Tom’s Midnight Garden by Philippa Pearce

Tom’s Midnight Garden by Philippa Pearce

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

The last job of the day, then, to sit with this book and to think of it for in a way I have not stopped thinking about it ever since I read it for the very first time. I revisited it recently, prompted not just by the fact that I have referred to it in many things but also because I realised that I had not formally reviewed it here, not documented my thoughts, and that was the sort of realisation that made me pick it up and begin a slow, delighted reread of this magical book. Magic is a wild thing in children’s literature for it can mean so much and sometimes nothing at all: a shorthand for things that you cannot explain any other way, the work of witches and wizards, the sly wink of writer to reader when they know that they have no other way to get their protagonists out of their piffle. Magic though, here, is a grounded and rooted and domestic thing. A close thing. But that’s the way that Philippa Pearce writes, I think, she gives other world and adventure to her reader so deftly, so simply as the next bus might arrive at the bus stop. Magic has always been there, always is there, and it is simply about allowing ourselves to see it.

I write this review at the end of the day, I write this review in the dark, and I think about the moment I stopped in Cambridgeshire at a service station and thought, quite suddenly, about running into Philippa Pearce there. It was a ridiculous thought and yet I could not shake it, this realisation that I was in a landscape that I knew from Pearce’s books, that I had skated down the river of, that I had walked through fields with, that I was here and she was here and perhaps, madly, we might be able to meet over over-priced crisps and soft drinks and I might be able to tell her how much I loved her.

She was not there, of course, but the land spoke of her. I thought of this as I reread Tom over the past few days, the way that she could make land feel full of story. The way that every part of this story aches for adventure, wants it to happen. I was struck by how the house begs Tom to explore it, how it yearns for him to discover its secrets. Every page of this wants you to read it. Every page. It longs for it. It tells you, and Tom, that there’s magic here and all you have to do is let yourself discover it. That it’s already here. That you’re already in it.

And the kicker of it all is this, her style. Pearce is a very clean and clear writer and the very definition of if you just write what happens then you’re doing the right thing. There’s a moment here where Tom decides to research what’s happening and Pearce carefully steps him through the process, carefully walks the reader through what’s happening, and you are genuinely thrilled at every inch of it. She’s that good. And then she goes big and gives you absolutely enormous ideas, still so simply and cleanly told, and has faith in you that you’ll understand it. No, it’s more than faith, it’s belief. She knows that her reader will get it.

I write this at the end of the day, I write this in the light.

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