![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Time and space are only forms of thought
A couple of nights ago I re-read E. Nesbit's The Story of the Amulet (1906) for the first time in decades. Of the three Psammead books, it's the one we didn't own, so I can't actually remember reading it more than once—which was all right, because for years what I mostly remembered about it was the sudden outcropping of anti-Semitic stereotypes in the chapter with the Queen of Babylon in London. I must have been quite small, but having a bunch of sharp-dealing stockbrokers with "beautiful long, curved noses" and names like Levinstein and Rosenbaum and Hirsh and Cohen express horror at the waste of good food which is the Queen wishing that London's hungry poor "may have in their hands this moment their full of their favourite meat and drink" before being bloodily cut down by her Babylonian guards still managed to leave an impression. I did not feel better even when the massacre was undone with a quick wish into dream: "I think I have explained before that business men do not like it to be known that they have been dreaming in business hours. Especially mad dreams including such dreadful things as hungry people getting dinners, and the destruction of the Stock Exchange." As an adult reader, I get that the intended target of Nesbit's satire was capitalism; I just wish she'd had the kind of first readers or editors who could have told her it works better if you don't drag Yiddishkeit into it. She didn't and I didn't re-read it for years. But then I was thinking about C. S. Lewis and the ancient Near East and the inevitable convergence of these two subjects is The Story of the Amulet, so I decided to give it another try.
I don't think it holds up for me. I feel bad about it. By all rights it's the Nesbit I should have loved best, with the time travel and the magical ancient world; a plot summary sounds like solid gold. With their father on assignment in Manchuria and their mother recuperating from illness in Madeira with their baby brother the Lamb, the four older children of Five Children and It (1902) and The Phœnix and the Carpet (1904) are staying with their old nurse at her house in Fitzrovia when they unexpectedly have to rescue their old acquaintance the Psammead from a sketchy pet shop; since he can no longer grant them wishes, in thanks he points them toward a charm in a similarly sketchy curio shop which he promises "can give you your heart's desire." It turns out to be half of an ancient Egyptian amulet with "the power to take you anywhere you like to look for the other half," with which it must be reunited before it can work its wonders. Guided by the divine voice which speaks through the Amulet and the cranky advice of the Psammead, Robert, Anthea, Cyril, and Jane careen through time in search of the missing portion of the charm, in the process learning a lot about the civilizations around the ancient Mediterranean and facilitating the perfect union of two imperfect souls. There are some stunningly numinous scenes and an intriguing undercurrent of mysticism that comes out at the climax. But even without the random jags of casual British anti-Semitism,1 too much of the book reads to me as a sort of Edwardian whimsy of the ancient world, and I don't think it was meant to.
The scholarship is not the problem. As far as I can tell, Nesbit wrote the book because she fell in love with the ancient Near East and possibly a little [edit: apparently more than a little] with E. A. Wallis Budge of the British Museum, who provided her with accurate hieroglyphics and translations and historically attested names; I think she really did her research. Some of it has since been superseded by new evidence or less Orientalist/racist interpretations,2 but in terms of material culture her ancient settings are terrifically described. There is a well-woven element of social critique to the narrative, as the flaws or virtues of past civilizations show up comparable or contrasting failings in contemporary English culture—some of them extremely scathing, as when the Queen of Babylon observes that giving the vote to the lower classes is a brilliant way of maintaining the status quo while promoting the illusion of choice. The trip forward in time to a Wellsian utopia reads as didactically as Wells' own The Shape of Things to Come (1933), but in terms of the quest it's a reasonable consequence of the children wondering if they can just find out from their future selves how they did it; their succeeding visit to the nearer future actually does set up a time loop, since a piece of information they learn there furthers the climactic recovery of the unbroken Amulet. And I am interested in all the ancient places Nesbit has the children visit—Babylon, Tyre, Iron Age Britain, Predynastic Egypt; Atlantis, why not, it's the past counterpart to the future utopia. But they're not strange enough to be themselves. Part of it is the tone, I think. Some of the episodes are obviously tongue-in-cheek, as when the children's attempts to put Julius Caesar off the invasion of Britain instead intrigue him so much that he decides to conquer the island after all ("if only to find out what Britain is really like") or their twopenny bribery of an Egyptian guard leads to the invention of coinage in Late Dynastic Egypt. "You will not believe this, I daresay," Nesbit allows, "but really, if you believe the rest of this story, I don't see why you shouldn't believe this as well." But even some of the dramatic chapters scramble their ratio of Elfland to Poughkeepsie in ways I find difficult to read. The writing of the scene in which the captain and crew of a Phoenician merchantman decide to wreck their ship rather than betray the secret location of the Tin Islands suggests that the reader should view them romantically: "the brave gentlemen-adventurers who went to their death singing, for the sake of the city they loved." What they are singing as they row for the rocks is "Tyre, Tyre for ever! It's Tyre that rules the waves!" at which point my disbelief collapses because I can't stop my brain from trying to make that scan to "Rule, Britannia!" It should go without saying that almost nobody in Nesbit's ancient world sounds like they actually hail from it. That's not necessarily a bug, if what you're talking about is register or idiom or style. Mary Gentle's Ash: A Secret History (2000) famously has fifteenth-century Burgundian mercenaries and Carthaginian legionaries using modern profanity; the classical Athenian narrator of Tom Holt's Goatsong (1989) sounds like the guy who just sat down beside you in the pub. They can get away with it because their characters' habits of mind are not modern: however much they sound like the present, they think like the past. Almost none of Nesbit's historical characters do. They're very English, or they're not-English in the expected ways. She gets the best contrast with the Queen of Babylon, who sounds like a flirty, gossipy society lady but behaves with imperious carelessness toward any of the social norms or moral codes of her twentieth-century visitors and the England they come from; elsewhere the effect is cozy. It cuts down on the reality of the past. It's fancy dress rather than the alien up close.
