An Enemy at Green Knowe

Someone said to me, when I was complaining about how bad a book was, “But it was a children’s book!” Well, this is also a children’s book, from an entire series of children’s books by Lucy M Boston, and I have no cause for complaint. There are exactly five characters in this book – Mrs Oldknow, Tolly, Ping, evil Melanie and the scholar – and there is one setting, the house, Green Knowe. And the plot is derivative, you might say, because Melanie is a witch who curses the house in one plague after another. None of those things sums up why this book is good and other books are crap. Certainly not either because of, or in spite of, those characteristics. There’s something else special about it, and that’s, I think, the fact that the writer believed in the place, the story, and the people – that they were utterly real, not just their existence but what they meant.

Actually, the house is real, and I’d love one day to visit it – it’s an open house now, somewhere in England, where you can look at the rooms and even some of the objects mentioned in the book. And the writer is sort of Mrs Oldknow, maybe. She told these stories – she said, to entertain herself – about the house and the time she lived (they’re written in the sixties – I think the way it is mentioned that Ping is Chinese alerts you to this) and about an attitude to the past, that the past is part of the present. She writes in a precise and solid and sensible way, and in fact you can imagine her firm storyteller’s voice as you read it.

I’ve always loved this series of books. I especially love it when the ghosts appear. I think it is solid English folklore, the mix of mythological Christianity, with its local saints, and the original Celtic/Briton background. This is the sort of book you could read to a mixed-aged group and everyone would enjoy it, and would probably enjoy the same things.