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. ( For this was not like the things that had happened in the country when the Psammead had given them their wishes. That had been funny somehow, and this was not. It was something like Arabian Nights magic, and something like being in church. No one cared to speak. ) 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. ( For this was not like the things that had happened in the country when the Psammead had given them their wishes. That had been funny somehow, and this was not. It was something like Arabian Nights magic, and something like being in church. No one cared to speak. ) 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?
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