Yet another classic children's genre novel to be adapted into a variety of films and TV shows, this is one that I knew something about but hadn't actually read. Like many, I'd probably let the story bleed into me through osmosis from general pop culture. I'm very happy to have finally read the book itself and, because I picked up the box set, now have the four sequels to look forward to over the next four months, though only four of them meet my classic criteria by being over fifty years in age, published between 1952 and 1961.

Just in case pop culture has let you down, the Borrowers are little people, each about four inches in height, who are otherwise born, live their lives and die just like the rest of us. However, they do so in their own world that exists within but out of sight of our own, venturing into ours to acquire what they need to survive, making them rather quaint scavengers. Over time, they have come to believe, with the surety that our own experience is the normal one, that human beans exist only to provide for Borrowers. There's a lot of relative thinking here that I found fascinating.

The leads are the Clock family of Borrowers, so named because they live under the floorboards of a human house and their home is accessed through a hole underneath the grandfather clock. It's very possible that they're the only Borrowers left in this house, because the other families moved out, emigrated to use their own term, after their rooms began to be shut off and disused. One of the other core themes here is change and how we adapt to it. As the house belongs to Great-Aunt Sophy, who's elderly and bedridden, it's become quieter as the years passed. Friends died off and people stopped visiting, as they do. The Borrowers take that to mean that human beans are dying out and they're almost extinct.

There are three Clocks: Pod and Homily and their fourteen-year-old daughter Arrietty. Pod is the provider of the family, the only one of them who knows how to get to the hole past all the gates with complicated clasps to keep the mice out of their home. He ventures out to obtain whatever they need at any particular moment, which fortunately tends to be the sort of thing we wouldn't miss. A scrap of food for us would feed them for a week. The Borrowers have stamps on their wall instead of pictures. They use coins for plates, cotton reels for stools and matchboxes for storage. Homily wants some more blotting paper for carpet. It's warm and cozy and soaks up spills.

Somewhat inevitably, there's an interaction between Borrowers and human beans, because that was always how change would occur. We knew it was coming, of course, because we start with Mrs. May telling Kate all about the Borrowers when she loses her crochet hook. Her brother told her a long time ago, because he made friends with some of them in an old house. Of course, that house is the house I've told you about and those Borrowers are Pod, Homily and Arrietty Clock. We leap into storytelling flashback to hear what the boy told his sister, later to become Mrs. May.

The Boy never acquires a name, but he arrives at his Great-Aunt Sophy's from India, because he's recovering from an illness. It's Pod who sees him first and vice versa. Pod has gone on a borrowing mission, climbing up the curtains to reach the doll's furniture stored in the corner cupboard in the schoolroom. He takes a cup that'll work perfectly as a mixing bowl for Homily and starts to climb back down but suddenly the Boy is there. Being seen is a calamity for Borrowers, but the Boy just helps him down and lets him go. It's a close call.

It's around this point that Arrietty has finally asked enough questions and pestered her parents for enough answers that they decide she should accompany Pod on her first borrowing run. That allows her to go outside into the garden, somewhere she's only ever seen through a grating, and that sets up a scene right out of a Bert I. Gordon movie. He was known as Mr. B.I.G. for a reason, making a number of movies that played with size, transforming people into tiny or giant versions of themselves and dealing with the consequences. Many of those were science fiction and horror and this scene initially feels like horror too, until Arrietty realises the Boy just wants to talk.

That's about all I'm going to tell you, but you can surely extrapolate a lot of where it will go, both from what I've already said and from the cover art, which does depict a scene from the book. The Borrowers have always feared being seen and there's the time-honoured story of Eggletina, who ventured out into the house at an inopportune time and is believed to have been eaten by a cat. At least the Boy didn't bring one of those with him, but they fear that discovery will force them to emigrate and that's an especially daunting task when the possibility has arisen that they're the last three Borrowers not just in the house but anywhere.

I thoroughly enjoyed 'The Borrowers' but I'm unsure as to which aspect appealed to me more. The central conceit of living a life on the scraps of others doesn't sound great on the face of it, but it's more and more appealing the more you look at the context. They're entirely free from what we'd call the rat race, their work being borrowing and making. There's no real mention of religion but it's easy to see that there could be. If there was, God, in whatever form the Borrowers would give him or her, does actually provide for them. Everything they need is out there for the taking and in serious abundance.

However, there's also a lot here about change. There's talk about a community of Borrowers with all the complexities of interaction that we know from our own communities. In the thriving house, the Overmantels were posh because of their literally elevated position up on the drawing-room mantelpiece but the Rain-Pipes were lower class because their home in a drainpipe flooded often, often leaving them destitute. We might wonder about why they didn't move, but they did, each family gradually emigrating as the house decreased in use, all of them before this novel begins.

The Clocks aren't in touch with any of them, even their relatives, there not being a Borrower mail system or internet, so we can only imagine as to how or indeed whether they made it to maintain that community elsewhere. That leads to a real feeling of isolation and this story is about ending, asking us what happens next. In the human world, Aunt-Sophy can't be far off death and, when she dies, there won't be anybody the Borrowers can borrow from. Below the floorboards, there's just one family. Who's going to keep their family and indeed their species alive? Inevitably, they have to leave at some point.

The ending is a tough one but the fall follows a rise and there are four more books, so we know it doesn't end here. Of course, that wasn't the case in 1952, when this was first published, because it could well have been the end, if indeed Mary Norton wanted it to be. The book was a hit, however, winning the Carnegie Medal for the year as the best British children's book, so she published 'The Borrowers Afield' three years later and followed that with two more by 1961. The fifth book, 'The Borrowers Avenged' arrived a couple of decades later in 1982. I look forward to diving into those. ~~ Hal C F Astell

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