"The Magic Faraway Tree" is a popular children's book written by Enid Blyton. It was published in 1943 and is the second book in the Faraway Tree series. The story follows the adventures of Joe, Beth, and Frannie, three siblings who discover a magical tree in the Enchanted Wood. The book begins with the introduction of Joe, Beth, and Frannie, who move to a new house near the Enchanted Wood. They soon befriend the magical creatures who live in the wood, including Moon-Face, Silky, and the Saucepan Man. One day, the children stumble upon an enormous tree in the woods, which they name the Faraway Tree.
Young adult book review: The Magic Faraway Tree by Enid Blyton
The Magic Faraway Tree follows siblings Joe, Beth, Frannie and their cousin Dick as they move to a new home and explore the nearby woods. They come across a tree with a small door at the bottom and discover a world of magical creatures, new friends and adventures along the way. Each time they find themselves at the very top of the tree there is a new and exciting land to discover, such as the Land Of Treats.
Who is it aimed at?
Though most of the books I review are aimed at young adults and sometimes a little older, I just had to find space for this classic children’s book. It’s the perfect gift for anyone older than five or even younger to read to them.
What was your favourite part?
Definitely my favourite part of The Magic Faraway Tree is finding out which fantastical world Joe, Beth, Dick and Franny would find themselves in each time they climbed to the top of the tree. Along with the recurring fun characters that lived in the tree they would always meet new, interesting people in whatever land they were exploring.
What was your least favourite part?
As it was originally published in 1943 it could be difficult for children today to relate to the roles and lifestyles of the kids in the book, but this was a small fraction of the story compared to their fun and timeless adventures.
Which character would you most like to meet?
Of all the characters I would probably most like to meet my favourite from when I was younger, Silky the fairy. She was always incredibly kind and would bake treats such as pop cakes which to this day I would still absolutely love to try.
Why should someone buy this book?
The Magic Faraway Tree is the first book I remember and set me on a path to adore literature as I do now.
ShareWhy are you making commenting on The National only available to subscribers?
We know there are thousands of National readers who want to debate, argue and go back and forth in the comments section of our stories. We’ve got the most informed readers in Scotland, asking each other the big questions about the future of our country.
Unfortunately, though, these important debates are being spoiled by a vocal minority of trolls who aren’t really interested in the issues, try to derail the conversations, register under fake names, and post vile abuse.
So that’s why we’ve decided to make the ability to comment only available to our paying subscribers. That way, all the trolls who post abuse on our website will have to pay if they want to join the debate – and risk a permanent ban from the account that they subscribe with.
The conversation will go back to what it should be about – people who care passionately about the issues, but disagree constructively on what we should do about them. Let’s get that debate started!
Callum Baird, Editor of The National
Comments: Our rules
We want our comments to be a lively and valuable part of our community - a place where readers can debate and engage with the most important local issues. The ability to comment on our stories is a privilege, not a right, however, and that privilege may be withdrawn if it is abused or misused.
Please report any comments that break our rules.
The Magic Faraway Tree
I am an Enid Blyton baby. I don’t know if children read Enid Blyton these days, their parents having perhaps seen the less than hagiographic biopics (Enid, with Helena Bonham Carter: an especially acidulous Blyton). Or maybe they’ve read the “nightmare mother” exposés online [1]. But for me, Noddy and Big Ears, The Secret Seven, Famous Five, and perhaps above all The Magic Faraway Tree shaped the contours of my childhood.
The Faraway Tree series, published very early on in her writing career (1939), is about a magic tree inspired by the Norse mythology that had fascinated Blyton as a child. The idea of the Yggdrasil tree, placed at the center of the cosmos and rising through a number of worlds, is found in northern Eurasia and forms part of the shamanic lore shared by many peoples of this region. This seems to be a very ancient conception, perhaps based on the Pole Star, the centre of the heavens, and the image of an omphalic tree in Scandinavian myth. Among Siberian shamans, a cardinal tree, often thought to be an Ash, may also be used as a ladder to ascend the heavens.
