Freddy Goes to the North Pole, Walter R. Brooks (365 Books, Day 359)

I have been nervous about the Freddy books for about a decade now; that is how long it's been since I'd read any of them. At least. I grew up with them, as some relative or other tucked a couple into a holiday box one year, and the library had a circulating selection. I remember really liking the ones with the Martians and the others are kind of blurry, so I had the fear one always has about childhood books: did this, while I grew up, receive a visit from the Suck Fairy? And did she bring her friends the Racism and Sexism Fairies along for the ride? I was so nervous about the Freddy books that I put off rereading the ones I own for about five years due, solely, to that nervousness. They are exactly the kind of thing that turns out to be awful when you grow up a depressing percentage of the time, and given that they were written in the 1930s through 1950s, well, the awful could have been spectacularly hideous.

I went through the library today and reread a lot of the ones I knew as a kid and read one, Freddy Goes to the North Pole, for the first time.

Thankfully, they aren't terrible. Whew. They are not brilliant, and they vary in quality extremely; you can see Brooks teaching himself to write them as he goes. They do not have consistent worldbuilding to the point where they do not have worldbuilding at all. They do not have consistent memories of things that happened in previous books, even.

But they are and remain charming, cute little books about a farm full of talking animals who, as a farm full of talking animals would inevitably be, are bored with farm work and therefore do anything else that comes into their heads. Freddy, the protagonist pig, has been a detective, an editor, a politician, a travel agent, a rocket scientist, a terrible poet (sadly a consistent feature)... the list goes ever on and on. The whole is set in a sort of bucolic-to-the-point-of-comedic-exaggeration whitebread extremely-stereotype-American small town which manages to get away with its strains of anti-Communism, rabid patriotism and general dislike of politicians by being such a caricature that you cannot possibly take any of its politics seriously. I am not capable of taking anti-Communist sentiments as intended as a real statement when they are expressed by a sheriff who hands off the key to the jail to his prisoners every weekend to make sure they don't feel unloved and rejected by society. I'm just not. Nobody can make me.

As an adult, I am capable of noticing which precise great English poems Freddy has plagiarized and turned into travesties of themselves in the service of his, uh, art. (Put down the Kipling! And back away slowly!) Apart from that, the books really haven't changed a bit, although I have no idea what anyone would think of them now who didn't read them as a kid.

The new-to-me-today is an odd duck among them, one of the ones that is more out-and-out fantastical, which is not the usual direction of this series. I don't think it works very well, but this is only the second and Brooks is still finding his feet. The animals decide to found a travel agency for other animals, in which they show them around various sights of interest in exchange for farm labor, and consequently all find themselves free to take a very long vacation; a party decides to go the North Pole. When it is not heard back from, another party goes... and discovers, in fact, Santa Claus. Whose shop has been taken over by the crew of a whaling ship who want to make it more efficient, which is making everybody miserable. The animals have to find a way to get the crew to go home without hurting them, since they generally mean well. Along the way they save a couple of orphans, have a genuinely tense confrontation with a wolf pack, and totally disregard everything about the way the climate on the way to the North Pole actually is (seriously, they all sleep on the ground under feather beds every night and it's just fine). It's an incredibly peculiar book.

As with all other Brooks, some animals talk and some don't, and some animals who talk eat other animals who talk, even knowing they talk, and some people are willing to eat even animals they know talk while other people are perfectly willing to treat the animals exactly as they would human beings, and the inconsistency of all of this multiplies by about ten thousand when you throw in Santa Claus, a crew of whalers, abused children, a fake treasure map, and lots and lots of filked Tennyson and Walter Scott. This specific novel doesn't quite gel, in that it's more a series of peculiar set-pieces than a coherent anything, but I can't disrecommend it, because it's certainly different.

And as I said, the series in general holds up, especially the ones with the Martians, because Brooks turns out to be way better at SF than fantasy, once you just take the talking animals as one of those things that happens sometimes. Which in fact is how everyone takes it. So, while these are not the sort of kids' books that turn out to be treasures that were totally beyond one's comprehension at the time (Keith Robertson's Henry Reed books turn out to be hilarious in ways I had never dreamed possible), they are the sort you can read happily and reminiscently without feeling sick to one's stomach. This makes me very cheerful, because, well, that's a whole chunk of childhood.

