventure fiction, as established by authors such as Ballantyne and Stevenson, with a dose of cold reality: 'You don't know what an adventurous life is', the narrator informs us:

I will tell you. It is a life of sordid unquiet, pursued without plan, like the life of an animal.

John Masefield: A Book of Discoveries (1910)

Its successor, A Book of Discoveries, is more in the tradition of books like Richard Jefferies' Bevis: The Story of a Boy (1882) or Kipling's Puck of Pook's Hill (1906) than adventure yarns such as Treasure Island or King Solomon's Mines. It's a kind of bildungsroman, depicting the everyday adventures and explorations of two young boys, Mac and Robin, "on a tributary of the River Tame in the village of Water Orton in Warwickshire."

Their mentor, Mr. Hampton, who catches them trespassing on his land, is (depending on how you look at it) either a tediously didactic and crotchety taskmaster, who lectures the boys incessantly, or an idealised self-portrait of the author himself, itching to correct the erroneous attitudes of the younger generation with a good dose of hard work. Take your pick. Here's a sample of his conversational style:

Xenophon, in his OEconomicus, praises the beautiful order of a big Phoenician ship which he saw at Athens. He makes it clear that even then ships were fitted 'with many machines to oppose hostile vessels, many weapons for the men, all the utensils for each company that take their meals together,' besides the freight of merchandise, and the men themselves. Yet all these things, he says, 'were stowed in a space not much larger than is contained in a room that holds half a score dinner-couches.' How big do you suppose that would be, eh?

I like that little "eh?" at the end, as if that's sufficient to transform it all into light banter. Admittedly, it's not all as dry as that, and the boys' finds throughout the book, which include a cave with a number of interesting flints and inscriptions, along with the remnants of a Roman pay-chest surrounded by small heaps of coins, go a long way towards proving Hampton's contention that:

the wonderful discoveries lie under our noses all the time, if we only had the sense to make them.

John Masefield: Lost Endeavour (1910)

I love stories. I prefer them to be touched with beauty and strangeness. I like them to go on for a long time, in a river of narrative; and I like tributaries to come in upon the main stream, and exquisite bays and backwaters to open out, into all of which the mind can go exploring after one has learned the main stream.

This passage from a 1944 essay of Masefield's with the Blakean title "I Want! I Want!" is a good description of Lost Endeavour, to my mind the richest - though possibly the least popular - of his pre-war boys' books.

In the chapter of my 1984 MA thesis on Masefield devoted to these books, I describe it as "a Treasure Island as Masefield felt it ought to be":

The parallels are very close – even down to the actual treasure on an island – but Masefield is concerned to show what such a life might actually have been like to experience. None of his villains are likeable – unlike Long John Silver – and his pirates in particular are potrayed as brutal ruffians and animals.

His twin protagonists, the gloomy boy Charles and the irresponsible grown-up dreamer Theo, reverse the pattern of the romantic Jim Hawkins and the business-like Squire Trelawny. The pattern of the successful quest for riches characteristic of such tales is also inverted in Masefield's novel, where "the meaning shows in the defeated thing" (as he out in in his much-anthologised poem "The Wanderer").

The value of the book lies in its incidental details, such as this description of a tropical forest:

All a wilderness of green things, a chaos of vegetables. No, it is not a chaos, it is a world of the most exquisite order. Every leaf is turned so as to catch life from its surroundings; the greatest and sweetest and fittest kind of life, either of sun or air or water. Not a blossom, not a twig, not a fruit there but has striven, I will not say with its whole intellect, but with its whole nature, to make of itself the utmost possible, and to give to itself in its brief life a deeper crimson, a more tense, elastic toughness, a finer sweetness and odour. Ah! the life that goes on there, the abundant torrent of life, the struggle for beauty and delicacy ... Ah! that forest. It was cool within there, out of the sun, so cool that it was like walking in a well; a dim, cool, beautiful well, full of pale green water from the sea. The flowers called to me: 'I am crimson,' 'I am like a pearl,' 'I am like sapphires.' The fruits called to me that they tasted like great magical moons.

"Tell me of your cities", concludes Masefield's narrator, "I tell you of the garden and the orchard, where life is not a struggle for wealth, but for nobleness of form and colour."

