I'm going quite a ways back for my classic children's novel this month, to the first half of a duology by George MacDonald, one of the most important pioneers of fantasy fiction, often described as a founder of modern fantasy, both through his own work and as a mentor to Lewis Carroll. In fact, it was because 'Alice's Adventures in Wonderland' was so well-received by MacDonald's children in a draught form that prompted Carroll to submit it for publication.

MacDonald was a Congregational minister by profession, his family including a whole slew of major religious figures in the Scotland of the day, though they almost stubbornly worked within different Christian denominations. However, unlike C. S. Lewis, who wrote him into 'The Great Divorce' as a character, his fantasies did not serve as religious metaphor. Unlike 'The Chronicles of Narnia', 'The Princess and the Goblin' is not the story of Jesus in thin disguise.

This wasn't his first fantasy, that being 'Phantastes: A Fairie Romance for Men and Women', which was published in 1858, arriving a year after 1871's 'At the Back of the North Wind', but it became a fast favourite with the public, no less a name than G. K. Chesterton writing in his introduction to a biography about MacDonald and his wife that this "made a difference to my whole existence" and "Of all the stories I have read, it remains the most real". Its biggest problem is that it's really only half a story, with a sequel, 'The Princess and Curdie' which wasn't published until 1883, eleven years on. Of course, I'm not going to wait eleven years. I'll take a look at that next month!

As the title suggests, it's about a princess and a goblin, but that's a little unfair because it's more about a princess and a young man named Curdie, meaning that the title of the sequel would seem to be just as appropriate for this one, another reason why they're two halves of one story. It's fair for me to point out that while the princess is absolutely Princess Irene, I couldn't tell you which the goblin is of a list of many, albeit few with actual names. Maybe it's Harelip, a goblin prince, but I'm just as convinced that it could refer to a handful of others.

Princess Irene lives in a castle in the middle of nowhere and her existence is rather lonely. The king, her father, is rarely there, off doing what kings do across the entire breadth of his kingdom, while her mother is dead. Her closest companion is a nursemaid, Lootie, because she's only eight-years-old as the story begins, though there are also a few guards dotted around and later events prompt the king to increase their numbers. However, very early in the book, she explores the castle, which is as vast and empty as you might expect, only to discover a mysterious lady unknown to everyone else who claims to be an Irene as well, the princess's father's mother's father's mother, and she's happy to spend her days in a high garret spinning wonders.

This might sound rather light and it is indeed told in very friendly language for a book that's over a hundred and fifty years old. There are Victorian flourishes, to be certain, and the sentences aren't always as short as they would be today, but it's easy to read, either as an adult or a child, and it has phrasing that suggests that it would be even better read aloud, probably by the fire on the sort of cold and windy night that Scotland is still used to. However, there's darkness here and we're about to learn about it.

While the castle is in the middle of nowhere, it's not entirely on its own. Nearby are mines and the sort of infrastructure you might expect to support them. However, while human beings work these mines, it's said that goblins work them too, using different tunnels that don't intersect the human ones. Irene is warned often not to go outside after dark and Lootie is tasked with ensuring that she adheres to that ruling, but inevitably one day finds them both a mile up a mountain when the sun starts to set. They rush back to the castle as quickly as they can, but Irene ends up being chased by goblins and saved by Curdie, a young miner and, I believe, a minor, who knows how to annoy goblins by improvising songs at them.

And so Irene and Curdie become friends, at least of a sort, because he's not of a station to simply hang out with a princess. He's a working boy and he spends long hours down the mine. In fact, he's down the mine when he discovers a point where human tunnels and goblin tunnels almost touch, separated only by a thin wall, which allows him to listen to them. He makes a way through too and learns much about the goblins and their plans, which are not only as benign as to keep mining the mines. They have a grand plan that they're working on and I'm not going to spoil what that is, just like I'm not going to spoil the secret goblin weakness that he discovers too.

While 'The Princess and the Goblin' was clearly written for a relatively young audience, I enjoyed it immensely. MacDonald said that "I write, not for children, but for the child-like, whether they be of five, or fifty, or seventy-five." I'm past the middle number there, so I guess I have enough child-like wonder at that world still in me, because this worked very well indeed. To modern eyes, the prose reads very well indeed and I found myself reading some of it aloud to myself just to see how well it would sound. I was not disappointed.

It's also easy to see how so much of the classic fantasy we know owes a debt to MacDonald and this book in particular. It feels very much like that point at which the fairy tales of the Brothers Grimm and Hans Christian Anderson, which were first published closer to MacDonald's work as we are to 'The Hobbit', were shifted into novel-length prose and presented as substantial coherent stories. I would suggest that Tolkien certainly owes a huge debt to MacDonald. We've all spent time within his goblin mines. So do Carroll, Lewis and Lord Dunsany, each of them fantasy pioneers in turn.

However, the structure seems a little awkward today, because we're set up to see Princess Irene as the primary character, only for her to pass the baton over to Curdie for long sections of the book. Of course, the overriding threat, because we were always going to learn what the goblins were up to at some point, is resolved appropriately with all the characters who ought to be there involved as they should be. And so, when the final page turned, I wanted to keep going. Instead, I'll do that in February, when I tackle the sequel, 'The Princess and Curdie'. ~~ Hal C F Astell

For more titles by George MacDonald click here