Freddy Goes to the North Pole, Walter R. Brooks (365 Books, Day 359)

I have been nervous about the Freddy books for about a decade now; that is how long it's been since I'd read any of them. At least. I grew up with them, as some relative or other tucked a couple into a holiday box one year, and the library had a circulating selection. I remember really liking the ones with the Martians and the others are kind of blurry, so I had the fear one always has about childhood books: did this, while I grew up, receive a visit from the Suck Fairy? And did she bring her friends the Racism and Sexism Fairies along for the ride? I was so nervous about the Freddy books that I put off rereading the ones I own for about five years due, solely, to that nervousness. They are exactly the kind of thing that turns out to be awful when you grow up a depressing percentage of the time, and given that they were written in the 1930s through 1950s, well, the awful could have been spectacularly hideous.

I went through the library today and reread a lot of the ones I knew as a kid and read one, Freddy Goes to the North Pole, for the first time.

Thankfully, they aren't terrible. Whew. They are not brilliant, and they vary in quality extremely; you can see Brooks teaching himself to write them as he goes. They do not have consistent worldbuilding to the point where they do not have worldbuilding at all. They do not have consistent memories of things that happened in previous books, even.

But they are and remain charming, cute little books about a farm full of talking animals who, as a farm full of talking animals would inevitably be, are bored with farm work and therefore do anything else that comes into their heads. Freddy, the protagonist pig, has been a detective, an editor, a politician, a travel agent, a rocket scientist, a terrible poet (sadly a consistent feature)... the list goes ever on and on. The whole is set in a sort of bucolic-to-the-point-of-comedic-exaggeration whitebread extremely-stereotype-American small town which manages to get away with its strains of anti-Communism, rabid patriotism and general dislike of politicians by being such a caricature that you cannot possibly take any of its politics seriously. I am not capable of taking anti-Communist sentiments as intended as a real statement when they are expressed by a sheriff who hands off the key to the jail to his prisoners every weekend to make sure they don't feel unloved and rejected by society. I'm just not. Nobody can make me.

As an adult, I am capable of noticing which precise great English poems Freddy has plagiarized and turned into travesties of themselves in the service of his, uh, art. (Put down the Kipling! And back away slowly!) Apart from that, the books really haven't changed a bit, although I have no idea what anyone would think of them now who didn't read them as a kid.

The new-to-me-today is an odd duck among them, one of the ones that is more out-and-out fantastical, which is not the usual direction of this series. I don't think it works very well, but this is only the second and Brooks is still finding his feet. The animals decide to found a travel agency for other animals, in which they show them around various sights of interest in exchange for farm labor, and consequently all find themselves free to take a very long vacation; a party decides to go the North Pole. When it is not heard back from, another party goes... and discovers, in fact, Santa Claus. Whose shop has been taken over by the crew of a whaling ship who want to make it more efficient, which is making everybody miserable. The animals have to find a way to get the crew to go home without hurting them, since they generally mean well. Along the way they save a couple of orphans, have a genuinely tense confrontation with a wolf pack, and totally disregard everything about the way the climate on the way to the North Pole actually is (seriously, they all sleep on the ground under feather beds every night and it's just fine). It's an incredibly peculiar book.

As with all other Brooks, some animals talk and some don't, and some animals who talk eat other animals who talk, even knowing they talk, and some people are willing to eat even animals they know talk while other people are perfectly willing to treat the animals exactly as they would human beings, and the inconsistency of all of this multiplies by about ten thousand when you throw in Santa Claus, a crew of whalers, abused children, a fake treasure map, and lots and lots of filked Tennyson and Walter Scott. This specific novel doesn't quite gel, in that it's more a series of peculiar set-pieces than a coherent anything, but I can't disrecommend it, because it's certainly different.