I find this especially frustrating because Nesbit can do strange. It's the reason I love The Enchanted Castle (1907) so much. The numinous in The Story of the Amulet is magnificent when she lets it out to play. In order to escape the dungeons of Babylon, the children use the hieroglyphic name on the Amulet to summon Nisroch, who may or may not have been an actual Babylonian god (he's a hapax legomenon in the Biblical story of Sennacherib) but is powerfully evoked by Nesbit in the form of the winged and bird-headed apkallû of the Neo-Assyrian reliefs I love:
There was a waiting silence. Then a cold, blue light awoke in the corner where the straw was—and in the light they saw coming towards them a strange and terrible figure. I won't try to describe it, because Mr. Millar will draw it for you, exactly as it was, and exactly as the old Babylonians carved it on their stones, so that you can see it in our own British Museum at this day. I will just say that it had eagle's wings and an eagle's head and the body of a man . . . It came towards them, strong and unspeakably horrible.
He speaks in a voice of rusted keys; when Anthea seizes his hand in panicked gratitude, it is "cold and hard in hers, like a hand of stone." He bows courteously to the children who called upon him, "the servant of the Great Ones," and makes for them a door through the wet stone wall of the dungeon into the rich chambers of the Queen. "Walk forward without fear," he salutes them. If he is a god, he is not a comforting one, but neither is he malevolent, and he's present for about three pages including his illustration. I'm not sure why he's the only supernatural being with which the children interact outside of the Psammead and the power behind the Amulet,3 but his effectiveness makes me think Nesbit could have done it more often.
The mystical subplot is even better. There are two significant adult characters in the narrative, one present from the beginning and one introduced in the second half of the book. The "poor learned gentleman" lives upstairs from the children with a collection of cuneiform tablets and cylinder seals and a mummy case and his usually uneaten dinner, being a thin shabby distracted antiquarian who has plainly not been able to parlay his impressive scholarship into any kind of living. He wears the Edwardian equivalent of nerd glasses and is probably not as aged as he looks. The children rather self-consciously nickname him "Jimmy" and use him as their pet Egyptologist; they are reluctant to take him back into the past after he almost gets them all killed by insisting on staying until the last possible moment of the destruction of Atlantis in order to know for himself how it ends. Following their foray into Iron Age Britain, the children try Pharaonic Egypt and there meet Rekh-Marā,4 an aristocratic young priest of Amen-Rā currently out of favor with the royal court for botching a prophecy. Impressed by their seeming magic with pocket matches, he presents the children before Pharaoh in a bid to redeem his reputation, which ends badly with another magical jailbreak and Rekh-Marā realizing the real power they possess. He is neither wholly an enemy nor wholly an ally to the children; he helps them when he believes they each possess one half of the same shattered Amulet and betrays them on discovering that the apparent two halves are merely the same half from different times and is as astonished as the children by the melting of his half into theirs (according to Nesbit's laws of time travel, more than one iteration of the same thing cannot exist in the same time). He's difficult for them to dislike entirely, although he has to be magically held to his oath to be their friend. When they meet him disguised among the Phoenician sailors, they think at once that "he's rather like our learned gentleman" before uncomfortably realizing their mistake, but that's the point.
"Already . . . he and I are as brothers, and his welfare is dear to me as my own." The two men meet when Rekh-Marā comes forward in time after the children's Amulet. They bond instantly, talking for hours in Jimmy's cluttered little museum of a room. They share a love of learning and an appreciation of the world that is remote and precious to Jimmy and familiar and beloved to Rekh-Marā; the way the priest explains the situation with the Amulet enables the scholar to make the simple, un-thought-of suggestion that finally brings the unbroken Amulet whole and powerful out of the past. And when it comes time for the granting of his heart's desire, in the end what the tricky Rekh-Marā wants most of all is to stay in this strange far-distant future and keep alive the knowledge of the time from which he came, which is understood so incompletely and inaccurately in the modern day if at all. At first this seems impossible: "Nobody can continue to live in a land and in a time not appointed." Nor can he return through the Amulet to his own time, since it was a conduit to the past only so long as it was broken, the separated pieces yearning toward each other across the millennia. But just as things look really bleak for the priest, the voice that speaks through the Amulet reveals that while bodies cannot survive outside their own times, souls are a different matter: "if in that other time and land there be found a soul so akin to it as to offer it refuge, in the body of that land and time, that thus they two may be one soul in one body." The children—except for the perceptive Anthea—can't figure out how this is going to work. "But the eyes of Rekh-Marā and the learned gentleman met, and were kind to each other, and promised each other many things, secret and sacred and very beautiful." And so it is that the presence behind the Amulet enacts between them something very like a sacred marriage, in which the two men joyously pledge their souls to one another for eternity and, just like the time-doubled half of the Amulet, like two drops of rain on the same window, like two beads of mercury rejoining, run into one another and become the same person, who still looks and sounds like Jimmy but possesses all the knowledge and memories of Rekh-Marā and all that was best in his character (the evil elements are left over as a centipede which Robert promptly squashes).
