At the Back of the North Wind

This has all the lyrical prose of a Victorian Children’s Fairy Tale, whimsical and wholesome. It dangerously approached saccharine sermonizing – if not for the North Wind. Sometimes a Tall Woman with Dark Hair, sometimes a Wolf, or a Fairy, or an Unseen Breath, she is the most intriguing character in a fairy tale I have encountered in some time. Biden by her unnamed Master, she often does what seems cruel, causing pain, suffering, and even death. And yet, in the end, is it revealed that all she does is for the healing, the betterment, and the good fortune of people. She is neither callous nor wanton in her destruction, but precise and obedient, doing her duty with a single-minded service to her master. A the Back of the North Wind show more is a place, a place she cannot see or visit, but a place she often takes those she is bidden to carry there. It seems a place where neither time nor illness nor hungry nor suffering dwell.
Daylight is a bit too cherubic for my taste, but I related to his constant out-of-place nature. He doesn’t fit in but doesn’t seem to notice. It is thought Daylight was modeled after MacDonald’s own son, as a tribute to the boy. His angelic goodness is off-set by the secondary characters, rough-and-tumble crowd, cabbies and street urchins, drunks and benevolent gentlemen. They seem real in a way Daylight does not. But perhaps that is the point.
This is a fantastic fairy tale, whimsical and imaginative, but with a somber ending that makes this far more than just a gossamer tale of nonsense for children. To understand that pain and death are important teachers, vital to our life and growth, is a lesson worth teaching our children. MacDonald’s story helps explain this concept to children in a way that makes sense to them. And may help adults understand a concept that seems so contrary to our minds. show less

I am indebted to one of my fellow reviewers for my review, whose horrified thoughts on the death of Diamond, prompted me to think more deeply about it myself. For this reader, Diamond’s death was a pointless, disappointing waste, and killing him spoilt the beauty Macdonald’s creation. This reviewer felt that Diamond should have had his happy ending, one where he grew to a happy, successful and accepted adulthood. In saying this, I believe the reviewer has forgotten who the author is and what he intended in writing this novel.
From my perspective, I believe that George Macdonald could have written no other ending. Diamonds' death wasn't pointless at all. In fact it was a vital culmination to all that had gone before. Diamond show more discovered in the course of his interactions with the North Wind that there was more to this world than what we can see. The longing to see and experience this world beyond clung to him and set him apart from the world of people around him. Throughout At the Back of the North Wind, Macdonald demonstrated to his readers a spiritual world that is beyond what our eyes perceive. However, to have ended there, to only show the unseen world of the living, would have been to truncate and hobble his message. As a man of faith, George Macdonald would not have seen death as a pointless waste, but simply a doorway into the great forever. As such, he needed to show that the unseen extends beyond this life. He could only do this through the death of Diamond and his innocent crossing from this world into the next.
The reviewer is also forgetting the era in which this was written. Modern children in the western world have little occasion to encounter death. It is sanitised and segregated, and given our healthcare, the death of children is not common. This would not have been the case in Victorian England. Death, including child death, was frequent and children would have been familiar with it. Indeed, Macdonald himself experienced much death, having lost his mother as a child, his sister, brother and father as a young man and later four of his own children. In that context, I believe the death of Diamond was intended as a fantastical comfort and encouragement to Macdonald’s readers, and a reminder that there is something better beyond this world.
At the Back of the North Wind is one of those books that take time to digest. It’s been a privilege to encounter it as my introduction to the works of George Macdonald, and I look forward to reading more of his writings in the coming months.
As I note, I really appreciate the hard work Librivox volunteers put into providing public domain audiobooks. In this case, most of the narrators were very good, with just a few that I didn’t enjoy. But I do wish the book could have been read by just one narrator. show less

"At the Back of the North Wind" is something wholly different than most of what I've read. It is a book of peace rather than conflict, which goes against the nature of plot as we know it. The only thing I can really compare it to is the slow windings of "Goodbye to a River" by John Graves, though the peace in that book is tinged with regret, while there is none of that here. I have rarely come across a character for whom I care so much as I do little Diamond. His simple, innocent, and true manner touches me deeply. This is one of those books that changes you, and for the better. I will treasure it always.

This has been a weird year for reading, where I’ve muffled through, started and stopped, and rejected many books. My father read At the Back of the North Wind to my siblings and I, most memorably when we were staying at a windy house on a hill in rural Vermont. It’s part old-school children’s adventure book, but mostly it’s a collection of prose poetry, bits and pieces of things the author needed a place for, some philosophy, some theology, and of course plenty of treacle. I’ve tried to go back and read it many times since childhood, but usually stopped after a few chapters, due to the meandering quality. This year I forgive it all the faults, and enjoyed it, and broke the reading drought of 2023.

Summary: Diamond becomes friend with the North Wind, who takes him on many adventures, even while he is a help to everyone he meets and known for his rhymes.

