The heart’s desire

Red jasper ‘thet’-girdle amulet: to grant the protection of Isis. © The Trustees of the British Museum

The Story of the Amulet
(third in the Psammead Trilogy)
by E Nesbit.
Illustrated by H R Millar.
Puffin Books 1999 (1906).

One summer holiday in the country four London siblings Cyril, Anthea, Robert and Jane discovered a strange creature, a Psammead or sand-fairy who granted wishes – a mixed blessing as they soon found out. The Christmas that followed found them lumbered with a Persian carpet and a Phoenix which got them into further scrapes.

Now it’s the next summer and they are staying in a London house owned by their old Nurse; left to their own devices, the heart’s desire of all four is to have their parents return home from abroad, one from reporting from the Russo-Japanese war in Manchuria, the other recuperating in Madeira. When the bored children start visiting shops selling caged animals they come across an old friend in dire straits who needs rescuing.

It is the Psammead, of course. And he has a plan to help each and every child achieve their heart’s desire.

‘Scheherazade’ by Sophie Gengembre Anderson (d 1903). Walsall Art Gallery.

When I first read this it felt very episodic – not surprising given that many of Nesbit’s books were first published in magazines in serial form – and thus slightly disjointed, rather like an incomplete tale told by Scheherade. A second read however revealed The Story of the Amulet to be a more cohesive narrative than expected, a quest for the other half of an ornamental object imbued with ancient magic and activated by speaking the name inscribed on it. This talisman, a thet or tyet amulet also called the knot of Isis, is now believed to represent a sacred cloth folded in a distinctive way and somehow a symbolic representation of life. Its symmetrical appearance also seems to imply a mystical union, an aspect that in fact comes to be in the course of the telling.

But the core of the narrative describes the close relationship between the siblings and their befriending of a learned gentleman lodging with their Nurse. He believes that the tales the children tell and his experiences when he joins them in their travels are all part of vivid waking dreams he’s experiencing. So when he sees the Queen of Babylon in London or Britain on the eve of the Caesar’s invasion, and meets an Egyptian priest from millennia before or is present at the fall of Atlantis, he is convinced that it is all simply unreal and due to some kind of hallucination.

The children know otherwise, having experienced similar madcap adventures in Five Children and It and, later, The Phoenix and the Carpet. Nesbit, having done her research, is able to bring the adventures to life with unforced descriptions of what was then supposed to be authentic recreations of past cultures, from prehistoric Britain to Babylon, Atlantis to Gaul, Egypt to a future Britain, and ancient Phoenicia to Syria (when they visit the Phoenix of the second book).

Relief of winged genie  from the palace of Assurnasirpal II, King of Assyria, 9th century BCE, Bristol Museum © C A Lovegrove

But however much she re-envisions historic places it’s how she recreates the life of close siblings at the turn of the 20th century that most delights, and how they try to appease the grumpy but grateful Psammead. Cyril the putative leader who parades his own learning, Robert the impulsive brother, and Jane the youngest who’s also the most timid and squeamish – they all come over as believable. But it is Anthea, the elder sister, who’s most impressive, sensitive to the Psammead’s moods, pouring oil on troubled waters, coming up with sensible solutions; can we credit her with being Nesbit’s alter ego in this novel?

It’s the undercurrent of humour that most impresses me this time round – the asides (either from characters or in commentary by the author), the misunderstandings and mishaps, the wordplay that somehow effects change, and so on. How does time travel work, and how do the children understand and speak with denizens of the past? It’s all explained, and if it’s not clear then either the Psammead or Nesbit will say it’s too difficult to clarify, and we have to just accept it. Along with the humour I also acknowledge Nesbit’s use of language which, more than a century on, is virtually as comprehensible to us as serious adult fiction of the time is often not so. Any unfamiliar word is easily understood from its context.

Dedicated to the scholar Wallis Budge, who helped her with the historical minutiae, The Story of the Amulet wears its learning relatively lightly on its sleeve. I loved it and would recommend it; but don’t take my word for it – the fact that C S Lewis’s The Magician’s Nephew, Edgar Eager’s Half Magic and Diana Wynne Jones’s The Homeward Bounders all owe something to this novel should alert the reader to the fact that its magic is only partly to do with the amulet and the sand-fairy.

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#Narniathon21 image after Pauline Baynes

As C S Lewis’s The Magician’s Nephew was in part inspired by Nesbit’s children’s fiction and especially by this title, I’m including this review in the #Narniathon21 thread.