John Masefield: Jim Davis (1911)

Unfortunately these poetic extensions of the possibilities of children's fiction were not really built on in Jim Davis, Masefield's final pre-war essay in the genre.

Like its predecessor Martin Hyde, it's a

traditional boys' book in form – told in the first person by the eponymous hero – and the action unfolds in an early nineteenth century Devonshire village.

This time, however, it's a story about smugglers. To do him justice, Masefield tries to stress the reality rather than the romance of so stressful a trade. In fact:

so accurately are Jim's reactions to his sufferings depicted, that at times the book becomes a little too poignant to bear. Jim's solitary march to London, to 'see the Lord Mayor' is a case in point, and I suspect that both Masefield and his readers rejoiced when he decided to bring the book to a swift conclusion ... There is no real leavening of 'romance' in the book.

Even Jim's protector Marah Gorsuch, though quite an attractive figure, is hardly a trustworthy one:

I had never really liked the man – I had feared him too much to like him – but he had looked after me for so long, and had been, in his rough way, so kind to me, that I cried for him as though he were my only friend.

In fact, as I commented in 1984, "Jim Davis ... reads almost like a tract against adventures."

John Masefield: Jim Davis (1911 / 1975)

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John Masefield: Dead Ned: The Autobiography of a Corpse (1938 / 1974)

It's nice to record that Masefield's penultimate children's book, Dead Ned, written some thirty years later, and subtitled "The Autobiography of a Corpse Who Rediscovered Life Within the Coast of Dead Ned and Came to What Fortune You Shall Hear", is in many ways the most vivid and enthralling of all his many novels.

John Masefield: Dead Ned: The Autobiography of a Corpse (1938)

His grasp of eighteenth century idiom is far superior to that of subsequent writers such as Leon Garfield or Philip Pullman. It certainly helps to have a poet's sensitivity to language when your material - murder, prison, execution, slave ships - is as melodramatic as this.

There's something of the atmosphere of a nightmare or a fever dream about Ned Mansell's story. It's not so much an escape from the horrors of the late 1930s, as an attempt to see them from a different angle.

John Masefield: Dead Ned: The Autobiography of a Corpse (1938)

John Masefield: Dead Ned & Live and Kicking Ned (1938-39)

Unfortunately its eagerly awaited sequel, Live and Kicking Ned: A Continuation of the Tale of Dead Ned, cannot really sustain the pace and excitement of the original.

The material - a search for a mysterious lost city in the depths of darkest Africa - is as good as ever. Rider Haggard thrived on just such plots. Pierre Benoît's famous (and much filmed) novel L'Atlantide (1919) is a classic piece of French adventure fiction.

John Masefield: Live and Kicking Ned: A Continuation of the Tale of Dead Ned (1939 / 1975)

I was a little shocked when I found out that the Puffin edition of the novel had been abridged . It was, admittedly, done by Vivian Garfield (neé Vivian Alcock), Leon Garfield's second wife, and a successful children's author in her own right. When, however, some years later I managed to locate:

a copy of the original novel, I began to understand the motives of the editors at Puffin Books in abridging it. Certainly it read better in its original form, but there was a great deal of unnecessary detail about the bureaucratic infighting in the Lost City, which was threatened by an imminent invasion. Clearly Masefield meant this as satire on the unpreparedness of England for the oncoming Second World War, but it did have the effect of undercutting the realism of the rest of the narrative.

I'm not sure that the novel really works very well in either form. There's a lot of great material there, though.

John Masefield: Live and Kicking Ned: A Continuation of the Tale of Dead Ned (1939)

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John Masefield with his daughter Judith, illustrator of The Box of Delights (1927)

How, then, should one conclude? Eight of Masefield's lifetime total of 23 novels were written for children - that's (roughly) one in three. He was not perhaps so well suited to the form as, say, Rudyard Kipling, who found it the ideal way to convey his somewhat reactionary views without the full apparatus of authoritarianism and militarism which pervades so much of his writing for adults.

The Masefield of the children's books is not really that different from the one we meet in the rest of his work - witness the recurrence of many of the themes and characters we encounter in The Midnight Folk and its sequel (Abner Brown, for example: along with the imaginary South American country of Santa Barbara) in earlier "grown-up" novels such as Sard Harker and ODTAA.