According to Blyton’s daughter Gillian, the inspiration for the magic tree came one day when she was trying to create a new story “and suddenly she was walking in the enchanted wood and found the tree. In her imagination she climbed up through the branches and met Moon-Face, Silky, the Saucepan Man and the rest of the characters. She had all she needed.” As in the Wishing-Chair series, these fantasy books typically involve children being transported into a magical world in which they meet fairies, goblins, elves, pixies and other mythological creatures.
But instead of the dragon Níðhöggr or the stags Dáinn, Dvalinn, Duneyrr and Duraþrór, Blyton populates her mythical tree with a hodge-podge of oddballs who her child characters (stand-ins for the children readers) visit whenever they like. There’s Moon-Face, a man (?) possibly afflicted with neurofibromatosis or Proteus Syndrome. Think Joseph Merrick, aka The Elephant Man. Moon-Face’s rotund face is never referred to as an oddity though, rather it serves as an identity marker. His house inside the tree is also round and filled with curved furniture. Two other larger than life roomies accompany the children on their adventures: The Saucepan Man and Mr Whatzisname. The Saucepan Man is covered with pots and pans, and perhaps for this reason is partially deaf. He lives with Mr Whatzisname, who cannot remember his own name (!?) although Wikipedia informs me that “during a particular story at the Land of Secrets, Mr. Watzisname discovers that his name is ‘Kollamoolitumarellipawkyrollo’. This is forgotten by the end of the story (even by the man himself) and he goes back to being Mr. Watzisname.”
There is also Silky The Fairy, who seems to identify as female, and perhaps for that reason, isn’t supplied with any salient characteristics, existing instead as a somewhat bland, almost sexless Barbie doll cipher. Anti-social elements pique the plot via The Angry Pixie, who lives in a house with a tiny window and has a habit of throwing cold water, or any liquid, at hand over people who dare to peep inside. Also Dame Washalot, who spends her time washing her clothes and throwing the dirty wash-water down the tree. If she has no clothes to wash, Washalot washes the dirty laundry of other people and even the leaves of the tree.
What is it about the Faraway Tree series, I have often wondered, that struck me so forcibly as a child, so that returning to the books now more than 40 years after a I first read them, I am still completely bowled over and enchanted by the adventures they contain?
I think it’s the promise of escape to alternate worlds. Books for a child, or for the inner child, are an objective correlative of this kind of escape. No doubt cannabis and other intoxicants and dissociatives work this way too. Re-reading these books, it is clear that the children go on a series of “trips” whenever they climb the tree, as we do whenever we vape cannabis flowers or eat magic mushrooms.
Reading these books now, I recognise how archetypally escapist they are, and also how as a child, I mainly read to escape. To escape the constant bickering of my parents, and other anxiety-provoking dynamics of family life, to escape boredom and the constraints of this particular conscious Self growing up in that particular culture at that time. I still read to escape, to some degree, although for this reason I am puzzled by the fact that I am not especially interested in the outskirts of escapist literature: fantasy and science fiction. Maybe because I don’t find the linguistic texture of these books as satisfying as a broadly-speaking “realist” literary novel. Or maybe because I do still like to be tethered in some way, rooted (like the Magic Tree in Enid Blyton’s book itself) in this world, even whilst exploring alternate/escapist realities. Which is perhaps why I fear trying psychedelics, even whilst feeling comfortable with cannabis; I still fear the hallucinatory power of LSD or psilocybin. Maybe I don’t really want escape in that way, maybe what I want is just a different way of seeing and being in this world, let’s call it The Enlightenment Model, where the essence of reality is perceived and understood with regard to its depths and riches in ways that we don’t normally have access to.
