3) The Borrowers Afloat
Everyone's favourite little junk foragers are back again. This installment begins once more with Mrs May and Kate trying to follow leads several decades down the track.
Our parents and daughter trio start this tale as the destitute house guests of Uncle Hendreary, Aunt Lupy and their four children. (Eggletina has been restored to them. She wasn't killed by the cat after all, although she's retained post traumatic stress disorder.) Anyway, being recipients of strained charity is a bitter pill to swallow. The Hendrearies consider themselves the magnanimous relatives who get to call all the shots. Then when the human residents prepare to shut up house, the prospect of famine rears its ugly head for all. It appears Pod, Homily and Arrietty will have to keep swallowing humble pie, but the intrepid Spiller arrives once again to save the day and be their guide. He suggests an escape route that had never occurred to Pod; the drains.
It's a wonderful exodus fraught with exultation and danger, including the need to escape a deluge of scented water from some distant bathtub. We get a more intimate tour of what lurks down our plug holes than we may have ever wanted, but enjoy every moment, since it's happening to them and not to us. Hanging out with the Clock family helps us view our own familiar world from a super-sized perspective, which is always quite fascinating.
Pod is his usual common-sense self, Homily continues to verge on fastidious hysteria, and Arrietty gets super-excited by each fresh revelation, although she tries to bottle it up. And laconic Spiller is still the scruffiest saviour to be found. The story switches back and forth between reflective nature chapters and action-packed survivalist ones. And all through, they retain their plucky attitude of considering themselves equal if not superior to those oblivious humans they're so fearful of yet so reliant on.
And we're lured by rumours of Little Fordham, the model village built to their scale which every borrower dreams of settling in. Perhaps that will be their next port of call. Throughout the book are many amusing moments and comments. (Homily: What's a poacher? Pod: It's a type of human borrower.)
I get the feeling Little Fordham will be their next stop.
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4) The Borrowers Aloft
It's a bit sad not to start with Mrs May and Kate this time round, but we're plunged directly into the world of other humans. Mr Pott is the kindly man who built the model village of Little Fordham as his fun hobby. Miss Menzies is his enthusiastic friend who helps with craft work and fills the village with small plaster people. And across the water live the shrewd rip-off merchants Sidney and Mabel Platter, who aim to copy Pott's every move and make an obscene profit from their own tawdry model village, Ballyhoggin. One night, Mr Platter spies tiny live people running around in Mr Pott's village and decides to purloin them to inhabit his. They are, of course, our little Clock family, who don't dream what lies ahead of them.
As a subplot early on, Arrietty keeps a guilty secret from her parents, because borrowers aren't supposed to be 'seen', yet she relishes the pleasure of delighting lovely, harmless folk like Miss Menzies just by showing up. For her, there's always a tension between two good things. Adherence to her strong family traditions on one hand and the thrill of making someone's day on the other. The double life makes her a bit cranky, yet her father attributes that to her awkward age.
It's a slower burn than the first three books, since a huge chunk of the story sets the family as prisoners in the Platters' attic over a six month period. Mary Norton had to write it so their escape didn't seem a cinch, yet without bogging the story down with the technical details of creating and launching the balloon. She treads a fine line and I think her success depends on the tolerance of mechanical waffle of each individual reader. Personally I felt it dragged in spots, and the title and cover themselves comprise a plot spoiler, as any young reader will instantly see how the Clock family will eventually escape from the Platters' attic. Oh well, sometimes a story is more about anticipation rather than surprise.
One thing I liked is the sound credibility. The Platters would most certainly have the materials for building the balloon stored up there. After all, balloons and strawberry baskets are part of the afternoon tea hustle they run on the side. So that was all good. And I felt great empathy for poor Pod's hopeless depression, when he foresees the remainder of their lives living behind glass, snooped at and treated like zoo animals. For this time, their unlikely boyish guardian angel Spiller can't come to their rescue, since he has no idea where they are.
Outside of the attic, the simmering dynamics between Arrietty and Spiller are getting cute. I sense subtle attraction from both sides, along with the angst that so often goes with it. I love Arrietty's irritation because Spiller won't listen to any technical explanations about the building of the balloon unless they come from her father. (He suddenly seemed balloon crazy... there seemed no end to his curiosity which, for some masculine reason Arrietty could not fathom, could only be satisfied by Pod.)
For over twenty years this was the final book in the series, and I think it's a perfect place to stop and let our reader imaginations take over. Pod has talked Homily into agreeing with him that purposelessness sets in when everything is done for you by others, so he and she look forward to resuming their hands-on lifestyle elsewhere. There is a broad hint that Arrietty and Spiller will end up happily married which satisfies our hearts for romance. In fact the end of the book's older version leaves us in no doubt. What more do we need?
This neat sense of completion is why I face the fifth installment, The Borrowers Avenged, with trepidation. Surprise sequels way down the track are sometimes facepalms. I hope it won't be one of those cases where an author plunges way beyond where she should have stopped, and undoes all her good work. I'll soon find out. (Update: Oh crumbs! You'll have to read my review.)
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