It's great gestalt mysticism. Jimmy is polite and vague and kind-hearted and intelligent and generally a sweetheart and completely ineffectual. He has trouble remembering to eat dinner unless someone is around to remind him. Rekh-Marā is adventurous and ambitious and unscrupulous and intelligent and not completely a villain, but his scenes with Jimmy are the first time we really see him apply his considerable abilities to the benefit of anyone but himself. Put them together and you get the man the children meet in their near-future jaunt, who keeps the whole and perfect Amulet in his spacious, sunny office filled with many more rare and beautiful antiquities than he had in his room at Fitzroy Street, having since become a wealthy and famous scholar of the ancient world whose publications, even the most theoretical-sounding, are borne out time and time again by the discovery of new evidence, especially regarding Pharaonic Egypt. All of this I love, including the way neither any of the children nor the reader gets to know what made the difference in future-Jimmy's character until the next-to-last page. I've seen the trope in later narratives, but I'm having trouble thinking of an earlier example.5 And rather like the memorable but brief appearance of Nisroch, this plot takes up maybe three chapters out of fourteen. Maybe four if you composite Jimmy's character development prior to the introduction of Rekh-Marā. It's beautiful, powerful stuff, but first there's the rest of the book.
I'm not sure what conclusion to draw. I understand that most authors cannot sustain an entire novel at a pitch of theophany; I don't even expect it from most books. I am capable of enjoying many forms of art which have been visited by the sexism, racism, or sometimes just plain whatthehell fairy. Some people whose tastes I trust rate The Story of the Amulet pretty highly and I believe its general reputation is the same. I may just not be its target audience after all: I appreciate more of this book in the abstract than in the actuality. I finished it and I re-read the three Roman stories from Kipling's Puck of Pook's Hill (1906) and the two American ones from Rewards and Fairies (1910). C. S. Lewis may have ripped off the Queen in London for The Magician's Nephew (1955), but I like the version with Jadis better. I like Jimmy and Rekh-Marā and the power behind the Amulet and Nisroch. Maybe I'd like the rest of the book better if so much of the narration were not Nesbit talking to the reader, because she keeps saying things like "in all their adventures the muddle-headed inventions which we call foreign languages never bothered [the children] in the least." At least she didn't take them to Carthage.
1. In a book about the splendor and interest of the ancient Near East, too. You want to know who else did that? Nazi Assyriologists! Never do things like a Nazi Assyriologist! Okay, if you want to memorize train schedules like Wolfram von Soden when he ran out of Akkadian vocabulary and morphology, that's cool. Also the thing where his contributions to our understanding of the language are incalculable and still influential today, nice work if you can get it. But he also wrote a fairly infamous paper in 1937 claiming that the epic of Tukulti-Ninurta proved an Indo-Aryan strain in the Assyrians because a Semitic culture could never have come up with something so creative and powerful on its own, so I think my advice generally stands. To be scrupulously, historically fair to von Soden, he was never a card-carrying Nazi: he just belonged to the SA. I just think that at the point where you pull a How to Suppress Women's Writing on the collective Semitic capacity for art, you kind of get your Parteibuch anyway.
2. Seriously, what is with the original inhabitants of Predynastic Egypt being fair-haired and fair-skinned and helplessly overrun by "cruel, dark big-nosed" conquerors who remind the children of "Mr. Jacob Absalom, who had sold them the charm in the shop near Charing Cross"? Did we miss the memo about Nazi Assyriologists?
3. The name on the Amulet is Ur Hekau Setcheh; it is not entirely clear that it is the name of the presence that works wonders through the Amulet, which "can make the corn grow, and the waters flow, and the trees bear fruit, and the little new beautiful babies come . . . can keep off all the things that make people unhappy—jealousy, bad temper, pride, disagreeableness, greediness, selfishness, laziness . . . can give you strength and courage . . . can give you your heart's desire" and speaks in "the sweetest and most terrible voice in the world," likened by Nesbit to "nightingales, and the sea, and the fiddle, and the voice of your mother when you have been a long time away, and she meets you at the door when you get home." If you asked me which of the major Egyptian gods that sounds like, I'd say Hathor first and Isis a close second and the distinction may have been immaterial to Nesbit considering how closely the two were associated/syncretized in later Egyptian religion (and the prominence of Isis in the esotericism of Nesbit's time). If so, I don't think I'm going out on a limb to notice that the children's quest is to restore something that was broken and lost and scattered, or that the "beautiful, terrible voice" performs a similar act of magical union—with souls rather than pieces of jasper or carnelian—through the Amulet once it is healed. It manifests in a green radiance that looks at first "like glow-worms' lamps" and becomes "the light that no man may look on and live . . . a glory and splendour and sweetness unspeakable." You see why this book frustrates me?