“The founding and fading myth of Adam and Eve is a great escape story,” Adam Phillips reminds us, taking us, as all good psychoanalysts must, to the mythical foundations of the stories we tell ourselves both as individuals, as well as a culture. “[It’s] the story of a failed breakout,” he goes on to suggest. “Transgression is the attempt to find out exactly what it is that is impossible to escape from. In seeking forbidden knowledge about God’s creation they discovered just what there was to fear about God. The biblical story dramatizes, whatever else it does, the link in our minds between curiosity and release –how our ideas of freedom depend upon our finding out what we have to fear. We find out what the world is like by testing it, by testing ourselves against it.”
Later, he writes in this, one of my favourite Phillips’ books, Houdini’s Box :
“Addicts –to work and money, to drink and drugs, to political ideology and fundamentalist religion –are the heroes and anti-heroes, the spirits of the age, because they (we) enact and dramatize our dilemmas about freedom and memory. About what kind of freedom is possible, and about how this is bound up with what any given society (any education) persuades us is worth getting away from; or, indeed, worth abolishing so that it is no longer there, apparently, to affront us. If we happen to live in a society that prefers artists to drug-dealers, then either we won’t think of good art as escapist, or we will have more or less tacitly agreed that whatever the art in question has released us from is unacceptable. That the lives we want depend upon avoiding, say, poverty, or ugliness, or guilt, or complexity, or frivolousness, and so on. Our negative ideals –what we are not supposed to desire, to like or to be like –are the materials from which we make our positive ideals. Our values are born out of perceived threat. ”
I like this idea a lot. It feel it’s something I’d like to think more about, maybe by reading a later book of his, Unforbidden Pleasures , which I think he explores this notion in greater depth.
The escapist myth of this Faraway Tree, is that its very highest branches poke through the clouds via holes, maybe a metre across in diameter. Every few days, as if on a neverending carousel, a new world with unique aspects special to it, comes to rest above these holes. One can climb up the branch, and then onwards via a ladder through the hole and beyond into an entirely new setting where all the strictures of our lives are upended. These Lands might be classified into spaces that are either facsimiles of childhood anxieties or panaceas of a sort.
Take the Land of Topsy Turvy where everybody walks on their hands and everything is upside down. Or The Land of Dreams which works more like a Bunuel film, or a Dali painting: distorting or manipulating reality in weird and woozy ways. And also in anxiety-provoking ways as often the characters get stuck in these lands, as when the Sandman throws sand in the children’s eyes to make them sleep. And yet, like all good (children’s) literature, these lands, as fantastical as they seem at first, mirror in some essential way our earthbound dimension. For don’t we all crave for things to remain the same (especially if they’re enjoyable), but fear their fixity if they’re not? As in the Land of Tempers where everyone rages and fumes on a Trump-like scale. This might be a dramatic excursion for those visiting, but if losing your temper means you will have to stay in this land forever, as it seems Orange 45 (as Greg Proops calls him) has had to do, the Land of Tempers might quickly become a kind of hell realm, where the only anxiolytic comes in the form of raging against Jews, and Trans people, and immigrants, and the media.
Then there are those lands that are therapeutic, useful, and seem to work as some kind of panacea, including The Land of Spells, inhabited by witches and wizards, and The Land of Magic Medicines which the children visit when their mother is ill to buy her medicine.
My favourite Lands as a child (no surprise there) were those of pure wish-fulfilment: The Land of Do-As-You-Please, The Land of Toys, The Land of Goodies, and The Land of Presents. Last night, a little stoned on Durban Poison, and very much enjoying a Tea Pigs Redbush/Honeybush cuppa with soya milk that drank like condensed milk at times, I snuggled in bed with Max and read the second Magic Faraway Tree book, marvelling at the twists and turns that Blyton orchestrates, ultra-prolific potboiler of a writer that she was, her plot twists often worthy of a Netflix series, always keeping you reading on and turning the next page.
