Books
by Elizabeth Hand
The King in the Window, by Adam Gopnik,
Miramax Books/Hyperion Books for Children, 2005, $19.95.
"PARIS TO LES JEUNES"
LONGTIME readers of Adam Gopnik's marvelous essays
as The New Yorker's Paris Correspondent (collected in the
bestselling Paris to the Moon, 2000) know that he is a writer
who could sell foie gras to vegans. Now, with the appearance of
The King in the Window, a spectacularly fine
children's novel, Gopnik may well have earned himself a place on the
shelf beside another legendary New Yorker author, E. B. White. The
King in the Window has all the markings of a genuine classic, a
là Charlotte's Web; or Charlie and the Chocolate Factory
or The Indian in the Cupboard or From the Mixed-Up Files of
Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler. I got the same atavistic rush reading The
King in the Window as I did from my first encounters with those
other books, a long time ago in a library far far away. I'll confess to
having felt burnt out by the cascade of YA fantasies over the last few
years, all those ill-begotten progeny untimely rip't from Harry
Potter's success (the editor of this magazine recently noted that
twenty-five percent of the new books he'd received for review were YA
novels). It's like trying to keep up with alt-rock bands: the Kills?
the Killers? the Thrills? the Fillers? the Hives? the Heaves? Eragon?
Aragorn? Estragon? Estrogen?
The King in the Window was something I
scarcely hoped to encounter again, its author's well-noted facility
notwithstanding: a fantasy with an original conceit, beautifully
written, funny, warm, and moving, even (quelle horreur) mildly
educational. Okay, it falls apart a bit at the end, but I've always
felt that even Roald Dahl faltered a bit with that Great Glass
Elevator. For any confirmed fantasy-lover who has sickened on stale
literary beer composed of the dregs of dragons, trolls, elves,
wizardlings, ersatz prophecies and spunky child protagonists, here is a
glass of Veuve Cliquot to be savored, though I suspect most readers
will down The King in the Window in one long gulp.
In a brief afterward, Gopnik notes that his
book's appellation contôle is Paris; the novel was
conceived there, and its author's love for the city suffuses the novel
like a blush. The central character is Oliver Parker, an American boy
whose father writes for a U.S. newspaper. Oliver has lived in Paris
since he was three. On the evening of Epiphany — January 6, Twelfth
Night; the Feast of the Kings and as important a holiday as Christmas
to the French — Oliver, as usual, finds the prize in his piece of galette,
the traditional Epiphany cake: a little gold key.
Then his parents did what they always
did. They both stood up, and his mother very ceremoniously placed the
[paper] crown on Oliver's head while his father saluted him. To anyone
looking in from the window, it would have looked like a very solemn
coronation, even though Oliver was eleven years old. "God, Dad,"
Oliver muttered — but he didn't say it very loudly.
But later that night, Oliver learns that someone is looking in
the window: "a boy in blue, with lilies on his clothing and long hair
to his shoulders, gazing gravely at him."
The boy beckons Oliver, names him as King and
calls him to do battle, then disappears. The next day, mysteriously
alarming encounters follow, with Neige, the beautiful girl who lives
upstairs from Oliver, and Madame Sonia, his favorite teacher; and so it
is that on Saturday morning Oliver hightails it to the Louvre,
"searching for what, he wasn't sure." There he finds, and steals, a
crystal sword. In a nice break with tradition, two of the Louvre's
guards witness this, and for the rest of the novel Oliver is pursued by
representatives of the mundane world, as well as those from the
supernatural one.
The crystal sword leads him to Versailles and the
palace's famed Galerie des Glaces: the Hall of Mirrors; and it is here
that Gopnik's luminous creation begins to burn through the contemporary
Parisian landscape, itself an otherworldly place to American eyes.
Within the glass panes of Versailles — within all the windows of our
world — live the window wraiths, who are most emphatically not ghosts.
Or, as explained by François, the boy whom Oliver first glimpsed
on Epiphany,
"You see, ghosts come from another world
and haunt you, but window wraiths are the world. We're the
memory of the world. We're here for good. You're the ones who come and
go like ghosts. You haunt us…
"…When you look into a window, what you see is not you — or not
entirely you. It's really a window wraith, looking back at you. There's
a window wraith inside every old window. We…look back at you the way
you'd like to look, not quite the way you really look, but with
something extra— to make you look a little bit better."
Well, I thought, that explains a lot. I read the passage quoted above
and had that Aha! experience you live for as a reader of the fantastic:
the sense of entering a writer's invented world and realizing that
this, indeed, is the way the true world must work, the world
within or encompassing or flowing alongside our own. The very best
fantasies make these revelatory visions of our world seem far more real
than the everyday versions we suspect are not, cannot, be the real
truth — think of the mannequins living inside department stores in John
Collier's "Evening Primrose," the Prisoner's Aid Society of mice in
Margery Sharp's Miss Bianca books; Roald Dahl's witches with their
scratchy wigs, Sylvia Townsend Warner's mannered fairies, and Dodie
Smith's sophisticated canine society in The Hundred and One
Dalmatians and The Starlight Barking; T. H. White's Mistress
Masham's Repose and John Crowley's Edgewood, and the Looking-Glass
world that Lewis Carroll's Alice enters, and to which Gopnik gives more
than a tip of the hat in his novel. These are all secret histories that
invest the domestic and the mundane with a glow that has something
within it of the sublime; not just the supernatural, but a faint
intimation of the sacred, the way the world should be. You
might think this is a heavy burden for a children's book to bear, but
aren't the most beloved children's books also sacred texts of a sort?
And isn't Paris where all good Americans are
supposed to go when they die? Oliver has the great good fortune of
being alive to enjoy it.
