Chapter Books

The Princess and Curdie

Here she is: Princess Irene of The Princess and the Goblin . She’s following the thread spun by her mysterious grandmother, who lives in a tower, keeps pigeons, and reveals herself only to Irene. That thread helps her to stay oriented in the caves of the goblins as she rescues Curdie, a miner boy who in his turn rescues her when the goblins erupt into her living room and kidnap her to be their queen.

Over the last week and a half I’ve been reading The Princess and Curdie, the sequel. I didn’t like it as well. I think I wasn’t prepared for it; it seemed at times more overtly allegorical than its predecessor, a story more about its symbolic agenda than its characters and action. But I still found that it gave me much to puzzle over.

It reminded me by turns of Pilgrim’s Progress and Hind’s Feet on High Places, both spiritual allegories. Curdie is an Everyman, a boy who’s proved his mettle once but is rapidly “getting rather stupid — one of the chief signs of which was that he believed less and less in things he had never seen.” When the story begins, he is “gradually changing into a commonplace man.”

A strange turn of events brings him face to face with Irene’s grandmother, who gives him a mission and sends him on a journey. Curdie enlists the aid of an unlikely army of deformed goblin animals, and sets out to find himself involved in a story that reminded me of Prince Rilian’s in The Silver Chair, or King Theoden’s in The Lord of the Rings.

I thought the basic situation was great, and MacDonald’s development of the role of faith was in some respects profound. The princess Irene’s grandmother seems a parallel figure to the Holy Spirit, and this characterization raises some illuminating questions and comparisons. I also liked the way MacDonald stressed that Curdie’s success or failure depends on the unexpected, the humble, the ugly.

There is something so strong and clean about MacDonald’s writing. Some books proceed like a meandering road, some are like a complex web where eventually everything comes together, and some seem to go from one narrative spot of light to the next. But this story is more like a sculpture, full of clean lines struck with force and without apology. I don’t always know where he’s going, but the world conjured up by MacDonald’s writing is so full of meaning. Take this, for instance, a description of a mountain:

A mountain is a strange and awful thing… Now that we have learned to look at them with admiration, perhaps we do not feel quite awe enough of them. To me they are beautiful terrors.

I will try to tell you what they are. They are portions of the heart of the earth that have escaped from the dungeon down below, and rushed up and out…

On it goes for many paragraphs. The description of Irene’s grandmother when she appears to Curdie underground is similarly extravagant: she embodies “all the beauty of the cavern, yes, of all he knew of the whole creation, [which] seemed gathered in one centre of harmony and loveliness in the person of the ancient lady who stood before him in the very summer of beauty and strength.”

I guess I have a love-hate relationship with passages like this. On the one hand they’re very rich, and they radiate multi-faceted meaning. On the other, they can be quite long-winded, and slow down the story. That pretty much sums up the experience of reading this book. It’s full of treasures — I suppose it’s fitting that Curdie is a miner, because these pages seem encrusted with jewels — but you have to be willing to take your time and mull and dig and consider.

George MacDonald was born on December 10, 1824, so it seems fitting to submit this post for the Celebrate the Author Challenge for December. My original plan was to focus on a different author, but with the busyness of these days I’m going to consider the timing of this reading as a serendipitous event, and conclude my participation in this challenge with this post. George MacDonald is an author I can certainly celebrate, given his famous influence on C.S. Lewis, who wrote that Phantastes “baptized his imagination.” Although he was employed by the church full-time only briefly before his controversial views created problems for him, he continued to earn income through preaching even after redirecting his energies toward writing. Some of his written sermons are collected in Unspoken Sermons.