Superficially, Tom’s Midnight Garden is a story about a boy, Tom, who is forced by his brother’s outbreak of measles at the start of the summer holiday, to stay with his aunt and uncle in their small city flat. Philippa Pearce wrote the book in 1958, and it is set around about then though, like all the best books, it is timeless. The only reason a reader would know the book was set in the late fifties / early sixties rather than at any other time, if they did not know when it was written, is from certain events near its end, and from Tom in the second line on the first page being said to have “looked his good-bye at the garden, and raged that he had to leave it.” Obviously this is a time when children were more inclined to play outside, to ‘make their own fun’; a time before videogames, or even widespread television, when being shut up inside a small flat for hours on end was torture rather than a preference.

For the first few days at his aunt and uncle’s Tom is bored and restless, and resents that, on the way, his aunt did not take him up Ely tower. He writes a postcard from the tower to his brother Peter, expressing his dissatisfaction at his situation, though, as an afterthought, counter-balances his complaints, “in fairness to Aunt Gwen,” by underlining on the last line of his postcard “the food is good.” From the first night, he is unable to sleep, and from boredom gets up and wanders into the kitchen. For this he is reprimanded by his uncle, and instructed that he is not to get up before morning. Though occassionally the character of his Uncle Alan comes across as something of a caricature, he is never the overbearing tyrant of, say, a Roald Dahl story. James, from James and the Giant Peach, and Matilda, were both thoroughly opressed by the adults that governed their lives; a reflection of Roald Dahl’s own unhappy childhood. Tom, on the other hand, is merely bored, much like Milo is in The Phantom Tollbooth (another of my favourite children’s books), and I think this make’s Tom’s story more believable and Tom more relatable. After all, everyone knows what it is like to have been bored at some point in their childhood, kept somewhere against their will, but fewer children, thought they may have felt unfairly treated at times, have been in the truly desperate situations of James or Matilda. I have nothing against Roald Dahl’s children’s books, they are a wonderful form of escapism for children, but I feel myself less inclined to reread them now than I do Tom’s Midnight Garden, The Phantom Tollbooth or the Moomintroll books.

What I like about Tom’s Midnight Garden, or rather, one of the things I like about it, is the subtlety and strength of its central idea: In the hall of the large house in which the aunt and uncle’s flat is situated, is a grandfather clock that never strikes the correct hour. One night the clock strikes thirteen times, and Tom is so annoyed by it as he lies in the dark, listening to its defiance of time, that he resolves to get up and see what time the hands say. When he gets downstairs, it is too dark to see they clock, so he opens the back door to let in the moonlight. This is when he discovers that, rather than the small concrete yard with bins, a car and a creosote-covered fence, there is a great moonlit garden out there: his midnight garden. He plans to visit it the next day, but discovers it is gone, and only reappears at night. From then on, he visits it every night, secretly, and within it meets a young girl called Hatty.

She is not the only other person who frequents the garden, but she is the only one who can see him, and so they become friends. This is the real crux of the story: their friendship. Time moves differently in the garden, and so sometimes Tom visits it at earlier, and sometimes later, points in its history. He goes every night, but the seasons and Hatty’s age changes. Tom realises that this must be the garden of the house from the previous century and so Hatty must be a ghost, creating this constant tension and mystery about what became of Hatty: how and where and when she died. Having previously read the book, I remembered how it ended, but it does not end with a Fight Club-style twist that lets you read it once, read it again to see the clues that lead to that ending and then never bother with it again; Tom’s Midnight Garden has exactly the sort of resolution you want, though I shan’t say more than that.

In a way, Tom’s Midnight Garden is similar to David Almond’s Skellig. Both are built around a single, fantastical discovery that in turn leads to self-discovery, becomes a catalyst for growing-up, and both feature a strong friendship that is formed between a boy and a girl, a mutually beneficial union. But Skellig, although it has a good story, is not particularly well-written: it lacked the spark, for me, of Philippa Pearce’s work. It’s hard to say exactly what that spark constitutes, but it feels like Pearce never compromised her vision just because she was writing a ‘children’s book’. She uses semi-colons every now and then, for example, which I don’t recall being common in many other children’s books, and words such as ‘obstinate’. There is also in her work the occassional hint of authorial intrusion, which I think has generally been discouraged since the start of the twentieth century, though I believe it is quite prevalent in the nineteenth-century literature of Jane Austen and Charles Dickens. Here, rather than invoking the god-like narrator that exists beyond the ontological plain of the fiction, her asides such as “but what can children do against their elders’ decisions for them, and especially their parents?” gives the impression of a kindly aunt relating to you this story.

There is also an economy, an efficieny, to the structuring of the plot in this story. Every single event, however minor, is relevant, and has an importance to the story as a whole, even if it’s importance is not immediately obvious. These minor details help to create a more vivid and cohesive world, and also reminds me of another book I love: To Kill a Mockingbird. That novel similarly invokes the essence of childhood, but juxtaposes it with various other more adult themes, such as racism and morality, denying it the single-minded clarity of Tom’s Midnight Garden. Though the two books obviously have very different goals, I feel that comparison is justified because I don’t think children’s book, in terms of quality, should be judged on different terms to books written for adults. A good ‘children’s’ book is one that is suitable, enjoyable and understandable for children, but equally so for adults. Winnie-the-Pooh is a good example because, although those books are written for children, are about children’s playthings, the inherant emotional charm of a living, breathing teddy bear that exists in his patch of the world called The Hundred Acre Wood never loses its magic. Another good example of what I mean by a good children’s book being for adults as well is George Orwell’s Animal Farm. An adult can read it as a satire of corrupt communism; a child can read it as a story about some animals who took over a farm and started out with good intentions for running it, but some of the animals eventually were consumed by power and greed.

Of course, emotional response to a work of fiction is highly subjective. Tom’s Midnight Garden gripped me in a surprising way that I have not experienced for a long time, and with a ferocity I might never have before experienced. Perhaps it’s because of the way I’m feeling at the moment, the best analogy for which I can come up with at the moment, having been playing Forza Motorsport a lot recently, is like when, in a motor-race, you’re on the final lap, in first place, with your nearest rival less than a second behind you. You know that, at this point, none of the other laps mean anything: that you were in pole position for the first seven laps, and then for three-quarters of the final lap, means nothing if you don’t cross that finish line first. So you’re on edge for this final lap, shaking with its intensity, and you know that, although spinning out on a corner would be disastrous, would dash your chances completely of first place, missing the apex of a bend, losing traction for even a second, would be equally detrimental to your chances of winning because your rival will use the opportunity to overtake, and then all the work of the first seven laps would be gone in an instant. In the final year of my degree, with my plans for next year uncertain, and no chance to redo this year if I don’t acheive well enough, that’s how I feel. And so perhaps that’s why Tom’s Midnight Garden, with its evocation of time and memory and childhood, in many ways similar to Proust’s great work, but obviously far, far shorter and without the pomp and pretense and cleverness of high literature, affected me so deeply. I once read an aphorism that said a good book should leave room for the reader, and that’s exactly what Tom’s Midnight Garden does; with immediately identifiable characters and an uncomplicated plot it invites you to step out into the garden of your youth with the wonder of a child and the experience of an adult.