4. I believe the name is now rendered as Rekhmire, since Egyptian hieroglyphs, like their Semitic abjad neighbors, generally believed written vowels were for weenies. (Check out the different English renderings of Akhenaten's name sometime. That one's so well-known, it's a plot point in an Amelia Peabody mystery.) I can't tell if Nesbit's character is meant as a riff on the historical person or not.
5. While we're speaking of precedents: when Jimmy reflexively swears "By Jove," Rekh-Marā just as automatically cautions him, "Call not upon the gods . . . lest ye raise greater ones than ye can control." That sounds to me quite a lot like The Case of Charles Dexter Ward (1927)'s "I say to you againe, doe not call up Any that you cannot put downe." Is there a really obvious antecedent for both (other than, I suppose, common sense), or should I contemplate the unlikely prospect of H. P. Lovecraft reading E. Nesbit?
I don't think it holds up for me. I feel bad about it. By all rights it's the Nesbit I should have loved best, with the time travel and the magical ancient world; a plot summary sounds like solid gold. With their father on assignment in Manchuria and their mother recuperating from illness in Madeira with their baby brother the Lamb, the four older children of Five Children and It (1902) and The Phœnix and the Carpet (1904) are staying with their old nurse at her house in Fitzrovia when they unexpectedly have to rescue their old acquaintance the Psammead from a sketchy pet shop; since he can no longer grant them wishes, in thanks he points them toward a charm in a similarly sketchy curio shop which he promises "can give you your heart's desire." It turns out to be half of an ancient Egyptian amulet with "the power to take you anywhere you like to look for the other half," with which it must be reunited before it can work its wonders. Guided by the divine voice which speaks through the Amulet and the cranky advice of the Psammead, Robert, Anthea, Cyril, and Jane careen through time in search of the missing portion of the charm, in the process learning a lot about the civilizations around the ancient Mediterranean and facilitating the perfect union of two imperfect souls. There are some stunningly numinous scenes and an intriguing undercurrent of mysticism that comes out at the climax. But even without the random jags of casual British anti-Semitism,1 too much of the book reads to me as a sort of Edwardian whimsy of the ancient world, and I don't think it was meant to.
The scholarship is not the problem. As far as I can tell, Nesbit wrote the book because she fell in love with the ancient Near East and possibly a little [edit: apparently more than a little] with E. A. Wallis Budge of the British Museum, who provided her with accurate hieroglyphics and translations and historically attested names; I think she really did her research. Some of it has since been superseded by new evidence or less Orientalist/racist interpretations,2 but in terms of material culture her ancient settings are terrifically described. There is a well-woven element of social critique to the narrative, as the flaws or virtues of past civilizations show up comparable or contrasting failings in contemporary English culture—some of them extremely scathing, as when the Queen of Babylon observes that giving the vote to the lower classes is a brilliant way of maintaining the status quo while promoting the illusion of choice. The trip forward in time to a Wellsian utopia reads as didactically as Wells' own The Shape of Things to Come (1933), but in terms of the quest it's a reasonable consequence of the children wondering if they can just find out from their future selves how they did it; their succeeding visit to the nearer future actually does set up a time loop, since a piece of information they learn there furthers the climactic recovery of the unbroken Amulet. And I am interested in all the ancient places Nesbit has the children visit—Babylon, Tyre, Iron Age Britain, Predynastic Egypt; Atlantis, why not, it's the past counterpart to the future utopia. But they're not strange enough to be themselves. Part of it is the tone, I think. Some of the episodes are obviously tongue-in-cheek, as when the children's attempts to put Julius Caesar off the invasion of Britain instead intrigue him so much that he decides to conquer the island after all ("if only to find out what Britain is really like") or their twopenny bribery of an Egyptian guard leads to the invention of coinage in Late Dynastic Egypt. "You will not believe this, I daresay," Nesbit allows, "but really, if you believe the rest of this story, I don't see why you shouldn't believe this as well." But even some of the dramatic chapters scramble their ratio of Elfland to Poughkeepsie in ways I find difficult to read. The writing of the scene in which the captain and crew of a Phoenician merchantman decide to wreck their ship rather than betray the secret location of the Tin Islands suggests that the reader should view them romantically: "the brave gentlemen-adventurers who went to their death singing, for the sake of the city they loved." What they are singing as they row for the rocks is "Tyre, Tyre for ever! It's Tyre that rules the waves!" at which point my disbelief collapses because I can't stop my brain from trying to make that scan to "Rule, Britannia!" It should go without saying that almost nobody in Nesbit's ancient world sounds like they actually hail from it. That's not necessarily a bug, if what you're talking about is register or idiom or style. Mary Gentle's Ash: A Secret History (2000) famously has fifteenth-century Burgundian mercenaries and Carthaginian legionaries using modern profanity; the classical Athenian narrator of Tom Holt's Goatsong (1989) sounds like the guy who just sat down beside you in the pub. They can get away with it because their characters' habits of mind are not modern: however much they sound like the present, they think like the past. Almost none of Nesbit's historical characters do. They're very English, or they're not-English in the expected ways. She gets the best contrast with the Queen of Babylon, who sounds like a flirty, gossipy society lady but behaves with imperious carelessness toward any of the social norms or moral codes of her twentieth-century visitors and the England they come from; elsewhere the effect is cozy. It cuts down on the reality of the past. It's fancy dress rather than the alien up close.