But he quickly learns that the city, indeed the
entire world, is imperiled by the Master of Mirrors, who enslaved the
vain aristocrats of Versailles by capturing their souls. Only a
relative few of the palace's inhabitants survived, by virtue of being
busy with creating works of art or science or philosophy. They are
known as Those Whose Backs Were Turned (to the mirrors), and their
ranks include Molière, Racine, the composer Marc Antoine
Charpentier; father-and-son spymasters Antoine and Bonaventure
Rossignol; Andre Le Notre, who designed Versailles' gardens; and the
duc de Richelieu, the only aristocrat not to have been captured by the
Magister Speculum.
"He was in charge of the king's
entertainment, and so he never looked up at the mirrors,"
[Molière] whispered to Oliver, "he is a very great figure. He is
the man who invented mayonnaise!"
Those Whose Backs Were Turned join forces with Oliver, Neige, and an
odorous army of clochards (street drunks — think Bowery winos
with French accents and a Gallic sense of higher purpose) to find and
defeat the Master of Mirrors before he can enslave the rest of the City
of Light. Gopnik's plotting is intricate, deft, and, for the most part,
surprising, so I won't reveal much more of it here. But above all, and
for all the complexities of its narrative, The King in the Window
is, as befitting a book about windows and mirrors, a novel of
contrasts: between irony and rhetoric, wit and wisdom; between the
American resignation to getting a job done, and the French panache for
doing so with style. It is also — please forgive me — surprisingly
reflective and, yes, wise for a contemporary American children's
fantasy. Philip Pullman raised the bar for this kind of writing with His
Dark Materials, and while there have been a number of fine novels
that have appeared since then, this is the first one that I immediately
sat down and began to reread.
This is because, among other things, The King
in the Window is very, very funny. Gopnik's famously aphoristic
style at first seems close to merely arch, when channeled through the
mouths of the window wraiths Molière and Racine.
But then we meet Mrs. Pearson, one of the most
instantly memorable characters in children's literature. Not since the
Wart's Merlyn, or since Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler set Claudia and her
brother Jamie sorting through her mixed-up files has there been such a
formidable ally to a Young Person in Distress.
Mrs. Pearson! Lucy Pearson! …She was,
well, about a hundred years old, Oliver knew, and she came originally
from England. She was one of three scandalous sisters, and then she had
gone to live with some very weird-looking French guy with a mustache.
She wrote books, always about the Grand Siècle. Whenever a new
one came out, his father would go to interview her, and she would say
mean things about people.
A sort of cross between Lady Antonia Fraser and Nancy Mitford, with a
bit of Lady Bracknell thrown in, Mrs. Pearson is not merely mean. She
is also one of the Witty, who in Gopnik's world — called The Way — rank
with the Wise and the Watchful in terms of importance. Mrs. Pearson
throws off witticisms the way a prism refracts color.
When intelligent people are challenged by
something evil, they often try to convince each other that it is merely
squalid.
It is civilized to tell small lies. But not to tell someone that he is
the first on the death list of the dread Master of Mirrors? That would
be impolite.
The loveliest setpiece in The King in the Window is the dinner
Oliver shares with Mrs. Pearson at Le Grand Vefour, the (real)
historic, three-Michelin-star restaurant where she orders chicken
breast with truffles ("the only healthy meal one can eat at a place
like this") and two bottles of Billecart Rosé. Gopnik's novel is
worth reading for this chapter alone, which, among its many delights,
seems to contain an homage to one of Merlyn's loveliest speeches in The
Sword in the Stone. Like John Crowley's Little, Big, The King
in the Window references numerous children's books, especially
Lewis Carroll's work, without being derivative; in a later chapter Mrs.
Pearson gives a recitation of the various types of lies, organized by
color, that should be required reading for anyone considering a career
in politics.
The King in the Window is children's
literature of the highest order, which means literature of the highest
order. Its secret history includes instructions for finding the hidden,
crowd-free entrance to the Louvre; a thumbnail history of glassmaking,
and Mrs. Pearson's means of preserving the bubbles in a bottle of
champagne (it involves a white silver spoon). Such things may seem to
be impossibly precious, adult knowledge to impart to young readers, and
in many ways The King in the Window does seem like a highly
polished stepping stone for American dream-children of a sensual,
Francophile bent, the missing link between the Madeline books and Zazie
Dans Le Métro, and A Sport and a Pastime and Before
Sunset. I personally think Mrs. Pearson's knowledge has more in
common with Merlyn's than with anything a kid could learn from
Hogwarts.
My only quibble with this book is the hyperactive
plot-twist that begins to build up halfway through; it's clever, but it
feels noisy and unnecessarily aggressive, and — there is no polite way
to say this — excessively American, like replacing your vintage Peugeot
with an SUV, or spiking that Billecart Rosé with Mountain Dew. The
King in the Window is published by Hyperion Books for Children, a
division of Miramax, and one can sense the cold breath of the Master of
Mirrors at work here, whispering that perhaps a few more computer gags
and special effects would make the project more movie-ready. Once upon
a time we fell in love with novels and, usually, were disappointed when
we saw their filmed version. Now the disappointing bits are too often
written right into the book, an unfortunate collusion between author
and marketplace that, in this instance, leaches a bit of the sweetness
from a lovely book.
But not much of it. Despite what disgruntled
authors may think, overpraising rather than its reverse is the
occupational hazard of reviewers. It may be that my palate has been
spoiled by imbibing too much literary plonk, but The King in the
Window seems like the real thing to me, a book both wise and witty
that, like the fine wines the redoubtable Mrs. Pearson savors, will
withstand the test of time.
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