There is something at once deeply sensual and restrained about her writing, which often comes out in her descriptions of food. Take this description of Google Buns for example [2]:
“The buns were most peculiar. They each had a very large currant in the middle, and this was filled with sherbert. So when you got to the currant and bit it the sherbert frothed out and filled your mouth with fine bubbles that tasted delicious.”
Currants, sherbert, froth? Yuck, but also enticing. Here’s a description of another Blyton delicacy I dreamed of tasting when I read these books as a child: Pop Biscuits.
“As soon as you bit them they went pop! And you suddenly found your mouth filled with new honey from the middle of the biscuits.”
Or how about a Toffee Shock: “A Toffee Shock gets bigger and bigger as you suck it, instead of smaller and smaller – and when it is so big that there is hardly any room for it in your mouth it suddenly explodes – and goes to nothing.”
Gathering together a larder of Blyton delicacies for this essay, I am struck by how all of them involve a kind of surprise in eating, perhaps the child’s surprise in discovering a taste experience for the first time: like the ultra-salty deliciousness of a piece of anchovy sitting in the milky gloop of mozzarella on one’s pizza, or jam filling in a donut. But also the surprise of non-food related experiences: one’s first kiss, or other early sexual experiences for example. Also the surprise of a plot-twist itself, a word used in an electrifying and unanticipated way – a linguistic hallmark of all good writing, I think.
Barbara Stoney describes Blyton’s descriptions of food in a story called ‘Mother! Mother!’ as being “more reminiscent of an orgy in an Edwardian emporium than a modern child’s idea of a good ‘blow-out’. Enid Blyton writes of tongues, ham, pies, lemonade and ginger-beer. This is not just food, it is archetypal feasting, the author’s longing for the palmy days of her own childhood.”
Michael Woods also tries to deconstruct the psychosocial ingredients of Blyton’s formula: superior social status, the absence of anything that smacks of the work-a-day world, the high fantasy level, and a strong animal interest.
“For most adults who write children’s books, once the communication barrier has been largely overcome, the main problem is to write what children want to read and yet remain intellectually honest to themselves in presenting the world as it really is. For Enid Blyton it seems unlikely that any such dilemma raised its head; she was a child, she thought as a child, and she wrote as a child; of course the craft of an extremely competent adult writer is there, but the basic feeling is essentially pre-adolescent. Piaget has shown us that children tend to make moral judgement purely in terms of good and bad and that it is only with the advent of adolescence that the individual is able to accept different levels of goodness and to judge the actions of others according to the circumstances. Enid Blyton has no moral dilemmas and her books satisfy children because they present things clearly in black and white with no confusing intermediate shades of grey.”
There is something in this that I need to think about in relation to cannabis. It is captured well in this Liesl Mueller poem too:
SOMETIMES, WHEN THE LIGHT
Sometimes, when the light strikes at odd angles
and pulls you back into childhood
and you are passing a crumbling mansion
completely hidden behind old willows
or an empty convent guarded by hemlocks
and giant firs standing hip to hip,
you know again that behind that wall,
under the uncut hair of the willows
something secret is going on,
so marvelous and dangerous
that if you crawled through and saw,
you would die, or be happy forever.
This “something secret going on,/so marvelous and dangerous//that if you crawled through and saw,/you would die, or be happy forever” energises the motivation for psychoactive substances, poetry being one of these substances. It is not just about turning away from the humdrum everyday into something strange and magical and enchanting, where trees (and plants) present opportunities to explore entirely new worlds, or worlds that function as simple but potent thought experiments. A more sophisticated version of this, albeit more high-tech is HBO’s Westworld television series.
Rather than physically travelling to strange and iconoclastic worlds though, some of us choose to read: novels, short stories, or poems saturated with dense dream-logic. All taking us in unforseen ways to somewhere different, or someplace other than our everyday conscious experience.
