The Enchanted Castle by E. Nesbit

The Enchanted Castle by E. Nesbit

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I’m very fond of what E. Nesbit does because she does it very well. She has a deep understanding of the messy, vibrant rhythm of family life and inter-personal relationships and it’s this, really, that makes her work still immeasurably readable and interesting for contemporary readers. It works. People are people. And even though she does embrace some familiar pattern in her work such as the ‘something happens’ and then ‘something happens again’ and so on, you can kind of disregard it all because it’s charming and vibrant and genuinely good.

The Enchanted Castle was first published in 1907 and sees three siblings discover an abandoned country estate. It’s beautiful, wild, and full of magic. This is only underscored when they discover a sleeping princess and then a magical ring which grants wishes to the bearer. As is to be expected, these wishes turn out to be complicated things and Things Happen. These things include dinosaurs, ghosts, a deeply disturbing episode with statues (seriously, this was one of the moments where if you pause to unpick it, you just have to go – wait – what? You’re actively choosing this?), and then there are the Ugli-Wuglies which, let me tell you, are basically a horror film waiting to happen.

There’s a lot here to unpack, not in the least in the way that there’s this deeply freaky subtext underneath it all. I couldn’t quite get over how there’s just this edge to everything here in a way that I’ve never quite really noticed in Nesbit’s work before. Of course there’s a darkness in a lot of what she does, a kind of hovering cloud of ‘this is the real world and it sucks, go out and change it, I believe in you’ but I’ve never quite noticed it like this.

This book is so interesting. It’s magical and fantastical and supernatural and strange and really rather dark underneath it all. I don’t know it’s one of Nesbit’s most accessible titles but it’s definitely one of her strangest and weirdest and I found it rather fascinating. Also if you’re a fan of Mary Poppins, there’s a really interesting scene which I suspect PL Travers might have come across.

Finally, it’s important to note that the edition I read had an incident of the n- word in. Please be aware of this if you’re picking up an unabridged edition.

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