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rushthatspeaks'Complete' here meaning that it has one more story than the original edition. These short stories were all initially published in magazines, and collected after the run.
If you don't mind the fact that Nesbit has a reader very definitely in mind, and that that reader is quite young, this is lovely; but I mean that she has that reader in mind much more firmly than many authors do, because it is not just that you can tell who the book is aimed at. This is that style of late Victorian/Edwardian children's fiction where the author tells you to wash behind your ears and not take too many helpings of pudding. You know. That sort.
That said, it does not hurt these tales greatly for me, because Nesbit is also so sharp it can take you a moment to notice the stab. When there is a national holiday, 'even the children of plumbers and authors got tuppence apiece', and when a king makes a law that everyone should have enough to eat it pleases everyone 'except the ones who had already had too much'. And as the theme of this is dragons, it stands to reason that some of them are beautiful. There is an ice dragon here, twined around the frozen plume of steam that is the North Pole, in the ever-burning fire-shadow of the Aurora Borealis: and though she never quite gets out of her own way entirely, the image is magnificent.
In fact it is her talking-to-children, her sense that things ought to be down-to-earth, that I wish she would let go of, because when she does, even for a sentence, the effect is magical. As it is, it is modified magic. At any rate, there are dragons aplenty, some large, some the size of earwigs, some carnivorous and some tame, ice and fire dragons, dragons made of iron and a dragon that turns into a cat eventually (one always knew it). And children to go with the dragons, who are usually doing something their parents would rather they not be doing, and who come out of things all right but are not believed, mostly. If this reminds me of anything it is Joan Aiken's Armitage family stories, that sense of prosaic and enchanted intermingled. I suppose it is possible these might read to some people as twee (there are a number of things that nearly go over that line for me), but she always means the real plots seriously, which for me mostly saves it.
There is also a wicked uncle here who is a magician, with a very posh taste in waistcoats and a desperate sense of his own self-importance, and I could see around the edges of that text C.S. Lewis, with his nose twitching at a scent, in a wild surmise. Vast chunks of what went into The Magician's Nephew are scattered throughout this collection, which made it interesting to me on an entirely separate level.
So, then, if this is the sort of thing you like you will like it, and it is very good Nesbit, though not like The Enchanted Castle, where she did get out of her own way, or Five Children and It. But good anyhow.
(I do wish the one extant biography of Nesbit weren't so screamingly badly written. I know I ought to read the Byatt novel. I will get to it.)
If you don't mind the fact that Nesbit has a reader very definitely in mind, and that that reader is quite young, this is lovely; but I mean that she has that reader in mind much more firmly than many authors do, because it is not just that you can tell who the book is aimed at. This is that style of late Victorian/Edwardian children's fiction where the author tells you to wash behind your ears and not take too many helpings of pudding. You know. That sort.
That said, it does not hurt these tales greatly for me, because Nesbit is also so sharp it can take you a moment to notice the stab. When there is a national holiday, 'even the children of plumbers and authors got tuppence apiece', and when a king makes a law that everyone should have enough to eat it pleases everyone 'except the ones who had already had too much'. And as the theme of this is dragons, it stands to reason that some of them are beautiful. There is an ice dragon here, twined around the frozen plume of steam that is the North Pole, in the ever-burning fire-shadow of the Aurora Borealis: and though she never quite gets out of her own way entirely, the image is magnificent.
In fact it is her talking-to-children, her sense that things ought to be down-to-earth, that I wish she would let go of, because when she does, even for a sentence, the effect is magical. As it is, it is modified magic. At any rate, there are dragons aplenty, some large, some the size of earwigs, some carnivorous and some tame, ice and fire dragons, dragons made of iron and a dragon that turns into a cat eventually (one always knew it). And children to go with the dragons, who are usually doing something their parents would rather they not be doing, and who come out of things all right but are not believed, mostly. If this reminds me of anything it is Joan Aiken's Armitage family stories, that sense of prosaic and enchanted intermingled. I suppose it is possible these might read to some people as twee (there are a number of things that nearly go over that line for me), but she always means the real plots seriously, which for me mostly saves it.
There is also a wicked uncle here who is a magician, with a very posh taste in waistcoats and a desperate sense of his own self-importance, and I could see around the edges of that text C.S. Lewis, with his nose twitching at a scent, in a wild surmise. Vast chunks of what went into The Magician's Nephew are scattered throughout this collection, which made it interesting to me on an entirely separate level.
So, then, if this is the sort of thing you like you will like it, and it is very good Nesbit, though not like The Enchanted Castle, where she did get out of her own way, or Five Children and It. But good anyhow.
(I do wish the one extant biography of Nesbit weren't so screamingly badly written. I know I ought to read the Byatt novel. I will get to it.)