Diamond is a young boy, who is described as having “a tile loose,” and yet is so pleasant and helpful and even precocious that he is a delight to his parents and all those his life touches. His first bedroom is in a barn above the stable of “Old” Diamond, the faithful horse his father drives, first as a livery man and later as a cabbie. The wall behind his head has a hole in it that he and his mother both try to plug until he learns that in so doing he is plugging one of the windows of the North Wind. Diamond befriends her and goes on a number of night adventures. In one, he show more helps a little girl, Nanny, a street sweeper. Most of the adventures with North Wind are delightful but not all. On one, North Wind is a great storm that swamps a ship, with the loss of all but a handful aboard. At another point, he learns of the land at “the back of the North Wind,” and in a time when he is very ill, he is permitted to go there, a place North Wind herself has not gone, by passing through North Wind into a paradise-like place.

On his return, a crisis had passed in his illness, and a turning point occurred in his life, much like that of many who report near-death experiences. He has an uncanny capacity to create rhymes that soothe the baby in his home and improvise on nursery rhymes. By now his father is driving cab and he learns to handle Diamond, and takes his father’s place during illness. There is a period where he rarely encounters North Wind. But he helps Nanny who has taken sick, seeking the help of Mr. Raymond, a philanthropist, who had been a fare and was taken with the boy. While she was in the hospital, she has dreams of going to the Moon, which she tells Diamond, making him wonder if his own adventures with North Wind were real or also just dreams–or can dreams be real?

I won’t reveal the ending except to suggest that I believe Diamond discovers the answer to his questions, which remind one of the questions one might have about the life of faith. And what of the North Wind? We have both a beautiful woman who creates a nest for Diamond in her hair or holds him to her bosom, but is also a fierce power sending a ship full of people to their deaths. Is North Wind a kind of angel of death (very different than typically portrayed)? Diamond is given up for dead at the time he goes “back of the North Wind.” Death hovers over this story, as it did over life in this period where children often died young, a pregnancy could end in death, or an illness strike down a hearty man, as it nearly does Diamond’s father. There is at once an inscrutable character about death but also the assurances of One who will be near us in our dying, even a friend of the dying.

Most of us do not have near death experiences from which we return. MacDonald doesn’t shy away from this reality. In Diamond, we have one whose life is transformed by dying, “as one who has been back of the North Wind.” And the story suggests to me that when we face death’s realities and our hope for what is beyond, we also may be changed. Stern stuff for young readers in our day, but in MacDonald’s time, children became acquainted early with death and needed stories to help them live in light of its reality. As do we. show less

This has all the lyrical prose of a Victorian Children’s Fairy Tale, whimsical and wholesome. It dangerously approached saccharine sermonizing – if not for the North Wind. Sometimes a Tall Woman with Dark Hair, sometimes a Wolf, or a Fairy, or an Unseen Breath, she is the most intriguing character in a fairy tale I have encountered in some time. Biden by her unnamed Master, she often does what seems cruel, causing pain, suffering, and even death. And yet, in the end, is it revealed that all she does is for the healing, the betterment, and the good fortune of people. She is neither callous nor wanton in her destruction, but precise and obedient, doing her duty with a single-minded service to her master. A the Back of the North Wind show more is a place, a place she cannot see or visit, but a place she often takes those she is bidden to carry there. It seems a place where neither time nor illness nor hungry nor suffering dwell.
Daylight is a bit too cherubic for my taste, but I related to his constant out-of-place nature. He doesn’t fit in but doesn’t seem to notice. It is thought Daylight was modeled after MacDonald’s own son, as a tribute to the boy. His angelic goodness is off-set by the secondary characters, rough-and-tumble crowd, cabbies and street urchins, drunks and benevolent gentlemen. They seem real in a way Daylight does not. But perhaps that is the point.
This is a fantastic fairy tale, whimsical and imaginative, but with a somber ending that makes this far more than just a gossamer tale of nonsense for children. To understand that pain and death are important teachers, vital to our life and growth, is a lesson worth teaching our children. MacDonald’s story helps explain this concept to children in a way that makes sense to them. And may help adults understand a concept that seems so contrary to our minds. show less

I never came across this book as a child and can't imagine what I'd have made of it if I had. The main character, a little cherub of a boy called Diamond, after the horse who sleeps in the stable below him, meets the North Wind, personified as a woman with long flowing hair, who blows in through a chink in the wall next to his bed. Returning time after time, she sweeps him off on various adventures around London and elsewhere, on her various missions that include punishing a drunken nurse and sinking a ship. At one point Diamond is taken to the Far North and goes through North Wind to a land of... well, I won't say, but he comes back most poetical and even sweeter than before. This is only about halfway through the book, and from that show more moment he takes to driving his father's cab and delighting everyone he meets, spreading goodness all around.
This is only one aspect of the tale, which also includes a separate fairy story, dreams, several poems and songs, and what I liked most about it, a picture of life in London in Victorian times: the horse-drawn cabs, children sweeping street crossings to make a little money, family life in different realms of society, a gruesome glimpse of poverty wrapped in a moralizing blanket.
It is a cake of sweet Victoria sponge sandwiched with jam and butter icing and topped with honey and marzipan - many layers, but you can only manage a small slice. show less