These days I well up ridiculously easily, so the thought of a film that might end in a place where "a little boy and his Bear will always be playing" rang alarm bells.
But I braved Goodbye Christopher Robin and enjoyed it. The boy was well able to look after himself in his page-boy haircut years, but he was heartbreakingly young when he enlisted to serve in the second world war.
The film did enough to show the average moviegoer that A.A. Milne was not a children's writer who had taken it into his head to write a serious book about mankind and war. When he started writing about his son and his son's toys in the mid-1920s, he was already known as a humourist, playwright and detective writer.
It was the books about his son and his son's toys that were the aberration, even though they came to dominate his reputation and obscure his work for adults,
My big criticism is that I found the portrait of Milne's wife Daphne too much. She never had a kind word or glance for her husband or little boy. The younger Milne's relationship with his mother was strained - he hardly visited her after his father died - but the film's treatment of her felt unfair.
Still, I enjoyed Goodbye Christopher Robin and can recommend it.
Two observations, if I may....
ReplyDeleteI once came across some of AA Milne's War Poetry, written in the 1940s when he was in the Home Guard. Not exactly Owen or Sassoon, but worth spending a bit of time with. Unusual, in that they were an old man's perception of the war.
Also, if you haven't done so already, try to get hold of a copy of EH Shepard's autobiography Drawn From Memory; it might be on BBC iPlayer, as they did it as the Book At Bedtime some years ago. It's a delight - he was clearly a very contented man, who brought happiness to most of the people he came in contact with. Definitely not a Misery Memoir of the type written these days.
Thank you! Shepard was a friend and neighbour of Malcolm Saville - they used to go walking together and he illustrated Saville's Susan and Bill series. As these were about children in a post-war new town, I'm not sure his illustrations were a good fit.
ReplyDeleteAnd Shepard's illustrations were key in the transition of Richard Jefferies' Bevis from a three-volume Victorian novel into a classic children's story.
'before... the first world war... detective writer'? His only detective story, The Red House Mystery, which I strongly recommend if you don't know it (though I rather suspect you do) was written after WW1. It could not be otherwise, because in the story Bill Beverley makes clever use of the smattering of Morse code he learned during his war service.
ReplyDeleteThanks, I'll reword that. The important point is that he wrote it before he started writing about Christopher Robin or his toys
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