I suspect that the children's books have dated better, though. The genre of the "rattling good yarn", one of Masefield's specialities, has now been superseded by more brutal and pitiless thrillers. But I'm pretty sure that books such as Dead Ned and The Box of Delights will continue to delight imaginative children as long as there are libraries with long dusty sets of shelves to discover them in ...

Stockcake: Free Child among Books

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John Masefield (1912)

John Edward Masefield
(1878-1967)

Children's Books:


1. Martin Hyde: The Duke's Messenger (1909)
   • Martin Hyde: The Duke’s Messenger. 1910. Redhill, Surrey: Wells Gardner, Darton and Co. Ltd., 1949.
2. A Book of Discoveries (1910)
   • A Book of Discoveries. Illustrated by R. Gordon Browne. London: Wells, Gardner Darton & Co., 1910.
3. Lost Endeavour (1910)
   • Lost Endeavour. 1910. London: Thomas Nelson and Sons, n.d.
4. Jim Davis (1911)
   • Jim Davis. 1911. Illustrated by Mead Schaeffer. London: Wells Gardner, Darton and Co. Ltd., 1924.
5. The Midnight Folk (1927)
   • The Midnight Folk. 1927. Illustrated by Rowland Hilder. World Books Children’s Library. London: The Reprint Society, 1959.
   • The Midnight Folk. 1927. Abridged by Patricia Crampton. 1984. Fontana Lions. London: William Collins Sons & Co Ltd., 1985.
6. The Box of Delights: or When the Wolves Were Running (1935)
   • The Box of Delights, or When the Wolves were Running. 1935. Illustrated by Judith Masefield. London: William Heinemann Ltd., 1958.
   • The Box of Delights; When The Wolves Were Running. 1935. Illustrated by Faith Jaques. Abridged by Patricia Crampton. 1984. Fontana Lions. London: William Collins Sons & Co Ltd., 1984.
7. Dead Ned (1938)
   • Dead Ned: The Autobiography of a Corpse Who recovered Life within the Coast of Dead Ned and came to what Fortune you shall hear. London: William Heinemann Ltd., 1938.
   • Dead Ned: The Autobiography of a Corpse Who Recovered Life within the Coast of Dead Ned and Came to What Fortune you shall hear. 1938. Puffin Books. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1974.
8. Live and Kicking Ned (1939)
   • Live and Kicking Ned: A Continuation of the Tale of Dead Ned. 1939. London: William Heinemann Ltd., 1939.
   • Live and Kicking Ned: A Continuation of the Tale of Dead Ned. Abridged by Vivian Garfield. 1939. Puffin Books. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1975.

Books about King Arthur:


9. Tristan and Isolt: A Play in Verse (1927)
   • Tristan and Isolt: A Play in Verse. London: William Heinemann, 1927.
10. Midsummer Night and Other Tales in Verse (1928)
    • Included in: The Collected Poems. 1923. Enlarged Edition. 1932. Enlarged Edition. 1938. London: William Heinemann Ltd., 1941.
11. Badon Parchments (1947)
    • Badon Parchments. London: William Heinemann Ltd., 1947.
12. Arthurian Poets: John Masefield. Ed. David Llewellyn Dodds (1994)
    • Arthurian Poets: John Masefield. Ed. David Llewellyn Dodds. Arthurian Studies, 32. Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 1994.

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David Llewellyn Dodds, ed. Arthurian Poets: John Masefield (1994)

Arthurian Poets Series:
[1990-1996]

Arthurian Poets: Matthew Arnold & William Morris (1990)



1. Arthurian Poets: Matthew Arnold & William Morris. Ed. James P. Carley. Arthurian Studies. Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 1990.

Arthurian Poets: Edwin Arlington Robinson (1990)



2. Arthurian Poets: Edwin Arlington Robinson. Ed. James P. Carley. Arthurian Studies. Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 1990.

David Llewellyn Dodds, ed. Arthurian Poets: John Masefield (1994)



3. Arthurian Poets: John Masefield. Ed. David Llewellyn Dodds. Arthurian Studies, 32. Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 1994.

Arthurian Poets: Charles Williams (1995)



4. Arthurian Poets: Charles Williams. Ed. David Llewellyn Dodds. Arthurian Studies, 24. Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 1995.

Arthurian Poets: Algernon Charles Swinburne (1996)



5. Arthurian Poets: Algernon Charles Swinburne. Arthurian Studies. Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 1996.

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