I find this especially frustrating because Nesbit can do strange. It's the reason I love The Enchanted Castle (1907) so much. The numinous in The Story of the Amulet is magnificent when she lets it out to play. In order to escape the dungeons of Babylon, the children use the hieroglyphic name on the Amulet to summon Nisroch, who may or may not have been an actual Babylonian god (he's a hapax legomenon in the Biblical story of Sennacherib) but is powerfully evoked by Nesbit in the form of the winged and bird-headed apkallû of the Neo-Assyrian reliefs I love:
There was a waiting silence. Then a cold, blue light awoke in the corner where the straw was—and in the light they saw coming towards them a strange and terrible figure. I won't try to describe it, because Mr. Millar will draw it for you, exactly as it was, and exactly as the old Babylonians carved it on their stones, so that you can see it in our own British Museum at this day. I will just say that it had eagle's wings and an eagle's head and the body of a man . . . It came towards them, strong and unspeakably horrible.
He speaks in a voice of rusted keys; when Anthea seizes his hand in panicked gratitude, it is "cold and hard in hers, like a hand of stone." He bows courteously to the children who called upon him, "the servant of the Great Ones," and makes for them a door through the wet stone wall of the dungeon into the rich chambers of the Queen. "Walk forward without fear," he salutes them. If he is a god, he is not a comforting one, but neither is he malevolent, and he's present for about three pages including his illustration. I'm not sure why he's the only supernatural being with which the children interact outside of the Psammead and the power behind the Amulet,3 but his effectiveness makes me think Nesbit could have done it more often.
The mystical subplot is even better. There are two significant adult characters in the narrative, one present from the beginning and one introduced in the second half of the book. The "poor learned gentleman" lives upstairs from the children with a collection of cuneiform tablets and cylinder seals and a mummy case and his usually uneaten dinner, being a thin shabby distracted antiquarian who has plainly not been able to parlay his impressive scholarship into any kind of living. He wears the Edwardian equivalent of nerd glasses and is probably not as aged as he looks. The children rather self-consciously nickname him "Jimmy" and use him as their pet Egyptologist; they are reluctant to take him back into the past after he almost gets them all killed by insisting on staying until the last possible moment of the destruction of Atlantis in order to know for himself how it ends. Following their foray into Iron Age Britain, the children try Pharaonic Egypt and there meet Rekh-Marā,4 an aristocratic young priest of Amen-Rā currently out of favor with the royal court for botching a prophecy. Impressed by their seeming magic with pocket matches, he presents the children before Pharaoh in a bid to redeem his reputation, which ends badly with another magical jailbreak and Rekh-Marā realizing the real power they possess. He is neither wholly an enemy nor wholly an ally to the children; he helps them when he believes they each possess one half of the same shattered Amulet and betrays them on discovering that the apparent two halves are merely the same half from different times and is as astonished as the children by the melting of his half into theirs (according to Nesbit's laws of time travel, more than one iteration of the same thing cannot exist in the same time). He's difficult for them to dislike entirely, although he has to be magically held to his oath to be their friend. When they meet him disguised among the Phoenician sailors, they think at once that "he's rather like our learned gentleman" before uncomfortably realizing their mistake, but that's the point.
"Already . . . he and I are as brothers, and his welfare is dear to me as my own." The two men meet when Rekh-Marā comes forward in time after the children's Amulet. They bond instantly, talking for hours in Jimmy's cluttered little museum of a room. They share a love of learning and an appreciation of the world that is remote and precious to Jimmy and familiar and beloved to Rekh-Marā; the way the priest explains the situation with the Amulet enables the scholar to make the simple, un-thought-of suggestion that finally brings the unbroken Amulet whole and powerful out of the past. And when it comes time for the granting of his heart's desire, in the end what the tricky Rekh-Marā wants most of all is to stay in this strange far-distant future and keep alive the knowledge of the time from which he came, which is understood so incompletely and inaccurately in the modern day if at all. At first this seems impossible: "Nobody can continue to live in a land and in a time not appointed." Nor can he return through the Amulet to his own time, since it was a conduit to the past only so long as it was broken, the separated pieces yearning toward each other across the millennia. But just as things look really bleak for the priest, the voice that speaks through the Amulet reveals that while bodies cannot survive outside their own times, souls are a different matter: "if in that other time and land there be found a soul so akin to it as to offer it refuge, in the body of that land and time, that thus they two may be one soul in one body." The children—except for the perceptive Anthea—can't figure out how this is going to work. "But the eyes of Rekh-Marā and the learned gentleman met, and were kind to each other, and promised each other many things, secret and sacred and very beautiful." And so it is that the presence behind the Amulet enacts between them something very like a sacred marriage, in which the two men joyously pledge their souls to one another for eternity and, just like the time-doubled half of the Amulet, like two drops of rain on the same window, like two beads of mercury rejoining, run into one another and become the same person, who still looks and sounds like Jimmy but possesses all the knowledge and memories of Rekh-Marā and all that was best in his character (the evil elements are left over as a centipede which Robert promptly squashes).
