REREAD: The Tower of Geburah
Mar. 17th, 2024 02:32 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
feather_ghyllThe Tower of Geburah: John White. Kingsway Publications, 1985
Rereading this book as an adult was a singular experience for me, as it had been read aloud to me as a child, so some names and phrases were ringing in my ears as I reread them now. ‘The Tower of Geburah’ belongs to the subgenre of fantasy children’s books that takes the Christian allegory of the Narnia books as its model. If you want to use shorthand, you might call it Narnia for the TV generation. It was first published in the 1970s and its heroes are living in wintery Winnipeg, an exotic location for me, hearing it read in the late 1980s, probably.
Wesley, Lisa and Kurt are staying with their uncle, who is away from home for a brief trip. Their loving parents are away for a much longer trip, as parents so conveniently and often are in children’s literature. The neighbour who is meant to be looking out for them can’t come over because of a family crisis, so the three children end up in the attic room, where they know they’re not really supposed to go. There they find four strange antique TV sets that pique their curiosity. The TVs magically come on, with a riddle appearing all of them and then four different images on all four screens.
It is Lisa who finds that her hand and then the rest of her body can slip into the TV set. Wesley and Kurt can’t believe it, but the screen turns dark, no longer showing a tiny Lisa and what looked like a prisoner in a dungeon. Her brothers choose to go through another set together to join an old woman sweeping in front of a cottage, hoping to rescue Lisa…
And so the three children find themselves in the land of Anthropos, which has a touch of the Narnia about it, but reminded me more of Tolkien’s Middle Earth, especially ‘The Hobbit’ with a touch of Errol Flynn’s Sherwood forest and castle of Nottingham. A noble king is a prisoner, his jailer a jinn. There are talking wolves, known as the Koach, dwarves who are called Matmon, and a House of Wisdom that is bigger than it seems from the outside. There are magical objects, particularly a piece of jewellery that makes its wearer invisible, but shows things as they really are. As with Narnia, there are influences from Greek myth (more the evil beings), but there’s no real sense of Tolkien’s cohesive reimagining of European myths. I didn’t sense a pattern in character names or place names – if anything, there’s a middle eastern tinge to some.
At first, the children seemed a little bland. As the oldest, Wesley is a worrier, while Kurt, the youngest, is more impulsive, while Lisa displays some traditionally feminine traits. Their age isn’t mentioned, although they’re probably not yet teenagers, so end of primary school/start of secondary school. Conveniently for plot purposes, they’re used to horse riding and sailing. But as we follow them, it turns out that they, children though they are, are meant to save a kingdom, each goes through an individual journey, with one moment where Lisa thinks she knows best leaving her in a very precarious situation, where her fastidiousness plays against her. She ends up in a desperate plight, and the way she is rescued works as a metaphor for conversion to Christianity.
Wesley and Kurt have the advantage of a glimpse of their futures. Apart from becoming a military commander thanks to a supernatural boost, Wesley’s journey to faith is less dramatic, while Kurt is tempted by the promise of becoming a magician and impressing his older siblings to do something on the isle of Geburah that he comes to be heartily ashamed of, and comes to terms with by meeting Gaal.
Gaal is the Aslan or Jesus Christ figure in this book. Daringly, he’s no lion, but human(-seeming.) He is referred to as the Shepherd, the Son of the High Emperor, known by other names in other lands. At first, there’s a rumour that he is in Anthropos, a kingdom that turned its back on him under the influence of the sorcerer Hocoino and has been in drought ever since. Then, one by one, the children encounter him. He is described as a mass of paradoxes, white-haired, yet vigorous. As for his face,
‘It was young, yet it was old, very, very old. It was merry yet it spoke of untold sorrows. It was kind yet it was stern; tender, yet irredeemably tough; gentle yet as strong as steel.’ (p.175)
He bears a sword, not a shepherd’s crook, and his perfume is reminiscent of cedarwood.
The Christian message is fairly clear. As I said, each child comes to have a personal relationship with Gaal, coming to obey his orders in order to save Anthropos and to love him.
