The Captive Reader

When is a children’s fairy tale not for children?  When is a comedy for adults also a tale for children?  Once On a Time by A.A. Milne was introduced by the author with the note that:

This is not a children’s book.  I do not mean by that…’Not for children’, which has an implication all its own.  Nor do I mean that children will be unable to appreciate it…But what I do mean is that I wrote it for grown-ups.  More particularly for two grown-ups.  My wife and myself…

It is a children’s book that any adult can enjoy, which I certainly did.  It’s not wildly brilliant but it is clever enough and certainly funny enough to be ranked well above most of the other fantastical stories meant to entertain adults as well as children.

The story is very simple: the neighbouring kingdoms of Euralia and Barodia go to war, leaving Princess Hyacinth to rule over Euralia in her father’s absence.  Princess Hyacinth is counselled by the clever Countess of Belvane, a beautiful, cunning woman who the King of Euralia is in love with and whom Hyacinth, somewhat jealously, cannot bring herself to trust.  So Hyacinth writes to the kingdom of Araby and requests that Prince Udo come to assist her.  Belvane, knowing that Udo has been called in, makes a very bad wish that something might happen to him on his journey.  It does.  When Prince Udo arrives, he appears not as a prince but as a cursed and very confused creature, unsure of what exactly he is.  This light, amusing tale develop delightfully and absurdly from there, with the war between Euralia and Barodia being waged in the background.

I loved everything to do with the ‘war’ between the two kingdoms.  The only casualty of this war is a pair of royal whiskers and the Euralian army, having set out with 500 men, comes back with 499 only because one stayed behind to marry the daughter of the Chief Armourer of the Barodian army.  The rest of the time is spent preparing or, even more wonderfully, sending both kings off under invisible cloaks to spy except, of course, they stumble across one another.  Each cleverly pretends to be a swineherd (well known for possessing magic cloaks) and they hold a learned discussion about swine herding (and milking) to conceal their true identities, greatly impressing themselves with their knowledge on the subject and their ability to communicate as an equal with the true swineherd they have stumbled across.  These sections were the most marvellous parts of the novel for me, perfectly skewering the dramatic and pointless posturing of armies.

Back in Euralia, Princess Hyacinth is a bit of a drip and Prince Udo, though he takes his misfortune very nobly, is too adaptable to be of much interest.  Belvane, on the other hand, is magnificent:

The Countess of Belvane!  What can I say which will bring home to you that wonderful, terrible, fascinating woman?  Mastered as she was by an overweening ambition, utterly unscrupulous in her methods of achieving her purpose, none the less her adorable humanity betrayed itself in a passion for diary-keeping and a devotion to the simpler forms of lyrical verse.  That she is the villain of the piece, I know well; in his Euralia Past and Present the eminent historian Roger Scurvilegs does not spare her; but that she had her great qualities, I should be the last to deny.

I must agree with Milne’s narrator rather than Roger Scurvilegs (respected though his opinions are): Belvane is fantastic.  Yes, she made up a fake, all-female army of Amazons who supposedly are there to protect Princess Hyacinth and takes all the funds allocated to them for herself but, I assure you, the money is put to very good use.  Belvane is vain and shelfish, but not greedy.  And she is only truly bad for a little while, the course of the novel in fact, turning good again once reunited with her beloved King.  She is a wonderful unsinister villain.

But the real fun of this novel though comes from the way it is told, rather than the story itself.  Milne’s narrator is very present in the telling and his prejudices and preferences, his quest to redeem Belvane in the public eye and his joy in correcting Roger Scurvilegs, that authority on Euralia’s history, gave me no end of delight.  Take, for example, his preamble before Prince Udo’s monstrous transformation from Prince to…something else:

This is a painful chapter for me to write.  Mercifully, it is to be a short one.  Later on I shall become used to the situation; inclined, even, to dwell upon its humourous side; but for the moment I cannot see beyond the sadness of it.  That to a Prince of the Royal House of Araby, and such an estimable young man as Udo, these things should happen.  Roger Scurvilegs frankly breaks down over it.  ‘That abominable woman,’ he says (meaning, of course, Belvane), and he has hysterics for more than a page.

All in all, I think Milne succeeded in writing a fairy tale with characters and situations developed enough and humourous enough to entertain adults as well as children.  It’s not a masterpiece but it is a very fun book to spend an evening laughing over and has only made me more confident that Milne’s style of humour is exactly suited to my tastes.