The Valley of Song [Import] [Hardcover]

Elizabeth Goudge (Author), Richard Floethe (Illustrator)

Product Details

• Hardcover: 255 pages
• Publisher: Coward, McCann; First Edition edition (January 1, 1951)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0340039310
• ISBN-13: 978-0340039311
• Shipping Weight: 1.7 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,276,901 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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4.0 out of 5 stars Erring on the side of wishful thinking, November 28, 2011

By 

John Gough "John Gough - Deakin University" (Melbourne, Australia) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Valley of Song (Hardcover)

Erring on the side of wishful thinking
Usually I extol Elizabeth Goudge, whether as children's author, or adult novelist.
However, with "The Valley of Song", regretfully, I find myself regretfully withholding praise.

This is a book that might have been acceptable, around the time it was written. I have no idea what contemporary reviewers thought of it. But circumstances have changed.

Surprisingly, in her autobiographical memoir "The Joy of Snow", Elizabeth Goudge speaks fondly of the book, describing it as her own favourite, or perhaps her favourite book written for children.
But author's favourites are notoriously unreliable. Beethoven, I believe, preferred his 8th Symphony over the other eight (or nine, if we count the strange "Battle Symphony").

The story is set on the south west coast of England, in a real ship-building sea town, around the Napoleonic era, when Nelson's fleet and the Royal Navy defended Britain.
A young girl (Goudge writes some of the great juvenile heroines of literature!), Tabitha Silver, finds that the local community is in difficulty.
The great ship that is currently being built has stalled in its construction. The ship-builders have run out of materials. The local economy is stalled, as salaries can't be paid. The beginnings of the shop may have to be broken up, and used to make smaller boats.
Happily, the young girl, and some friends, and some adults, find that they can enter a mysterious other-world -- the Valley of Song.
There they encounter strange creatures, who explain profound mysteries of life, and after-life.
The great zodiac-like heraldic creatures of pagan mythology and the Bible are real and alive in this other-world.
It is the source of all that is created in the real world.

All of this leads to the humans returning to their own real-world.
Then, miraculously, the ship is finished, by supernatural powers.

(The folk motif here is like the Grimms' fairytale of the elves and the shoemaker: what the shoemaker is unable to complete, exhausted by the end of his working day, is secretly and mysteriously finished by the elves. Beatrix Potter's "Tailor of Gloucester" has the same theme.)
The great ship is able to be launched, and has a great future ahead of it, blessed, sanctified, by the higher powers that have come to the miraculous aid of the townsfolk.
There is also a hint of the legend of the Angel of Mons, from 1914, and the start of World War I. (God is on our side, it would seem.)

There are anticipations, in "The Valley of Song", of C.S. Lewis's "The Last Battle", and a revelation of another heaven-world -- Aslan's country.
(In fact, Goudge's own "The Little White Horse", slightly before Lewis's "The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe", has a remarkable lion, Rolf: an eerie anticipation of Lewis's god-lion, Aslan, although, mysterious as he is, Rolf is only a lion -- not that anyone ever understands this in the book: one of its great jokes is that everyone speaks of Rolf as a strange, powerful, large dog. But as the little white horse is actually a unicorn, it makes good heraldric sense for the unicorn's natural britannic companion to also appear in "The Little White Horse".)
But Lewis attempted depictions of traffic between our own physical reality, and afterlife, before "Narnia" was fully developed, let alone published.
His first novel was a Bunyan-like allegory, "Pilgrim's Regress".
A later work, "The Great Divorce", presented a vision of hell, purgatory, and heaven, where the central human character's guide to the worlds after death is the spirit of George Macdonald, Nineteenth century fantasy novelist, and a major influence and inspiration for Lewis throughout his life. Macdonald also presented fictional visions of the after-life, and other-worlds, as in "Phantastes", and "Lilith", and his great children's fantasy "At the Back of the North Wind".
Similarly, Lewis's friend Charles Williams, also presented visions of other worlds, and heraldric angel-figures, as in "The Place of the Lion" (another anticipation of Lewis's Aslan), a story that describes how magic releases, into our own world, the TRUE archetypal "ideals" of Plato's philosophy -- notably "LION", in its true form.
(Decades later Russell Hoban wrote "The Lion of Boaz-Jachin and Jachin-Boaz" in which a vision of a lion, in archetype, haunts, and eventually physically touches a human.)

Goudge was writing "The Valley of Song" in the dark years of British privation and hardship after World War II.
Shortly before this time, Evelyn Waugh wrote "Bridehead Revisited", and nostalgically revisited aspects of pre-war British life and luxury that had been halted, for seemingly endless years, by the upheavals, destruction, and rationing of World War II.
I suspect something similar happened to Goudge, writing "The Valley of Song".
Trapped in the bleakness of war-time rationing, casualty lists, death, German bombing (all of this, far more realistically haunts her war-time adult novel "The Castle on the Hill"), shortages of materials, and the desperate, seemingly never-ending struggle to continually re-arm, as ship after ship is sunk by German U-boats, I suspect that Goudge wrote "The Valley of Song" with a profound patriotism, and inner longing, that blinded her to the weakness of what happens in the book.

The community desperately want their saviour-boat to be completed.
Angelic forces come to their aid!
Hooray!
All is well!

Several years later, writing for adults, Goudge returns to some of this concern, in the grand sweep of "The Damerosehay Trilogy".
Seemingly this is a story of families who live in "Damerosehay", an old country house.
In reality this trilogy explores the reasons to go on hoping, when faced with the exhaustion of victory (there was no revivifying Marshall Plan to restore Britain, as was the case with devastated Germany), the dark threat of atomic bombs, the nightmare revelations of the Nazi concentration camps, and the trauma of war-time experiences, death, and disruption to relationships.
The "Damerosehay Trilogy" (and several of her other single-volume adult novels) offer profound existential meditations on spiritual hope in a seemingly godless universe.
Angels do not come, miraculously.
Wishes alone do not solve terrible human problems.
Humans pray for grace, and strength, and bravely, actively seek their own salvation, despite their worst nightmare feelings of despair.
"The Valley of Song" is the Pollyanna-cheerful reverse of this adult spiritual realism.

Why did Goudge like this book more than her others (or say that she did)?
Maybe also she found personal consolation and enjoyment in creating a child's vision of heaven -- something she perhaps hoped for, as an adult, in her middle age. Certainly much of the detail, and the inventiveness of the other-world and its denizens, sparkles. My concern is what it all adds up to.

Let me add that the illustrations, by Richard Floethe, for the American edition of "The Valley of Song" are simply dreadful: cartoony, naïve and sketchy, and often ugly.
By contrast, the illustrations for the original British edition (1951), by Steven Spurrier, look as if they could have come from an early Nineteenth century artist, an engraver, with a sense of almost Blakean vigour, as if William Blake or Samuel Palmer had illustrated a dream-novel written by Jane Austen.

I wish it were better, but I doubt "The Valley of Song" will ever be re-printed, except as curiosity, an unavoidable part of a Collected Edition -- for which we may hope!
John Gough -- Deakin University -- [e-mail]