Riggs’ book can’t be pigeonholed
MISS PEREGRINE’S HOME
FOR PECULIAR CHILDREN
By Ransom Riggs
Quirk Books, $17.99
There aren’t enough original ideas in this commercial world where nepotism outpaces merit, celebrity autobiographers don’t really write, and fame deservedly lasts 15 minutes. So it is satisfying when a new novelist and a small press combine to produce a breakout book that keeps you reading and keeps you guessing. Hollywood took note and quickly bought the rights.
Enveloped in tremulous fog, yet elaborately staged, Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children makes one wonder where the phrase “time stood still” came from. In the simplest way of presenting what you’re in for, the author sorts through a pile of vintage photographs (think flea market) and weaves a magical story from them. It’s Tod Browning’s 1932 film Freaks meets Alice in Wonderland. Or something like that.
This book cannot be jammed into any one genre: to say it is rooted in the history of World War II is not quite right, because it floats (like one of the characters) more than it is rooted, and it challenges our linear understanding of time. To say it embodies the love story of a grandfather and grandson who have eyes for the same girl makes it sound kinky when it is anything but. Indeed, to say it “embodies” at all is to give it greater corporeality than imagination, which is also problematic.
The story centers around a single day, Sept. 3, 1940, when German aircraft patrolled the skies over England, and night rained bombs on a remote island in Wales.
A survivor named Abe Portman came to America; but the dark events he witnessed never disappeared. He tells his stories to his somewhat skeptical 16-year-old grandson Jacob, who feels a compulsion to visit the Welsh site and learn the truth behind the mysteries that directed Abe’s mind. Jacob convinces his indulgent dad, a wildlife enthusiast ever working on his first nature book, to take him there.
The atmospherics, inside and out, steer Jacob’s adventure. There’s an old wreck of a house, sunken vessels, oddly lit tunnels, muddy bogs, twisting paths, footprints, echoes and rapidly changing weather. It’s all so mesmerizing. And what about the children in the old photographs? Were they real? They were certainly peculiar.
In Abe Portman’s vocabulary, to be a “peculiar,” as distinguished from “common,” is to be differently endowed and in some need of protection. And if Jacob actually found people like that — like the photos he discovered among his grandfather’s possessions — he would understand what was haunting old Abe.
More to the point, he could get to the bottom of Sept. 3, 1940, a night of violent fireworks that swirled about the world — some world — where raindrops stopped before reaching the ground and peculiar children lived and/or died, or were resurrected “like some Sisyphean suicide cult, condemned to be blown up and stitched back together for eternity.”
You could say that it’s only magic if something amazing happens when you’re not prepared for it. In his debut novel, Ransom Riggs, a little-known travel writer before his breakout book of 2011, takes magic to a new place.
Andrew Burstein is Manship Professor of History at LSU and author of books on American politics and culture. His website is: http://www.andburstein.com.