In one chapter, they stay in a cave where they are told Gaal fought death, and through a hole in the roof name get glimpses of what may have happened. On the other hand, the sorcerer and his evil allies are acting on behalf of the Lord of Deepest Darkness, the name of whom alone ought to serve as a warning. Books have power in this world – Chocma reads from the Book of Wisdom, which shines a blue light (good) and vanquishes their enemies. It must be the New Testament equivalent, for the Book of History and True Wisdom is even more powerful. There’s a pigeon that is a kind of supernatural guide that reflects the role of the Holy Spirit – although a pigeon seems a lot humbler than a dove, to me!
Although there are literal battles, they are written with a child audience in mind, but there are also internal struggles, as the children have to obey what seem like impossible instructions. The introduction of Theophilus, a comedy flying horse, would appeal, although he is involved in one very scary chase involving the monstrous Qadar of the night skies. It was Chocma, who is capable of appearing like an old woman or a beautiful young woman with the same eyes, the personification of wisdom, and the wolves who stayed with me over the years.
There is romance, noble captured King Kardia is engaged to beautiful Princess Suneideisis, but the sorcerer Hociono’s meddling ruined their engagement as much as King Kardia’s kingdom. It’s all rather underwritten – Lisa, who befriended both Kardia and Sun is invested, but the author suspected his target audience would rather read about wolves, swords, goblins and ogres and writes rather glancingly about it. My eyebrows shot up when I learned that Kardia and Sun met when she was six and she was deeply in love with him at about sixteen when they got engaged, but the narrative is positive about their reunion, and their wedding is part of the celebrations after evil is vanquished, drought ended and all restored.
One other notable feature of the book is the narrator, who seems to be telling the story as Wes, Lisa and Kurt told it to him (although there are a few scenes that aren’t strictly speaking from the children’s perspectives.) Their Uncle John appears at the end, and it’s suggested that he too has been through the TV sets to Anthropos. It’s never stated outright that he is the narrator, but it’s not ruled out either, and the fact that the character shares the same name as the author was highly suggestive to me as a child.
Anyway, this is the first of a trilogy and I will try to read the other two this year (I think I remember the second book more clearly.)
Rereading this book as an adult was a singular experience for me, as it had been read aloud to me as a child, so some names and phrases were ringing in my ears as I reread them now. ‘The Tower of Geburah’ belongs to the subgenre of fantasy children’s books that takes the Christian allegory of the Narnia books as its model. If you want to use shorthand, you might call it Narnia for the TV generation. It was first published in the 1970s and its heroes are living in wintery Winnipeg, an exotic location for me, hearing it read in the late 1980s, probably.
Wesley, Lisa and Kurt are staying with their uncle, who is away from home for a brief trip. Their loving parents are away for a much longer trip, as parents so conveniently and often are in children’s literature. The neighbour who is meant to be looking out for them can’t come over because of a family crisis, so the three children end up in the attic room, where they know they’re not really supposed to go. There they find four strange antique TV sets that pique their curiosity. The TVs magically come on, with a riddle appearing all of them and then four different images on all four screens.
It is Lisa who finds that her hand and then the rest of her body can slip into the TV set. Wesley and Kurt can’t believe it, but the screen turns dark, no longer showing a tiny Lisa and what looked like a prisoner in a dungeon. Her brothers choose to go through another set together to join an old woman sweeping in front of a cottage, hoping to rescue Lisa…
And so the three children find themselves in the land of Anthropos, which has a touch of the Narnia about it, but reminded me more of Tolkien’s Middle Earth, especially ‘The Hobbit’ with a touch of Errol Flynn’s Sherwood forest and castle of Nottingham. A noble king is a prisoner, his jailer a jinn. There are talking wolves, known as the Koach, dwarves who are called Matmon, and a House of Wisdom that is bigger than it seems from the outside. There are magical objects, particularly a piece of jewellery that makes its wearer invisible, but shows things as they really are. As with Narnia, there are influences from Greek myth (more the evil beings), but there’s no real sense of Tolkien’s cohesive reimagining of European myths. I didn’t sense a pattern in character names or place names – if anything, there’s a middle eastern tinge to some.
