Herbert Reade’s ‘The Green Child’ is an impossibility. A critic with an actually good piece of art of his own making. Surely not. And yet here it is, a mystifying and enchanting novel, full of myth and philosophy, with prose that has been lauded by the likes of T.S Eliot.
The novel is split into three parts, and each show us both a death and a re-birth of our protagonist Oliver, or as his South American subjects know him Dr. Olivero. In the first a strange, slightly surreal and fantastical, homecoming. Dr Olivero has faked his assassination and come home to his little countryside village in England after spending 25 years as dictator of the fictional South American country Roncador. Walking along the paths of his youth he sees that the stream is running in the opposite way to what he remembers, and so he begins following it to try and figure out this mystery. This investigation leads him to encounter the mythical Green Child, being forced to drink lambs blood by her jealous and half manic husband Kneeshaw.
After the first, we move on to a more journalistic and matter of fact style, which tells us the story of Oliver, and how he came to be a ruler of a country after starting his journey as a young and insignificant schoolteacher. We follow him to London, then to Poland and all around Europe until his imprisonment in Cadiz for being a suspected revolutionary for having a book of Voltaire. He is finally released, and having learnt the Spanish language during his incarceration, he decides to try his luck in one of the South American colonies, where once he arrives he is once again mistaken for a revolutionary, this time however, by the revolutionaries themselves, and he manages to lie his way into their confidence. The rest of this section is concerned with Oliver’s rise to power, and does get a little dry in certain parts, however the descriptions of his travels both around Europe and his journey from Buenos Aires to Roncador are maybe my favourite bits of the whole book.
In the final part Olivero and the Green Child make their way into her world, a world of, in a way, reverse Platonism, as Olivero and The Green Child leave the surface world of the Sun and enter the cave, and it is in these caves were a real utopian society exists. I won’t go into too much depth into this society and how it works as it would probably take longer for me to try and explain than it would take to just read it, but I’ll say that I did find the emphasis on the Parmenidean view of reality that the Green People quite interesting. For them one of the absolute basic principles of the universe is that there can only be Order and Disorder, Order being all the space and mass around them and Disorder the emptiness/non-existence which will never exist. I found the discussions Olivero has one he reaches the highest stage of life in this society particularly interesting, as since he has spent his entire life on the surface and the inhabitants of the caves have never seen the Sun or felt wind in their entire existence, Olivero will often attempt an argument which they have absolutely no concept of.
Once Olivero reaches the highest stage of existence in this society, that of being a cave hermit he looks forward “to that time when the body is released from the soul, and the soul from the body, and the body exists in itself. He had acquired that final wisdom, which sees in the soul a disturber of the peace of the body.” He comes to understand that it is “The soul it is that incites the senses to seek spiritual satisfactions. But the only satisfactions are physical, measured and immutable…All absolute things, absolute beauty and absolute good, and the essence or true nature of everything, these are not apprehended by the fickle senses, but achieved by the body itself when it casts off the fickle worm that has devoured it and filled it with itches and desires, and takes on a state of crystalline purity.” This kind of reasoning, that the reason why we are so often tormented in our lives is because it is the soul that wants but only the body that can receive, is one that makes a whole lot of sense for me.
For me, The Green Child is at its strongest in its poetry and mythology, mythology of the past, present and future, which is why the first part is my favourite and something I can see myself coming back to time and time again just for the pleasure. I think it does get bogged down in certain parts when it comes to politics, interestingly Reade was a known anarchist though that is never presented in the politics of this novel, as well as the philosophy which I just don’t really have the background in to fully comprehend. But it is a fantastic short novel nonetheless, easily one of my favourite works of British literature from the first half of the 20th century, and one which as far as I can tell is severely under-appreciated and under-read.
4/5
by marqueemoonchild