[1] “The truth is, Enid Blyton was arrogant, insecure, pretentious, very skilled at putting difficult or unpleasant things out of her mind and without a trace of maternal instinct,” writes Imogen Blyton of her mother. “As a child, I viewed her as a rather strict authority. As an adult, I did not hate her. I pitied her.” https://www.express.co.uk/expressyourself/230862/Enid-Blyton-the-nightmare-mother
[2] Yes, this is 1943, and yes that’s what she called them. A lot of Blyton’s writing has been “cleaned up” and bowdlerised , but Google Buns remain untouched.
Book Review: The Magic Faraway Tree by Jacqueline Wilson
happy Monday bookish people! I hope you’re all having a good day today. Today I am bringing you the book review for The Magic Far-away Tree by Jacquline Wilson.
I will give star ratings to four categories and I will write a little bit about each one. I will try to keep this review as spoiler free as possible.
One day, the children stumble upon an enormous tree in the woods, which they name the Faraway Tree. The Faraway Tree is no ordinary tree; it is home to an array of fantastical lands that appear at its top. Each land stays for a limited time before being replaced by a different one.
The magic faraway tree plot:
Rating: 3 out of 5.
This is a modern take on Enid Blyton’ original series, following a similar plot of a family moving to the cottage and discovering the faraway tree and the lands that appear at the top. For me there was too much that just didn’t work about this story, it comes down to the feeling and it didn’t give me the same feeling as the original series did.
The children quickly become enchanted by the tree and its many mysterious lands, such as the Land of Take-What-You-Want and the Land of Birthdays. Throughout the book, Joe, Beth, and Frannie climb the Faraway Tree and explore its various lands. They encounter strange and magical creatures, such as the Angry Pixie and the Slippery Slip, and learn valuable lessons along the way. Each trip to the tree is filled with excitement, as the children never know what land they will discover next. However, not all the lands in the Faraway Tree are pleasant. The children sometimes find themselves in dangerous situations, such as when they visit the Land of Dame Slap, a land ruled by a wicked queen. With the help of their friends and their own ingenuity, the children manage to escape from these perilous lands unscathed. The book also introduces new characters, including Connie, a girl from the city who joins the siblings on their adventures. Together, they embark on thrilling escapades, making new friends and facing new challenges along the way. "The Magic Faraway Tree" is a captivating tale that sparks the imagination and takes readers on a wonderful journey. It teaches valuable lessons about friendship, bravery, and the importance of kindness. With its enchanting storytelling and delightful characters, this book continues to captivate generations of readers..
Reviews for "A Journey of Discovery and Adventure: Summary of 'The Magic Faraway Tree"
1. John - 2 stars - I found "The Magic Faraway Tree" to be quite boring and the story didn't really captivate me. The plot seemed repetitive and lacking in depth. The characters were also one-dimensional and didn't have much substance. Overall, I was disappointed with this book and wouldn't recommend it.
2. Sarah - 1 star - I couldn't enjoy "The Magic Faraway Tree" at all. The writing style was too simplistic and didn't engage me as an adult reader. The magical elements were unrealistic and didn't make sense to me. Additionally, the pacing of the story felt disjointed and I couldn't connect with the characters. Overall, I found this book to be a waste of time.
3. Mark - 2 stars - "The Magic Faraway Tree" didn't live up to the hype for me. The concept of the magical tree was interesting, but the execution fell flat. The adventures felt rushed and lacked depth. The dialogue also seemed forced and unnatural. Overall, I wasn't impressed with this book and wouldn't recommend it to others.
4. Emily - 3 stars - I didn't hate "The Magic Faraway Tree," but I didn't love it either. The story felt too predictable and lacked originality. The writing style was also average and didn't keep me fully engaged. While it had some enjoyable moments, it didn't leave a lasting impression on me.
5. Alex - 2 stars - "The Magic Faraway Tree" didn't meet my expectations. The plot felt repetitive and the characters were forgettable. The world-building wasn't immersive enough to hold my interest. While it might appeal to younger readers, I didn't find it particularly engaging as an adult.