Recent reads:

The Borrowers, by Mary Norton.

This classic kids' book was highly recommended to me, and so when I came across a slightly browned paperback copy in a local book sale, I took the opportunity to check it out.

For the uninitiated, the "borrowers" of the title are miniature people who live in the spaces in the walls and floor of a house somewhere in England, presumably sometime during the 19th or early 20th century, since there are references to Queen Victoria and to British interests in India. The author doesn't explicitly say so, but I can't help but wonder whether they were intended to depict one way the "little people" of rural myth might have adapted to the spread of urbanization.

Of course, it's also evident that the author has imbued this particular family of "borrowers" with decidedly English middle-class attitudes and fears of the "outside". The descriptions of their living spaces under the floor and behind the wainscoting, cluttered with furniture improvised from "borrowed" household items, bring to mind Connie Willis's adage that the Victorian era was so repressed because no one could turn around without knocking something over. And I can certainly see why the clever, adventurous and unstoppably curious Arietta would appeal to any equally curious and adventurous child who felt stifled by a parent's sense of propriety and fear of the "outside world". The fact that Arietta's ability to make a connection with the outside world brings both danger and, potentially, salvation to the "borrowers" must also have been noticed by any careful reader.

The story both opens and closes with a framing story in which a young girl hears the story of the "borrowers" from an older relative, and for a book intended for a juvenile audience, the story closes on a disquietingly ambiguous note. Although the author wrote several sequels, which strongly suggests that a dire fate did not overtake the protagonists, it is not clear at the end of The Borrowers just exactly what has happened. At a critical point, we're returned abruptly to the framing story, where the young listener and her aunt go on to discuss what *might* have happened.

I wonder whether this was intended to parallel young readers' thoughts when, say, a favorite pet mysteriously disappears amid a conspiracy of adult silence? Or, perhaps, as an analogue to later discussions regarding concepts such as religious concepts, which cannot be proven beyond a certain point and must proceed on the basis of supposition and faith?