It's great gestalt mysticism. Jimmy is polite and vague and kind-hearted and intelligent and generally a sweetheart and completely ineffectual. He has trouble remembering to eat dinner unless someone is around to remind him. Rekh-Marā is adventurous and ambitious and unscrupulous and intelligent and not completely a villain, but his scenes with Jimmy are the first time we really see him apply his considerable abilities to the benefit of anyone but himself. Put them together and you get the man the children meet in their near-future jaunt, who keeps the whole and perfect Amulet in his spacious, sunny office filled with many more rare and beautiful antiquities than he had in his room at Fitzroy Street, having since become a wealthy and famous scholar of the ancient world whose publications, even the most theoretical-sounding, are borne out time and time again by the discovery of new evidence, especially regarding Pharaonic Egypt. All of this I love, including the way neither any of the children nor the reader gets to know what made the difference in future-Jimmy's character until the next-to-last page. I've seen the trope in later narratives, but I'm having trouble thinking of an earlier example.5 And rather like the memorable but brief appearance of Nisroch, this plot takes up maybe three chapters out of fourteen. Maybe four if you composite Jimmy's character development prior to the introduction of Rekh-Marā. It's beautiful, powerful stuff, but first there's the rest of the book.
I'm not sure what conclusion to draw. I understand that most authors cannot sustain an entire novel at a pitch of theophany; I don't even expect it from most books. I am capable of enjoying many forms of art which have been visited by the sexism, racism, or sometimes just plain whatthehell fairy. Some people whose tastes I trust rate The Story of the Amulet pretty highly and I believe its general reputation is the same. I may just not be its target audience after all: I appreciate more of this book in the abstract than in the actuality. I finished it and I re-read the three Roman stories from Kipling's Puck of Pook's Hill (1906) and the two American ones from Rewards and Fairies (1910). C. S. Lewis may have ripped off the Queen in London for The Magician's Nephew (1955), but I like the version with Jadis better. I like Jimmy and Rekh-Marā and the power behind the Amulet and Nisroch. Maybe I'd like the rest of the book better if so much of the narration were not Nesbit talking to the reader, because she keeps saying things like "in all their adventures the muddle-headed inventions which we call foreign languages never bothered [the children] in the least." At least she didn't take them to Carthage.
1. In a book about the splendor and interest of the ancient Near East, too. You want to know who else did that? Nazi Assyriologists! Never do things like a Nazi Assyriologist! Okay, if you want to memorize train schedules like Wolfram von Soden when he ran out of Akkadian vocabulary and morphology, that's cool. Also the thing where his contributions to our understanding of the language are incalculable and still influential today, nice work if you can get it. But he also wrote a fairly infamous paper in 1937 claiming that the epic of Tukulti-Ninurta proved an Indo-Aryan strain in the Assyrians because a Semitic culture could never have come up with something so creative and powerful on its own, so I think my advice generally stands. To be scrupulously, historically fair to von Soden, he was never a card-carrying Nazi: he just belonged to the SA. I just think that at the point where you pull a How to Suppress Women's Writing on the collective Semitic capacity for art, you kind of get your Parteibuch anyway.
2. Seriously, what is with the original inhabitants of Predynastic Egypt being fair-haired and fair-skinned and helplessly overrun by "cruel, dark big-nosed" conquerors who remind the children of "Mr. Jacob Absalom, who had sold them the charm in the shop near Charing Cross"? Did we miss the memo about Nazi Assyriologists?
3. The name on the Amulet is Ur Hekau Setcheh; it is not entirely clear that it is the name of the presence that works wonders through the Amulet, which "can make the corn grow, and the waters flow, and the trees bear fruit, and the little new beautiful babies come . . . can keep off all the things that make people unhappy—jealousy, bad temper, pride, disagreeableness, greediness, selfishness, laziness . . . can give you strength and courage . . . can give you your heart's desire" and speaks in "the sweetest and most terrible voice in the world," likened by Nesbit to "nightingales, and the sea, and the fiddle, and the voice of your mother when you have been a long time away, and she meets you at the door when you get home." If you asked me which of the major Egyptian gods that sounds like, I'd say Hathor first and Isis a close second and the distinction may have been immaterial to Nesbit considering how closely the two were associated/syncretized in later Egyptian religion (and the prominence of Isis in the esotericism of Nesbit's time). If so, I don't think I'm going out on a limb to notice that the children's quest is to restore something that was broken and lost and scattered, or that the "beautiful, terrible voice" performs a similar act of magical union—with souls rather than pieces of jasper or carnelian—through the Amulet once it is healed. It manifests in a green radiance that looks at first "like glow-worms' lamps" and becomes "the light that no man may look on and live . . . a glory and splendour and sweetness unspeakable." You see why this book frustrates me?
4. I believe the name is now rendered as Rekhmire, since Egyptian hieroglyphs, like their Semitic abjad neighbors, generally believed written vowels were for weenies. (Check out the different English renderings of Akhenaten's name sometime. That one's so well-known, it's a plot point in an Amelia Peabody mystery.) I can't tell if Nesbit's character is meant as a riff on the historical person or not.
