Uncommon readings: Fairytale best read by adults

Published on Saturday 3 October 2009 15:27

LEE RANDALL on a little-known novel by AA Milne

AS THE New Yorker's Constant Reader, Dorothy Parker was tasked to assess an AA Milne book. She delivered one of the most famous and oft-quoted dismissals of all time: "And it is that word 'hummy,' my darlings, that marks the first place in The House at Pooh Corner at which Tonstant Weader Fwowed up."

If you too have a low threshold for Pooh, Piglet and the rest, you may have missed Milne's other work. I urge you, rethink this boycott. Instead, the next time you want to laugh out loud at satire both silly and sharp, pick up this novel, written in 1917 to amuse the author and his wife.

Milne calls it "a fairy story for grown-ups". It's his attempt to address the fact that the conventions of fairy stories don't allow for the shades of grey in real life.

The central conflict finds Merriwig, King of Euralia, coming to blows with the King of Barodia who, pleased as punch by a gift of seven-league boots, follows a daily flight path over the breakfast table, putting Merriwig off his kipper – just as he's about to tell Princess Hyacinth of his plans to provide her with a step-mum, in the zaftig shape of Countess Belvane.

Knowing that Belvane is based on Milne's wife, one wonders at the state of their marriage. "What can I say which will bring home to you that wonderful, terrible, fascinating woman?" he writes. "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."

There's a temptation to read this as a scathing commentary on war – the wars between nations sparked by personal hubris and pomposity, and the war between the sexes when playing the high stakes game of marriage and mating. Me, I'm only ever tempted to read this bonkers, barking mad little book as a potent antidote to sadness. It's filled with glorious set pieces such as a misdirected magic potion that turns the handsome prince into a beast half lion, half bunny; and a chance encounter in which both participants are wearing cloaks of darkness, and thus scare the bejeesus out of each other.

It's a book in which everyone's a little foolish, and everyone's a little loveable, and all's well that ends well when the final curtain falls.