The Box of Delights

Last night the members of my MA class were talking about a book that is a special favourite of mine: John Masefield's 'The Box of Delights'. Interesting range of reactions to it - from flat-out amazement at the jumbled incoherence of its structure; the way everything but the kitchen sink is whopped into the mix to utter enthrallment at its dreamlike lucidity.

The book is even more of a cornucopia than the 1984 TV serial - with episodes that the TV people wisely lopped off occurring every other chapter. Other people in the group loved the anarchic fantasy of it all and the way that it doesn't always add up or make sense. The point was made a couple of times that it is a fantasy story as a kid would write one... with sudden twists and changes and some plot points dropped and never resolved. It's a kind of attention deficit fantasy which reads as odd to us now, when kids' books often seem so carefully crafted for the mass market, with all the sharp corners sanded down.

Masefield was a poet, of course, and the story follows a poet's logic - as well as a child's and a dreamer's. We move swiftly from one image to a next, from Roman Centurions to stags in the forest, phoenixes and gangsters, clergymen and wolves. To me it all makes a perfect kind of sense, especially when you're in the thick of its very particular atmosphere.

It's this atmosphere that makes it, of course. The cosily snowed-in, wolf-at-the-door ambience of the best Christmassy spooky tale. Susan Cooper later borrows some of it for 'The Dark is Rising', as does Phillip Pullman in the first and best instalment of his increasingly-stodgy 'Dark Materials' sequence. I'd say CS Lewis was a reader of 'Box of Delights', too. There's a whiff of Turkish Delight in some of these chapters.

When I first reread it ten years ago I found it a bit rich and too chewy. I much preferred the telly version. This time though I loved that prose. It's a gorgeous book. I read it in the new Egmont edition, which sports a handful of Quentin Blake illustrations. I say a handful - he contributes only a very few to this most visual of kids' books. This seems a bit skimpy to me. I love Quentin Blake and I think a book's not really illustrated by him unless he has his ticklish lines scrawling all over each and every page, as he used to do with Roald Dahl's books, say.

Anyway, a lovely revisit, this. Just in time for the approach to Christmas and the annual weekly re-viewing of the dvd. I fondly imagined a lovely sequel last night. One featuring Maria, the proto-feminist cousin to the hero Kay. The one who demands that Christmas in 1935 be brought up to date with pistols and gangsters and pirates. Wouldn't it be great to have a story with her as an orphaned teenager in the Blitz and the Box of Delights finding its way into her vengeful possession? We wondered last night whether the Box represents a portable version of Alice's rabbit hole... or whether it's a Pandora's Box. It'd be fun to explore that in a darker world, set five or ten years after Masefield's fantasy.