5. While we're speaking of precedents: when Jimmy reflexively swears "By Jove," Rekh-Marā just as automatically cautions him, "Call not upon the gods . . . lest ye raise greater ones than ye can control." That sounds to me quite a lot like The Case of Charles Dexter Ward (1927)'s "I say to you againe, doe not call up Any that you cannot put downe." Is there a really obvious antecedent for both (other than, I suppose, common sense), or should I contemplate the unlikely prospect of H. P. Lovecraft reading E. Nesbit?
no subject
The bad parts sound... well. *wince*
no subject
This book had one of the strongest and weirdest polarizations I can remember reading in a long time. The good parts were so good that I wanted much, much more of them. The bad parts I wanted to exorcise with fire and salt.
no subject
no subject
I can certainly take it under advisement! I have only just started writing fiction again after nearly a year's hiatus, and technically it was fic. So I don't know what I can promise right now, but I am honored to be asked.
footnote #5
Re: footnote #5
I think (though I'm not at all sure) that it turned out to be a fraudulent 'ghost', who would've gotten away with it if it wasn't for you meddling Superman, alas. I remember being delighted by the idea of someone finding out that they'd been calling on something supernatural all along, though.
Re: footnote #5
Re: footnote #5
Now I really want the version where it is Caesar's ghost and he has to help solve the mystery, all the while thinking that this is not exactly the Elysium he was expecting.
Re: footnote #5
The more I hear about this show, the more I really want to see it. If nothing else, it sounds consistently batshit.
no subject
Your description makes me think I would have loved it when I was a kid, and that the patronizing tone and the anti-Semitism probably would have flown over my head.
I got most of the elements elsewhere, and I am reasonable content not to have impressed on it (though elements of the novel are spookily close to things I've been writing -- time travel, gestalt, the numinous, are all places I've been visiting).
Possibly I got this in utero; my mother was a huge E. Nesbit fan as a kid, but never passed that taste on to me. I discovered the BBC drama of The Phoenix and the Carpet as a preteen, but didn't look for the corresponding book for about 15 years.
It's really pleasing to see the name of Wally Budge as a consultant. I grew up hearing his name from my father, along with that of James Pritchard. Also, I'm just pleased to see someone who isn't me use hapax legomenon in a sentence.
I agree that I have probably loved your brief retelling here much more than I would now enjoy the original work, but then, I am the child of an thwarted archeologist who became a story teller, and a thwarted children's librarian who chose a full time home in the numinous, so this kind of narrative is pretty much where I live.
Thank you for this. It made my morning much richer.
no subject
Wonderful--there's a whole story in this statement.
no subject
I read The Phœnix and the Carpet first and then backtracked to Five Children and It, but I think I ran across The Story of the Amulet by chance in a library. I just can't remember which one. The most likely culprits are the now-remodeled children's room in Cary Library in Lexington or the now-relocated children's room in the Cambridge Public Library, but conceivably I could have read it at my grandparents' house in Portland, along with The Jungle Book (1894).
Your description makes me think I would have loved it when I was a kid, and that the patronizing tone and the anti-Semitism probably would have flown over my head.
It really interests me that the anti-Semitism didn't fly over my head, because usually I noticed that sort of thing—not if it was a Holocaust or a social problem novel, obviously, but if it was casual period anti-Semitism in a narrative otherwise not about Jews—years later on re-read. I didn't remember the keeper of the curio shop also being Jewish, for example, although he clearly is. But the massacre at the Stock Exchange registered with me at the time and upset me and was enough to prevent me from reading the book again until this week.
(though elements of the novel are spookily close to things I've been writing -- time travel, gestalt, the numinous, are all places I've been visiting).
Just going out on a limb here, I suspect I will enjoy your version more.
. I discovered the BBC drama of The Phoenix and the Carpet as a preteen, but didn't look for the corresponding book for about 15 years.
I didn't know that existed! How is it?
Thank you for this. It made my morning much richer.
You're very welcome. I'm glad I was able to pass on the good parts.
no subject
Some novels really are VERY mixed bags.
I think at some point I dipped into just the future portion of this novel, and I recall being struck by how accurate her sense of future clothing was.
no subject
That is an excellent and sadly apt word.
Some novels really are VERY mixed bags.
And usually they have some middle ground! There are bits that are all right, or not quite as magical as the better bits, or not so hot but still not wholly terrible. At least for me, The Story of the Amulet had almost no neutral setting between numinous and moving and emotionally-mythically true and AGH NO AVAUNT AVAUNT AVAUNT.
no subject
You should definitely contemplate this. What could possibly go wrong?
Probably not vice versa, though.
no subject
Vice versa: I dunno, I feel like there's a story there.
no subject
See below: it would have to be supernatural.
no subject
Actually, this article makes it sound like she might have been right in his line.
(She died in 1924: I think she could only have read him as a ghost. Which is promising in itself.)
no subject
I am, sadly, not at all surprised by racist and anti-Semitic tendencies in British archaeologists and antiquarians of the early 1900s. There was a lot of overlap in their interpretations and German ones from that period. Even the "ah, yes, clearly the founders of this civilization were pale-skinned people who were later driven off by dark-skinned ones!" thing shows up as a theory for multiple historical civilizations. But you probably know all this already! It is nevertheless frustrating when it shows up to ruin an otherwise pleasant read.
