![]() ![]() Looking back, I can see that this dark undertow, tugging me in a different direction from where I thought the book should be taking me, was a milestone in what I suppose we should call, though it feels unsuitably clinical, my reading development. It is compounded of Arrietty's yearning to be free, the fragility of their essentially parasitical lives (part of Arrietty's journey to maturity involves her facing up to what the Boy sees as a self-evident truth - that the Borrowers are dying out) and the ceaseless circumscription of their activities by the need for secrecy and the concentration of generations of fear under the floorboards. I had forgotten it myself until I read Victor Watson's essay on the series, where he identifies it as melancholy. The perfectly realised miniature world is, naturally, people's strongest memory of the book, but I suspect that is because if you first read it as a child, you cannot put a name to the uneasy feeling within you that the book evokes, and so perhaps as the years pass, the memory falls away. Soon, the rest of the household discovers his secret and the little family must flee. ![]() Her parents eventually relent on the borrowing front, but her explorations result in her being spotted by and eventually befriending the lonely boy who has come to stay in the house. Shut up underground, with only a grating to give a glimpse of garden and sky, Homily and Pod's daughter Arrietty longs to be taught to "borrow" and to be allowed outside, despite her people's fear of being seen by their giant, unwitting hosts. ![]()
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