A Sense of Reality

Published 1963

This second collection of short stories includes only four, of which the first, “Under the Garden,” is a novella. The remaining stories are “A Visit to Morin,” “Dream of a Strange Land,” and “A Discovery in the Woods”. The first and last stories are fantasies and those I found most compelling, although the other two stories are also excellent.

“Under the Garden” tells of a boy who discovers a strange king, Javitt, who lives with his sister in an underground warren of tunnels and rooms beneath the estate of the child’s uncle. This story is The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe in Greeneland. Not surprisingly, the morals to be learned in Greene’s Narnia are quite different than in those  C.S. Lewis’s.

Javitt has been around a long time and seeing the world from below has let him see on what unstable ground civilization lies. Those with deeper roots may appear rootless to the civilized. The boy imbibes an entire understanding of the world and perhaps his lifelong inability to stay in one place long began at this moment.

Javitt is larger than life. He reminds me of Tom Bombadil. Perhaps they are both Green Men, although Javitt is a cynic, in the philosophical sense. Early in the story is a reference to Frazer’s The Golden Bough and the influence of that work is apparent.

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“A Discovery in the Woods” is a story in a very different style although it is also a children’s story. That is, the characters are all children. A group of young friends live in a fishing village on an island in the middle of the sea. Perhaps there are other villages, or perhaps not. What they know is that no one in recent memory has ever left the immediate surroundings of the village. They want to see what’s on the other side of the island and they want to collect berries. They wend their way across the island, stumbling and lurching on their crooked feet and bowed legs. What they find on the other side of the island is more than they can understand. But the old legends about Old Noh and his ship are apparently true and they find the skeleton of a giant, with such straight legs and teeth.

If the previous story seemed to imitate C.S. Lewis, this story darkly foreshadows Madeleine L’Engle. This story is beautiful but sad, as the reader is able to understand the significance of children’s find much more than they are.