And as I said, the series in general holds up, especially the ones with the Martians, because Brooks turns out to be way better at SF than fantasy, once you just take the talking animals as one of those things that happens sometimes. Which in fact is how everyone takes it. So, while these are not the sort of kids' books that turn out to be treasures that were totally beyond one's comprehension at the time (Keith Robertson's Henry Reed books turn out to be hilarious in ways I had never dreamed possible), they are the sort you can read happily and reminiscently without feeling sick to one's stomach. This makes me very cheerful, because, well, that's a whole chunk of childhood.

You can comment here or at the Dreamwidth crosspost. There are comments over there.

The Red House, E. Nesbit (365 Books, Day 360)

Via Mari Ness, who pointed out over at torcom that she had never read any of E. Nesbit's adult novels, and gave this one a fairly complimentary review. I realized I'd never read any of the adult books either.

It's very interesting. It's not a book in which much happens, but the ways in which things don't happen are, for 1902, revolutionary, and still, for fiction, in some ways impressive.

In short, this is a book about housework.

From a male perspective.

The protagonist and his wife, new-married and both working in artistic professions for a not-spectacular living, are left a house and a small income by an uncle. The house is gigantic-- twenty-nine rooms, far too large for two people, and besides has four adjacent cottages which belong to the property, an orchard and large garden, and a ridiculous number of necessary repairs. It would be silly to move into it. They promptly move into it; they cannot help it. (I don't think many people could.) And then they are caught in the trap that the things they want to do and most enjoy doing, which are fixing up the house and unpacking the furniture and building new furniture and going through the cellar and getting the mold off the doorstep and hanging the wallpaper etc. etc. etc., do not bring in any money whatsoever, but it can be very difficult to write and draw when you have a giant old house all around you calling out for things to be done to it and also half your clothes are still at the back of a pile of boxes under the stairs and damn it if you don't prune the peach trees this year they're going to fall over onto the roof.

The thing that I like is that this is an absolutely gender-neutral problem. They both work, neither takes the work lightly, and they are both in a state of new-house rapture compounded by still pretty much being on honeymoon compounded by spring. And neither one of them has ever had to do housework before, being of the class who keep servants, but they can't get one to stay; the house is too big. So there's the novelty value for them also, but in addition the organizational issue-- the protagonist thinks at one point that his wife knew how to be an organized person in the tiny house they had before this, because she had lived in a similar house growing up and was following her mother's rules, whereas in a tiny house he tried to spread out and claim territory all over the place. But in a large house she has to find out what rules she actually considers necessary, and he's turned into a person who wants to do the dishes between parts of dinner just so he knows where to find the things again.

Fortunately they have a good and sophisticated friend, who is willing to come in and gently sort them out, though one of the book's few sour notes is that she has an Obligatory and most annoying Romance of the kind that I almost suspect the Powers That Be of insisting on. Because in a book of this sort in 1902 having a woman of her sort (been to college, has a career) not have an Obligatory Annoying Romance would be sufficiently subversive as to be unpublishable. Still. Aargh.

The other sour note is that there are a couple of racial epithets of sorts that are nowadays not used, and which are not here used in reference to any specific people, but it is very odd and jarring to see them crop up in figures of speech and analogies: unpleasant.

Overall, though, this is a kind of book I thoroughly enjoy and approve of: it's a book about a happy marriage that I can believe, a marriage in which people talk to each other and in which they consistently and cheerfully enjoy one another's company. They are each other's best friends. And when she becomes pregnant, and they are both absolutely terrified and with good reason (they are twenty and twenty-two, they've only just sorted their lives out, and there is a real possibility of this killing her, because that happened randomly sometimes then), they talk out their fears to one another and are honest about the prospect of death. (Look! An Edwardian novel that mentions pregnancy!)

1902, people. This gentle, honest, humane, still unique book was the political equivalent of throwing a bomb. It's a sign of how well that bomb has exploded that lots of this is now actually somewhat quaint and even a little sexist. It's a sign that it is still exploding that my list of books which value housekeeping as a human art and endeavor is very short, and this is one of precisely two I can think of in which the narrator is male and his discovery that he enjoys housework isn't meant as a joke. (The other one is Gordon Korman's Losing Joe's Place, in which the entire rest of the book is a joke, and a good one, but not that bit.) I have a feeling this should not be this rare a quality in a novel; but at least, if three things make a genre, we are lacking only one now.

