I've enjoyed my trip back to the Faraway Tree, something I do once in a while when I need my brain to stop for a while, but I'm not going to continue into the fourth and final book. That ought to be a shock for my editor but for reasons I'll happily explain.

'Up the Faraway Tree' isn't a novel like the first three, instead a set of increasingly skimpy stories to accompany line drawings that practically invite readers to colour them in. Each page contains a pair of such pictures with a two- or three-line paragraph of text underneath each. Given that there are eight stories taking up ninety pages and three quarters of each page is image, you can surely imagine how insubstantial these hints at stories are.

Worst still, the first one, 'Off to the Enchanted Wood!' follows a new pair of characters, Robin and Joy, reprising everything that everybody else did the first time they climbed the Faraway Tree, an inexcusable mistake because the reason they're there is that they've already read about it in 'The Enchanted Wood'. Surely to goodness, if you've read about how anyone who looks into the Angry Pixie's window gets drenched, the first thing you do when climbing up the Faraway Tree wouldn't be to look into the Angry Pixie's window. And, even if you're so caught up in the moment that you do, surely you'd step aside when you hear washing water hurtling down from above. It seems that Robin and Joy aren't the brightest bulbs in the pack.

But that's it for 'Up the Faraway Tree'. Let's read 'The Folk of the Faraway Tree', very much a third novel, originally published in 1946, seven years after 'The Enchanted Wood' and three after 'The Magic Faraway Tree'. Unfortunately, it's also initially yet another a redux of its predecessor. For everyone who decries Blyton for adhering to strict formula, you certainly have a point. However, unlike 'Up the Faraway Tree', where pretty much everything is recycled, here it's just the opening chapter.

It's not greedy Cousin Dick coming to stay this time because his mother is ill, it's spoiled Connie. At least her mother, Lizzie Haynes, has the courtesy to ask if it's okay to send her first. The kids aren't as happy as last time, because Connie isn't just spoilt, she's also stuck-up and annoyingly curious. I would add frustratingly stubborn too, something I know well, because Dick had told her all sorts of wild stories and she doesn't believe any of them. At this point, that's fair, of course, but not after she's climbed the Faraway Tree and got drenched by the Angry Pixie and Dame Washalot because she doesn't believe in them. The only variance this time is that the former throws ink not water.

Once all that's out of the way, we can settle down to what these books do best, which is to explore Blyton's wild imagination through a series of bizarre lands that arrive in turn at the ladder at the top of the Faraway Tree. This time, she even mentions lands that we don't even visit. The Land of Smacks? Yeah, I can see why we don't go there. The Land of Know-All. The Land of Whizz-About. It's fair to say that, if there's been any learning progression within this series, it's the awareness of a growing core cast of children that not every magical land is worth visiting. Bessie even invents an enticing new land, the Land of Silence. It isn't real but for a moment it would be welcome.

For a while, this plays as a morality tale with Connie as its centre. She falls down the Slippery Slip in the middle of Moon-Face's house and wears out the back of her dress because she didn't have a cushion. She sulks outside. Then she climbs back up and into the land above. The Land of Marvels, from which Moon-Face acquired hot-cold goodies, is still there but it promptly moves on. Luckily, Saucepan knows that you can get to it from the Land of Giants and you can get to that by climbing Jack's beanstalk. And he does indeed know Jack. They make it but Connie has upset a whole bunch of other people and so climbed the Ladder-That-Has-No-Top to get away from them. Moon-Face is tasked with getting her back down.

And so it goes. We enjoy our time with Jo, Fanny and Bessie but wonder how long we're stuck with Connie. Eventually, she starts to turn into a bearable girl, but in a surprising stroke of reality, it's not a seamless transition. Nonetheless, the most enjoyable parts of this book are the ones where Connie has joined the human race for a while. She has a great and generous idea at one point. As Saucepan is really upset because the children don't want to visit his mother on her birthday, albeit because she's cook to Dame Slap and they don't want to go anywhere near the latter's school, she suggests that they take some presents for her. That's not just a good idea, it's a selfless one.

Of course they go anyway and Connie screws up royally by looking for Saucepan's mum but finding Dame Slap instead, but she's still a worthy character at this point. She even takes a smack on each hand in the classroom, clearly for the first time in an era when that was acceptable, and she takes it without complaint. These are fun chapters, especially when Bessie has the temerity to lock this vicious headmistress in a cupboard. How much wish fulfilment can you get in one chapter? I never had a problem with the heads at my schools, but there were a few teachers I'd love to have seen locked in a closet. Does that make me a naughty boy? Do I deserve a slap?

The biggest flaw the book has is that, like its predecessors, especially 'The Magic Faraway Tree', it unfolds in relentlessly episodic fashion with very little to render the book worthy as a novel rather than a set of chapters that effectively serve as short stories. Beyond Connie's reversed story arc of fall-rise-fall, the only real progression is covered by some of those short stories unfolding over multiple chapters and multiple lands. The Land of Secrets extends into the Land of Enchantments. And the final substantial story, about the tree potentially dying because there are trolls cutting its roots while they mine for jewels, extends into the Land of Know-All. There's emotion here and a proto-environmentalist attitude as well.

One little detail I enjoyed was that we all learn Watzisname's name in the Land Secrets, including Watzisname himself, only for everybody to promptly forget it again because it's so unwieldy. For anyone unhappy with the name their parents gave them, take at least a moment of solace in the fact that it isn't Kollamoolitoomarellipawkyrollo. At least, I hope it wasn't. Then again, it's just an amalgam of five letter nonsense words with no more syllables than Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio.

And so that's the 'Magic Faraway Tree' series of three books and a kinda/sorta fourth that worked better as an inoffensive serial in 'Enid Blyton's Sunny Stories', a children's magazine that Blyton founded, edited and wrote from 1926, when it was called 'Sunny Stories for Little Folk' until 1953, when Malcolm Saville took over under another new name, 'Sunny Stories'. They're highly episodic and repetitive, but full of imagination. No wonder other authors, including Jacqueline Wilson and Jeanne Willis, have extended it under their own hands. Frankly, I'd like to read an adult version. Who says wonder should be reserved for children? ~~ Hal C F Astell

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