At two-thirds of the way through The Enchanted Places by Christopher Milne, I was incredibly frustrated. I was not enjoying the book. I had wanted to, I had heard good things from friends and had seen positive reviews on other blogs, but I was having trouble with it. Was it the format perhaps? The short chapters, mini-essays really? The lack of narrative structure? These things don’t usually bother me but I think I had gone into the book expecting it to be more of a traditional biography and less…episodic?
Finally, I realised the main problem: it had been too long since I had read any of A.A. Milne’s works. As a child, my father read me the Winnie-the-Pooh books but we were far greater fans of Milne’s poetry and, while I can still recite “Disobedience” and “The Dormouse and the Doctor”, I cannot tell you where Eeyore lived. The first portion of the books is very much Christopher Milne’s life in contrast to Christopher Robin’s and, when you can’t remember much about Christopher Robin, you rather miss the point.
Eventually though, the book settled into a more cohesive, focused style that I found far easier to read and enjoy. It also concentrated on Christopher’s relationship with his father which, honestly, is what I wanted to read about. Despite being one of the most beloved children’s authors, A.A. Milne was not greatly involved in his son’s early years. He may have written about his son (or some alternative version of his son) but he did not necessarily need to be involved with Christopher to take inspiration from him:
There are two sorts of writer. There is the writer who is basically a reporter and there is the creative writer. The one draws on his experiences, the other on his dreams. My father was a creative writer and so it was precisely because he was not able to play with his small son that his longings sought and found satisfaction in another direction. He wrote about him instead. (P. 36)
By adolescence, the two had formed close bonds, despite their earlier distance, becoming not just father and son but friends. A.A. may have spoiled Christopher a little, allowing his son to rely on him more than was probably good for his development, but it created a bond between them that was abnormally close, particularly for father-son relationships of that era. Even as Christopher continued to age, through school and, from the quick glimpse we see, his time in the army during WWII, the friendship between them held.
Having enjoyed the concluding portion of the book so much, I must try to track down the remaining two-thirds of this autobiographical trilogy: The Path Through the Trees and The Hollow on the Hill. They both appear to be rather obscure but that just means more time spent combing through used bookstores. How I suffer.
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It has been a hectic last couple of weeks so I haven’t until now had a chance to sit down and go through the new issue of Shiny New Books. And what an excellent issue it is, full of an amazing variety of excellent reviews and interesting bookish articles.
The Captive Reader 