Is there a really obvious antecedent for both (other than, I suppose, common sense), or should I contemplate the unlikely prospect of H. P. Lovecraft reading E. Nesbit?
It reminds me of all the stories about medieval necromancers and demonologists who have to be careful to create just the right magic circle and do all the right incantations, because one smudged line or mispronounced syllable will lead to being overwhelmed by the demons they summon, but I'm not sure that's quite similar enough to count.
no subject
no subject
I did once ask out a youngish man in plus fours, horn-rimmed glasses and oven mitts, who (along with several other people) was carrying a full-size model of an atom bomb. I probably should have invited him to meet me at the ROM, instead of a coffee shop.
no subject
That makes perfect sense to me. [edit] The asking him out; I assume there was also a reason for the atom bomb, but I don't know it.
no subject
no subject
Scratch the "possibly," then. Thank you! I just figured he was the nicest of the curators in the scene in which the Queen of Babylon magically floats all of the Babylonian items out of the British Museum.
I'm always reminded of it when I read about Topaz in I Capture the Castle saying that she didn't trust her husband going to the British Museum: "People do nothing but use it for assignations -- I met him there myself once, in the mummy room."
I love that line.
no subject
< boggles at the circular reasoning >
< nods sadly >
no subject
< nods sadly >
Not the finest hour of German Assyriology, I'm just saying.
no subject
And it made me so mad, because Anthea is one of my favorite characters in all children's literature. Was this also the book where she needs a reason to have been crying, and so she gets one of her brothers to whack her on the hand with an iron poker? The sheer bravery of that act (and the fact that it was motivated by love) haunted me in a thrilling and inspirational way for years.
no subject
As I noted to
Was this also the book where she needs a reason to have been crying, and so she gets one of her brothers to whack her on the hand with an iron poker? The sheer bravery of that act (and the fact that it was motivated by love) haunted me in a thrilling and inspirational way for years.
No, that's the The Phœnix and the Carpet, but it is an extremely badass scene. I think it is wonderful that Anthea inspired you.
no subject
“With the unerring instinct of his race, he knew that this was not play-acting, that there was something behind it—something real. The sense of romance, of great things all about them transcending the ordinary things of life—this in the Jews has survived centuries of torment, shame, cruelty, and oppression. This inherited sense of romance in the pawnbroker now leaped to answer Dickie's appeal. (And I do hope I am not confusing you; stick to it; read it again if you don't understand. What I mean is that the Jews always see the big beautiful things; they don't just see that gray is made of black and white; they see how incredibly black black can be, and that there may be a whiteness transcending all the whitest dreams in the world.)”
Maybe, as with Dickens and Fagin, someone put it to her that what she was writing had been damaging, and that she needed, as best she could, to undo the damage?
The same book also has the time is only a mode of thought theme running through it.
no subject
no subject
Kipling manages to avoid them in "The House Doctor," which is one of the reasons I like that story, but I have still never figured out how to feel about Kadmiel in "The Treasure and the Law" and his one-man benevolent Jewish well-poisoning money-lending conspiracy.
no subject
Interesting—I hadn't known. Thank you for telling me! I still get weird when people say things like "the unerring instinct of his race" (as I get weird about Mr. Riah being as saintly as he is), but it is positive!
Your summary of Harding's Luck actually sounds like The Story of the Amulet in that it is a mixed bag of a book full of mostly unexamined prejudices with a knockout final—supernatural—scene.
The same book also has the time is only a mode of thought theme running through it.
It seems like something she might have believed.
no subject
no subject
I think Harding's Luck is a worse-constructed book than Amulet, but its prejudices are mostly about class, with no opportunity for the Assyriology etc.
no subject
I think you're right. My major structural issue with The Story of the Amulet is that it doesn't really gather a plot until it's three chapters from the end and it's such a good plot that there deserved to be more of it and less of the episodic condescension-prone history tourism. Harding's Luck has a plot and an apparent arc and I thought I could see where it was heading and then it ran into the main plot of The House of Arden and snapped in half—Nesbit wanted it to be something else all along and I don't actually think the two threads go together very well. And I agree with you about the pawnbroker. "If you don't beat all! . . . I give you a present, and you come to pledge it with me! You should have been one of our people!" Attempt at reparation appreciated, Nesbit, now please just back away.
[edit] Now I really want to re-read Elizabeth Goudge's The Valley of Song (1951). That book has an exquisite balance of the numinous and the everyday and it works so well I don't even care about the implicit Christianity, because there is also wild magic and the realm of Fairy and Greek gods and the living signs of the Zodiac and a community coming back to life on both collective and personal levels. I read that book very young and it has only gotten better as I've returned to it. Nesbit's handling of the magical and the otherworldly reminds me of Goudge's, but her control over it is much more tenuous. I would really love to find a story of hers which sustained the strangeness. It doesn't feel like a technical problem; it's an authorial decision that I just disagree with.
no subject
no subject
You're welcome! It is my favorite Elizabeth Goudge and definitely her best book for children, possibly her best full stop. Naturally, it is desperately out of print. I recommend libraries.
no subject