Word: reid
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...BARBER (572 pp.)-Forrest Reid -Pantheon...
...animals in Forrest Reid's books talk like Barker and Squeaker. Unlike their counterparts in The Wind in the Willows, they must have a human being around to put words into their mouths. This human being must be young, honest and gifted with an extra sense, like little Tom Barber. He must see the world as Tom sees it-as a place where magic abounds...
Every Boy's Life. Forrest Reid, maker of this strange world, was an Ulsterman who began life as a tea-merchant's clerk and ended up a part-time writer living alone with his dogs in Belfast, playing bridge and croquet. When he died at 70, in 1947, he left behind a handful of novels and about a roomful of ardent admirers. One was Novelist E. M. Forster, who now introduces the Tom Barber trilogy of novels to U.S. readers. Reid's work, he concedes, has "puerilities and longueurs." But it is the work of "an extremely...
...Reid wrote his trilogy backwards, beginning with Tom Barber aged 15, ending with him at eleven. He spread the work over a period of 14 years, by the end of which his prose had grown firmer. The result is that author and hero steadily mature in opposite directions. Equally upsetting is the fact that Reid did not bother to fit his three parts together very neatly. Tom enjoys two parents and a granny in the first two volumes and becomes an abrupt orphan in the third. To lose one parent, as Lady Bracknell suggests in The Importance of Being Earnest...
...Sleepwalker. Author Reid doted on boyhood's weirder aspects-its imaginativeness, its crazy-paved fantasies. Tom, for instance, is a sleepwalker. His "walks" carry him in and out of time itself. He goes back to medieval days and alchemy. He goes back to ancient Greece, back to the Garden of Eden itself. "Well, Adam," says the serpent, "so you've come back at last . . ." But he has not brought any Eve with him-in fact, Eve is conspicuously absent from most of the trilogy...