Mistress Masham's Repose by T. H. White

Mistress Masham's Repose by T. H. White

One of my favorite pieces of writing about what science fiction is and what it does comes from China Miéville's introduction to H. G. Wells's The First Men in the Moon. Miéville argues that science fiction is not really about the future: "It is, like any worthwhile literature, 'about' now, using a technique of rationalized (rather than free-for-all) alienation from the everyday to structure its narratives and investigate the world." But, he points out, there's also a pitfall if you go too far in the other direction: "When 'mainstream' writers dip their toes into the fantastic, they often do so with the anxiety of seriousness, keen to stress that their inventions are really 'about' other, meaningful things." What makes the fantastic work for its readers and writers, he claims (and I agree), is that it does both at once. You get a metaphor for the present day but within the world of the story, it's literally true (unlike in mimetic fiction, where metaphor is just metaphor), and that's pleasurable. He uses Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels as an example of this:

In Swift, for example, Gulliver's journey to Brobdingnag [...] clearly casts a remorseless light on Swift's own society; it also, however, features a sword fight with a giant wasp, a passage the enjoyment of which depends on the specific uncanny/​estranging impact of literalizing the impossible: simply, it is a great, weird idea. Weirdness is good to think with, and is also its own end.

Miéville goes on to mention "the pleasure he [Wells] took in his oddities" as one of the things that distinguishes First Men from being only satire.

It's been a long time since I actually read Gulliver's Travels, not since childhood, but it's my memory that though certainly Brobdingnag, Lilliput, and all the other fantastic countries Gulliver visits are literally true, and the book has certainly provided its share of "great, weird" imagery—that iconic image of Gulliver tied down by the Lilliputians, which is on so many book covers and probably appears in every screen adaptation—Swift's emphasis is more on the social satire than the "great, weird" ideas. Like, sure we get swordfights with giant wasps and such, but the point of the novel is to see our human foibles writ large and writ small and writ equine. (I, for one, always though the journey to the place where they got electricity out of cucumbers was underrated.)

Published: 1946
Read: December 2023

Mistress Masham's Repose is a 1946 children's fantasy novel by T. H. White, best known as the writer of The Once and Future King. It's clearly intended to be read aloud (the name of the dedicatee, Amaryllis Virginia Garnett, is even mentioned by the narrator a few times), though in that very British way where there are passages that the adult reader will get much more out of than the child listener, a lot like Kingsley's The Water-Babies. I found it on my wife's shelves and decided it looked interesting enough to read; the book is a sort-of sequel to Gulliver's Travels.

The premise is that there's a young orphan girl named Maria who lives on the rambling country estate that she inherited from her parents, but does not have the money to maintain. Her legal guardian is a cruel vicar, and her day-to-day guardian is an even crueler governess. Her only friends are the estate's sole servant, a cook, and a local absent-minded professor of classics. One day, exploring an island on the estate, she finds a colony of Lilliputians, brought to England and forgotten about, where they've been living for centuries in secret.

The pleasure of the book is that it takes the "great, weird idea" of the Lilliputians very seriously, probably more seriously than Swift himself did. Anticipating books like Mary Norton's The Borrowers (1952) and John Peterson's The Littles (1967), the book gives us a group of little people operating in our world, and asks how they might survive, what they might to do, say, fish in a world where the fish are to them as whales are to us, or how they might be able to intervene to battle against human adults.

The book not only gives the reader this pleasure of the fantastic, it also explores how the characters themselves experience that pleasure. There's one extended sequence where the Professor imagines what he would do if they also got hold of a Brobdingnagian giant. What would be the logistics of capturing it? How would you transport it back to England? What would you do with it then? He doesn't go through with any of this, he can't, but it's fun to see him work it all out. In another passage, Maria and the Professor debate if an island could really fly in the way Swift imagined for Laputa. (And the Professor points out "that Dr. Swift was silly to laugh about Laputa. I believe it is a mistake to make a mock of people, just because they think. There are ninety thousand people in this world who do not think, for every one who does, and these people hate the thinkers like poison. [...] Better to think about cucumbers even, than not to think at all." The book is filled with great, quiet observations like this.)

The book also finds limits to literalizing the impossible. Maria, for example, concocts an idea that Lilliputians might be able to fly in toy airplanes, and tries to make it happen. But she is (metaphorically) crashed down to earth when her pilot (literally) crashes down to earth. As she learns, we can have some fantastic imaginings that cannot be well, realized. Realistic concerns get in the way. This is disappointing to Maria, of course, but part of what makes the book pleasurable to us—if the book is to feel real, there need to be some things that cannot happen.

It's also very funny. I was forever quoting bits to my wife (who, if she had actually read the book, did not remember it all). When the Professor tries to get the local Lord Lieutenant to intervene to protect Maria from the cruelty of the vicar and the governess, who have locked her in the estate's torture dungeon, the Lord Lieutenant objects that such things aren't heard of these days:

"But, good Lord, my dear chap, you can't do that sort of thing in the nineteenth century, or the twentieth, or whatever it is. I mean, you take the first two figures, and add one, or subtract one, I forgot which, for reasons I never could fathom, possibly owin' to these X's which those chaps are always writin' on monuments, and then it is different. Now, take horses..."
     "Whether you can or can't, it has been done. I tell you..."
     "My old Grandad, or his grandad, I can't remember which, used to ride a hunter in a long point until it foundered, old boy, died, absolutely kaput. Now you couldn't do that sort of thing nowadays, not in this century, whichever it is, without getting the Society for Cruelty to Animals after you. Absolutely couldn't do it. Not done. Out of date. I heard it was the same with dungeons?"

I mean, it's funny if you like pompous out-of-touch English people going on about things, and I certainly do. The book is is filled with stuff like that.

Overall, Mistress Masham's Repose has good "worldbuilding" (I kind of shudder to apply the term here, but it fits) and good comedy, but also good themes and great hair-raising escapes and dangers and ingenious protagonists. I found it an utterly delightful 250 pages. I don't know if it would work for most readers, but it's the kind of book that felt squarely aimed at me, and all the better for it.