The Red House, E. Nesbit (365 Books, Day 360)

Via Mari Ness, who pointed out over at torcom that she had never read any of E. Nesbit's adult novels, and gave this one a fairly complimentary review. I realized I'd never read any of the adult books either.

It's very interesting. It's not a book in which much happens, but the ways in which things don't happen are, for 1902, revolutionary, and still, for fiction, in some ways impressive.

In short, this is a book about housework.

From a male perspective.

The protagonist and his wife, new-married and both working in artistic professions for a not-spectacular living, are left a house and a small income by an uncle. The house is gigantic-- twenty-nine rooms, far too large for two people, and besides has four adjacent cottages which belong to the property, an orchard and large garden, and a ridiculous number of necessary repairs. It would be silly to move into it. They promptly move into it; they cannot help it. (I don't think many people could.) And then they are caught in the trap that the things they want to do and most enjoy doing, which are fixing up the house and unpacking the furniture and building new furniture and going through the cellar and getting the mold off the doorstep and hanging the wallpaper etc. etc. etc., do not bring in any money whatsoever, but it can be very difficult to write and draw when you have a giant old house all around you calling out for things to be done to it and also half your clothes are still at the back of a pile of boxes under the stairs and damn it if you don't prune the peach trees this year they're going to fall over onto the roof.

The thing that I like is that this is an absolutely gender-neutral problem. They both work, neither takes the work lightly, and they are both in a state of new-house rapture compounded by still pretty much being on honeymoon compounded by spring. And neither one of them has ever had to do housework before, being of the class who keep servants, but they can't get one to stay; the house is too big. So there's the novelty value for them also, but in addition the organizational issue-- the protagonist thinks at one point that his wife knew how to be an organized person in the tiny house they had before this, because she had lived in a similar house growing up and was following her mother's rules, whereas in a tiny house he tried to spread out and claim territory all over the place. But in a large house she has to find out what rules she actually considers necessary, and he's turned into a person who wants to do the dishes between parts of dinner just so he knows where to find the things again.

Fortunately they have a good and sophisticated friend, who is willing to come in and gently sort them out, though one of the book's few sour notes is that she has an Obligatory and most annoying Romance of the kind that I almost suspect the Powers That Be of insisting on. Because in a book of this sort in 1902 having a woman of her sort (been to college, has a career) not have an Obligatory Annoying Romance would be sufficiently subversive as to be unpublishable. Still. Aargh.

The other sour note is that there are a couple of racial epithets of sorts that are nowadays not used, and which are not here used in reference to any specific people, but it is very odd and jarring to see them crop up in figures of speech and analogies: unpleasant.

Overall, though, this is a kind of book I thoroughly enjoy and approve of: it's a book about a happy marriage that I can believe, a marriage in which people talk to each other and in which they consistently and cheerfully enjoy one another's company. They are each other's best friends. And when she becomes pregnant, and they are both absolutely terrified and with good reason (they are twenty and twenty-two, they've only just sorted their lives out, and there is a real possibility of this killing her, because that happened randomly sometimes then), they talk out their fears to one another and are honest about the prospect of death. (Look! An Edwardian novel that mentions pregnancy!)

1902, people. This gentle, honest, humane, still unique book was the political equivalent of throwing a bomb. It's a sign of how well that bomb has exploded that lots of this is now actually somewhat quaint and even a little sexist. It's a sign that it is still exploding that my list of books which value housekeeping as a human art and endeavor is very short, and this is one of precisely two I can think of in which the narrator is male and his discovery that he enjoys housework isn't meant as a joke. (The other one is Gordon Korman's Losing Joe's Place, in which the entire rest of the book is a joke, and a good one, but not that bit.) I have a feeling this should not be this rare a quality in a novel; but at least, if three things make a genre, we are lacking only one now.

You can comment here or at the Dreamwidth crosspost. There are comments over there.