At first, the children seemed a little bland. As the oldest, Wesley is a worrier, while Kurt, the youngest, is more impulsive, while Lisa displays some traditionally feminine traits. Their age isn’t mentioned, although they’re probably not yet teenagers, so end of primary school/start of secondary school. Conveniently for plot purposes, they’re used to horse riding and sailing. But as we follow them, it turns out that they, children though they are, are meant to save a kingdom, each goes through an individual journey, with one moment where Lisa thinks she knows best leaving her in a very precarious situation, where her fastidiousness plays against her. She ends up in a desperate plight, and the way she is rescued works as a metaphor for conversion to Christianity.
Wesley and Kurt have the advantage of a glimpse of their futures. Apart from becoming a military commander thanks to a supernatural boost, Wesley’s journey to faith is less dramatic, while Kurt is tempted by the promise of becoming a magician and impressing his older siblings to do something on the isle of Geburah that he comes to be heartily ashamed of, and comes to terms with by meeting Gaal.
Gaal is the Aslan or Jesus Christ figure in this book. Daringly, he’s no lion, but human(-seeming.) He is referred to as the Shepherd, the Son of the High Emperor, known by other names in other lands. At first, there’s a rumour that he is in Anthropos, a kingdom that turned its back on him under the influence of the sorcerer Hocoino and has been in drought ever since. Then, one by one, the children encounter him. He is described as a mass of paradoxes, white-haired, yet vigorous. As for his face,
‘It was young, yet it was old, very, very old. It was merry yet it spoke of untold sorrows. It was kind yet it was stern; tender, yet irredeemably tough; gentle yet as strong as steel.’ (p.175)
He bears a sword, not a shepherd’s crook, and his perfume is reminiscent of cedarwood.
The Christian message is fairly clear. As I said, each child comes to have a personal relationship with Gaal, coming to obey his orders in order to save Anthropos and to love him.
In one chapter, they stay in a cave where they are told Gaal fought death, and through a hole in the roof name get glimpses of what may have happened. On the other hand, the sorcerer and his evil allies are acting on behalf of the Lord of Deepest Darkness, the name of whom alone ought to serve as a warning. Books have power in this world – Chocma reads from the Book of Wisdom, which shines a blue light (good) and vanquishes their enemies. It must be the New Testament equivalent, for the Book of History and True Wisdom is even more powerful. There’s a pigeon that is a kind of supernatural guide that reflects the role of the Holy Spirit – although a pigeon seems a lot humbler than a dove, to me!
Although there are literal battles, they are written with a child audience in mind, but there are also internal struggles, as the children have to obey what seem like impossible instructions. The introduction of Theophilus, a comedy flying horse, would appeal, although he is involved in one very scary chase involving the monstrous Qadar of the night skies. It was Chocma, who is capable of appearing like an old woman or a beautiful young woman with the same eyes, the personification of wisdom, and the wolves who stayed with me over the years.
There is romance, noble captured King Kardia is engaged to beautiful Princess Suneideisis, but the sorcerer Hociono’s meddling ruined their engagement as much as King Kardia’s kingdom. It’s all rather underwritten – Lisa, who befriended both Kardia and Sun is invested, but the author suspected his target audience would rather read about wolves, swords, goblins and ogres and writes rather glancingly about it. My eyebrows shot up when I learned that Kardia and Sun met when she was six and she was deeply in love with him at about sixteen when they got engaged, but the narrative is positive about their reunion, and their wedding is part of the celebrations after evil is vanquished, drought ended and all restored.
One other notable feature of the book is the narrator, who seems to be telling the story as Wes, Lisa and Kurt told it to him (although there are a few scenes that aren’t strictly speaking from the children’s perspectives.) Their Uncle John appears at the end, and it’s suggested that he too has been through the TV sets to Anthropos. It’s never stated outright that he is the narrator, but it’s not ruled out either, and the fact that the character shares the same name as the author was highly suggestive to me as a child.
Anyway, this is the first of a trilogy and I will try to read the other two this year (I think I remember the second book more clearly.)
