The Princess and the Goblin (George MacDonald)

The Princess and the Goblin
George MacDonald
Tantor
Fiction, CH Fantasy
***+ (Okay/Good)

DESCRIPTION: Eight-year-old Princess Irene, as pure and good as she is beautiful, lives a sheltered life in the royal house while her father travels about the kingdom. She is so sheltered she doesn't even know about the goblins who live underneath the mountains of the kingdom: hateful beings who may once have been men but have been twisted and turned ugly by generations of exile away from the sun, whose sole purpose and joy is tormenting surface-dwellers. It is only after she stays out too late one evening that she even glimpses a goblin - an encounter where a miner boy, Curdie, saves them by reciting songs and verses (for everyone knows goblins despise both, being unable to sing or rhyme, possibly owing to their lack of souls). But her first encounter is not to be her last, as the king and queen of the monsters have concocted a diabolical plot to exact ultimate revenge against the kingdom and the men they have despised for so very long.

REVIEW: First published in 1872, this classic tale has been cited as a significant source of inspiration by authors from J. R. R. Tolkien to C. S. Lewis, while MacDonald himself was influential to many more; apparently he was mentor to Lewis Carroll and encouraged him to publish Alice in Wonderland. When read (or listened to) in 2023, The Princess and the Goblin still holds some charm and has some memorable imagery, but unfortunately it can't help showing its age, particularly if one happens to be a secular reader.
In the way of so many fairy tales, the story takes place in an idealized "once upon a time" kingdom of happy, uncomplicated people, living happy, uncomplicated lives, where the commoners are content to serve and toil under a just and noble king and where enemies are clearly defined not only by their physical differences but by their utter embrace of an inherent, soulless evil and an entire culture built around harassing their "betters" from the dark and deep places to which they were long ago banished. (One can't help seeing certain racial/cultural implications, here, especially as the tale unfolds and religious subtexts become more and more glaringly obvious.) Into this world is born Irene, a girl who has anything a child could possibly want and then some, looked after by a nursemaid who perpetually misreads situations, fumbles in her duties, overreacts, cowers before the rank and general perfection of her charge, and otherwise reminds the reader that those of lower classes are inherently inferior even to eight-year-old nobility, who are by blood and blessing closer to heavenly influences; indeed, the lesser classes are to be pitied for their inability to bask in divine glory like the princess. It's while exploring the royal house that Irene first stumbles across the hidden high tower room and her "great-great grandmother" namesake, who from the start is at the very least ghostly and later is quite clearly some manner of godly incarnation, offering comfort and healing and guidance and ritual cleansings (but which others, of lesser blood and therefore less inherent divine favor, often refuse to believe - indeed, to ask for actual proof of anything is tantamount to blasphemy). There's certainly a direct line of literary influence between the elder Irene and C. S. Lewis's lion Aslan, though at least Aslan got off his tufted tail now and again to go out and directly do something in the greater world, while Grandmother Irene mostly sits about serenely in her tower, even as her influence leads Princess Irene into risky situations (that the girl nevertheless rises to, making her a decently competent heroine given her literary circumstances). Meanwhile, miner boy Curdie stumbles across the goblin plot whilst working deep in the mountains, and risks life and limb to investigate deep in the stony bowels of the enemy stronghold. It takes the two of them (and, of course, not a little bit of Grandmother's enigmatic advice and tweaks to the strings of fate) to figure out the danger... but will anyone believe either child, when one is just a lowly miner and the other an innocent young princess whose foolish nursemaid has already spread tales about to discredit her as prone to flights of fancy (having disbelieved the girl's encounter with Grandmother)?
As I mentioned earlier, MacDonald presents some decent, memorable imagery, if imagery sometimes oversaturated with Symbolism and Messages about theological concepts like redemption and enlightenment and other things that this atheist-leaning agnostic only recognizes in the vaguest of terms. The goblins are nasty enemies, reveling in their cruelty, and their mutated animals, even described only in the vaguest of terms (being too twisted for the storyteller to put adequately into words), likely have fueled countless nightmares. Countering this is the ethereal, grandmotherly presence of the elder Irene, who may or may not be an embodiment of Princess Irene's real great-great grandmother (the more the story goes on, the less she seems like she's even the spirit of a mortal woman and the more she seems like either a saint or a goddess), who also has some interesting imagery woven around her presence. The characters may not be particularly deep, but they have an interesting adventure and are not beyond the odd failure (even with divine protection). Ultimately, though, the aforementioned oversaturation of Symbolism (and the unpleasant, creeping suspicion that the goblins were meant to be stand-ins for "anyone not sufficiently white or Christian for holy redemption, who is therefore automatically a despicable agent of evil") cost it in the ratings. I also can't say I was impressed with the quality of the audiobook I listened to; the sound was weirdly inconsistent from chapter to chapter (likely from different recording sessions, but I've never encountered one where the "cuts" had such glaringly different volumes or audio quality; I swear some of the chapters sounded like the microphone was underwater, they were so muddied and muted, while others were painfully strident).

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