The Secret World of Arrietty opens this week, an animated film by Studio Ghibli based on Mary Norton’s The Borrowers. Written between 1952 and 1982, The Borrowers is a series of five novels about a family of tiny people (only six inches high) who live in the walls of an Edwardian English country home. Everything Pod, Homily, and Arrietty need for their lives they “borrow” from the “human beans” who live upstairs. Objects taken from the humans are re-adapted for their tiny world: spools become side tables, plush-lined jewelry boxes become beds, the Clock family uses an iron cog for their fireplace and blotting paper for their carpet.
One of the primary appeals of the series is the way our ordinary world becomes re-purposed to the world of the Borrowers. Norton is very skilled at writing descriptions from the viewpoint of her characters, allowing the reader to see the world in a different way. But the central conflict in the series --- Arrietty’s longing to see the outside world --- pushes the series out beyond the house in the first book, to the outside world, where the Borrowers have more to contend with than just being “seen” by humans, but must also confront wild animals and having to glean natural resources from their environment.
Each of the books pushes a little further into the larger world with the titles reflecting broader horizons. Borrowers Afield is about the adventures of the Clock family after they leave their original home beneath the floorboards and make their home in a boot in the outside world. Borrowers Afloat features their adventures --- some of them afloat inside an abandoned teapot --- traveling to a model village where they are told they will find others of their kind. Borrowers Aloft is about what happens when the inhabitants of the model village are discovered by humans who want to put the Borrowers on display. The Clock family enacts a daring escape in a homemade hot air balloon, taking them aloft as in the title. The final book, Borrowers Avenged, was written almost 30 years after the original novel and features the family settling in an English country church.
I had not read these books since I was a little girl. At that time, the books inspired me to make my own tiny Borrowers world, essentially homemade dollhouses constructed out of re-purposed household objects in shoeboxes. What I loved about the books is that they seemed real to me in a way that tales about other tiny people --- fairies, for instance --- did not. The Borrowers series does not rely upon magic, just a different view of the world. Revisiting these books as an adult, I found them just as charming, but also poignant and a little old-fashioned. (Blotting paper, for instance, is something I’ve never encountered outside the pages of books.)
As an adult I find Arrietty’s plight, trapped beneath the floorboards and only able to see the outside world through a grating, all the more moving. And her insistence on befriending humans, despite the danger this involves both to herself, her family, and their way of life, is not just understandable, but essential. She is an only child and has never met any Borrowers beyond her immediate family. As far as she knows, she is the last of her kind. She is lonely, desperate for company and for wider horizons. Her story, which involves the expansion of her world from her under-the-floorboards home to the outside world with its many dangers, is the story of every child growing up. In some ways, the Borrowers and their tiny world can be seen as a metaphor for the way children live in our world. Children are at the mercy of adults who provide for them. They are constantly repurposing objects abandoned by grownups for their own use and play.
I have not yet seen Studio Ghibli’s adaptation, but I’m looking forward to it. Often called “the Walt Disney of Japan,” Hayao Miyazaki’s studio has often championed the adventures of children, especially little girls. Not all of Ghibli’s films are appropriate for young children, but they have a very good track record with adaptations, including that of Howl's Moving Castle by Diana Wynne Jones, which quite possibly improved upon the original. I can’t wait to see the vision Ghibli has brought to The Borrowers, stories that themselves are about seeing the world in a different way. For adult readers, we are asked to see the world through the eyes of a child. For young readers, we are asked to imagine creatures even smaller than ourselves. Either way, The Borrowers remains a reminder that whether we acknowledge them or not, the world we live in is shared by other creatures who view it in very different ways for themselves.
Children's literature has many books about miniaturization whether it's stories about fairies, toys that come to life, or animals that inhabit the human world. What are your favorite books about miniaturization?
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