Customer Reviews

The Green Child

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This is one of the only, if not the only, pieces of fiction written by Sir Herbert Read (1893-1968), a British poet, critic and philosopher. He was a champion of modern art and a founder of the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London. Sir Herbert Read's writings are used as textbooks in Art Appreciation classes and he is considered to be one of the foremost Art Critics of the twentieth century. His prose has the sensibility of a visual artist, the lines written almost as if painted with a brush. The beauty of the book is akin to a fine painting of an English Landscape. Since I was first introduced to this book, over 30 years ago, I have bought at least 30 copies to give as gifts to friends who I knew would enjoy really fine prose for the sake of the prose itself. The story is a wonderfull philosophical tale of adventure and the discovery of another race that live beneath the English countryside metamorphosing into crystalline beings. A definite MUST READ for fans of FINE prose.

I always assign my philosophy students The Green Child as an immediate follow-up to Plato's Republic. It is a beautiful novel in every respect, and a wonderful companion to Plato's Allegory of the Cave. I have been thanked by my students and friends for thirty years. Many have said that Read's The Green Child is the most beautiful piece of prose they have ever read.

I was drawn to read The Green Child because I had heard it was an intriguing fantasy piece. The book is unique - in structure and style - I've read nothing quite like it. The structure made the novel a bit difficult to follow at first, but once the tale begins, you cannot escape Read's crafty storytelling. And the third act is a mind-blower! I appreciated Read's ability to tell his fantasy story concisely. The story captures dream-like imagery, structure, and motifs masterfully.

I have read that the story is allegorical, but not being a political historian or philosopher, that angle was lost on me. Thank goodness Read was successful writing on multiple levels.

I have given 5 copies of this book out to friends and family who I know would enjoy the prose and the tale itself. I would recommend this book to anyone who enjoys unusual, unpredictable, and fantastical writing.

I wish it were a little bit fresher on my mind, but I plan on re-reading this gem of a novel. It does get a little bit too whimsical for my taste at the end but, I set my cynicism aside and was ultimately glad I did.

This book speaks at many different levels. It could be called "adventures in synchronicity" or it could be a Jungian categorical excursion into the same type of regimentation-as-freedom found in, say, a monastery or a totalitarian paradise. The crystal, milky-white earth-beings found under the earth, as explained here by Read, find their final rest in the form of individual obliteration, as they lay down in neat rows, to become fused as mineralized pieces of a complex crystalline underground society, accompanied in the background by the racket of numerous initiates, tapping out certain patterns of sounds on various-sized hunks of crystal as a preliminary qualification to their own eventual obliteration.

Aha! Now we understand the ice cave scene in "Superman" a little better, as well as the scene in that Planet of the Apes movie where they manipulate crystal inserts in a control panel to cause something like nuclear reactions. There must be an analogous Star Trek episode as well.

The Plato's cave comment picks up on this. Just as Plato's Republic veers into totalitarianism, so does the Green Child. Unlike Plato, however, it is not clear that Read is trying to be prescriptive. It may be optional, as was the Heaven's Gate cult, where they all wore the same shoes, ordered the same food at the same restaurant, laid down on the same size beds, and took the same overdose, waiting for the same spaceship, to unify them with the great beyond up there somewhere. Read here describes an inversion, going down to the labyrinthe, rather than out into the abyss. Now he has become the brave explorer of the inner extreme. He thus gains a foothold in medieval thought, with Plato in the rear view mirror.

Hermann Hesse may have tried the same thing, with his "Journey to the East" but Hesse trapped himself in an obscure labyrinthine dead end. By the end of the book, you don't even care what he meant. Here, with the Green Child, you wonder....is this a vision of heaven? A fusion of the is and the ought? What you want equals what you get? For some people, I think it might be. In this book resides a vision they find beautiful and personally compelling.

It also operates as a cool story on its own. We'll see how "Lord of the Rings" does later this year. It would take unusual talent to make this book cognizable as a movie. For the record, this book makes a good companion to John Updike's essay "Augustine's Concubine," and if law completely falls apart, I may do a PhD dissertation on Augustine's rejection of regimentation as a starting point for freedom and responsibility. The opposite of crystal fusion.