Although this will never be as close to my heart as is the Box of Delights, it's still a pretty charming book. Less magical, by a long shot, despite the presence of a coven of witches, and also less fantastic, but with the same old fashioned charm of the second book. I read it less than half as often as the Box of Delights, which I read virtually ever Christmas, but I'm happy to have read it right now, when I need charm and low stakes adventures.

The Midnight Folk is another in a long list of “How have I never read this before?” books. It’s exactly the kind of book that I love. Tell me a cat leads a boy into a magical world, and I'm there. Published in 1927, it references earlier works (Shakespeare in obvious ways, but also, if I’m reading it correctly, Dickens, Wind in the Willows, and perhaps even The Wonderful Wizard of Oz), and it seems to be an influence in numerous other works that followed in the twentieth century. I can’t recall having heard of a connection between John Masefield and C. S. Lewis (I’m sure they knew of each other, at least), but it’s hard to believe Lewis wasn’t influenced by Masefield in certain key images of The Voyage of the Dawn Treader.

In The Midnight Folk, Masefield includes no chapter breaks at all, which gives the narrative an unbroken, dreamlike feeling. The separation between one day and night and the next is tenuous, and as I read, I sensed time moving differently. Strange, unsettling things happen throughout the book, all of which are received very evenly and calmly by Kay Harker, the young protagonist. The tone of the writing lures me in to accept everything just as Kay does, with the result that the book is illogical but perfect. I love the way Masefield brings together tropes from mythology, fairy tale, Arthurian legend, pirate adventure, and the search for lost treasure. Having pieces of the past revealed to Kay little by little really drew me into the story. And the way the characters across several generations share the same names was fantastic. Madeleine L’Engle wrote the afterword in the edition I read, and that makes perfect sense to me, since she took that idea of names across generations for her novel A Swiftly Tilting Planet.

I really enjoyed this book, and I’m eager to continue on to The Box of Delights.

A really charming read. What's not to like about an orphaned boy having nightly adventures with various small animals that can talk to him as he flies about through the sky trying to find a long lost treasure and is being prevented from succeeding at every turn by an evil governess?

British children from the 1920s must have been far more literate than American children from the 1960s (my generation), because though reading this as an adult in my retirement years, I found the sophistication of language and plot in The Midnight Folk far exceeds what I would have found leisurely reading during my childhood years.

It was really quaint, and it made it really hard for me to get into. I struggled to finish it, but was determined to plough through once I'd gotten 50 pages in.

DNF
Sad, because the whole premise sounded so interesting. Perhaps I’ll give it another chance at another time. But it was just very odd and it made no sense. Most of the book felt random and I had no idea what on earth was going on. Oh well, I tried.

Learnt a rather old English phrase from the 1700s - "All my eye and Betty Martin", meaning humbug, which is the opposite of what this book was!