The Box of Delights: Or When the Wolves Were Running (Kay Harker)

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There is SO much in this book that I'm surprised editors didn't catch and go, 'hang on a minute...', etc. Dr Philip W Errington, a senior specialist at Peter Harrington Rare Books, leading antiquarian specialists, and an expert on Masefield, has been working with the RSC as a consultant on The Box of Delights, which will be performed at the RST between 31 October and 7 January. Masefield, a former poet laureate, gave each chapter a rhyming couplet and interspersed the story with verse; his characters are “scrobbled” by kidnappers and danger is summoned by the haunting warning: “The wolves are running”. Piers Torday’s adaptation retains much of the idiosyncratic language, adds comedy to the menace, features plenty of carolling (including a wonderful set piece to open the second half) and gives Kay a more clearcut mission. It also uses an affecting modern-day framing device with Kay and his grandson, visiting for Christmas after his parents’ separation, underlining the novel’s view of the fragile preciousness of family. Torday also solves the problem of feeling deflated by the novel’s ending as he immediately establishes a dream world.

John Masefield adapted an opera libretto from his book, also incorporating elements of The Midnight Folk, which was eventually set to music in the late 1980s by the British composer Robert Steadman. Masefield has a way with a well-turned, memorable sentence: "And now, Master Harker, now that the Wolves are Running, perhaps you could do something to stop their Bite?"

Contents

The Box of Delights is a children's fantasy novel by John Masefield. It is a sequel to The Midnight Folk, and was first published in 1935. It is also known as When The Wolves Were Running. It was also ‘classic’ in the sense that it was period, cosy and wilfully old-fashioned. This sort of thing - the ceaseless round of unthreatening adventures with starchy Edwardian prigs - earned the BBC a reputation for well-mannered bourgeois stuffiness,. A parade of Pevensies and Bastables; poppets in pinafores befriending talking ponies, gaggles of Fauntleroys discovering they were princes of a nation of animatronic otters. I’ve often thought that I’d like to return to the full, original novel someday and see what I think of it now. Looking into editions of the real book, I learned that the story’s protagonist, Kay Harker, also appears in an earlier novel by Masefield, The Midnight Folk. So I started with that one and then went straight on into The Box of Delights (both in the New York Review edition).

I don’t know how I feel about this one, and it may be too soon to tell, as I literally just finished it. Started this as a Christmas Read-Aloud with my kids - I thought it had so much potential - and they DNF’d it. To them it was confusing, and they couldn’t tell what was real and what was not. It seemed like characters went from A to C without telling how they got there or what happened to B. And because they couldn’t tell where it was going and get that invested in the characters, they just weren’t interested. Plus the chapters were long and it didn’t seem Christmas-y at all. The dream cliche' makes me feel like I've wasted my time somehow, ESPECIALLY because 'The Midnight Folk' was JUST as magical and hard-to-believe (if you don't use imagination), yet it was all proclaimed true. There was NO reason whatsoever to write this off as a dream. None. I'm disappointed. For it is a cliché. We can probably let Lewis Carroll get away with it in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland as it’s a foundational example in children’s literature (and it becomes positively admirable in Through the Looking Glass when Carroll inverts it and Alice is told that she’s nothing but a thing in the Red King’s dream), but even there it’s an unsatisfactory rug-pull. The play’s director, Justin Audibert, said: “It’s a show that features trains, boats, planes, mythical creatures, a good and a very bad magician, and characters that magically turn into tiny versions of themselves, characters that transform into animals that fly through the air and swim in the sea. How exciting is that?

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Stylistically it's dated - with Enid Blyton-y dialogue. The magic seems barely thought out and apart from a few good moments at the start is pretty mundane. The writing of the action ending is really bad and you barely get any sense of real geography or concrete quality to it. The deus ex machina has nothing to do with the main story or plot and the boy hero is basically a witness to events that do not require any action on his part. Also, The way the police and grown ups behave in response to the children going missing is totally unbelievable and though you might get away with it once - afterall grownups in kids books are always a little clueless - The fact everyone reacts this way as multiple characters are kidnapped in suspicious circumstances starts to stretch my credulity to the limit. Design will come from RSC Associate and Olivier award-winning Tom Piper, who most recently created the sets for the RSC’s productions of Hamnet in the Swan Theatre and The Tempest in the Royal Shakespeare Theatre in Spring 2023. But I just couldn't get into this book. Perhaps because I haven't read The Midnight Folk, thus coming in mid-story, as it were. But the plot seemed convoluted and disjointed, the characters seemed stilted, and the battle of good vs. evil (the staple of every really good children's books) seemed confused -- I never could sort out why the Wolves wanted to win or what they thought they might gain by winning.

Asked why, Errington added: “He was a very bad businessman and when people came to him and asked to do movie adaptations of his plays and novels, he simply said no or held out for ridiculously high contracts. Poet John Masefield's 1935 British Empire-era fantasy finds twelve-year-old Kay Harker home from his boarding school just in time to help a magical old Punch and Judy showman. At least, that seems to be what happens. The plot's pretty convoluted. But the images Masefield conjures up are gorgeous. The book that always had the magic of a snowy English Christmas…. It’s still a lovely book, magical and funny, to be read by anybody of any age.” —The Horn Book He was the one that suffered because ultimately they never made the films. The one that really hurts is that Richard Burton was going to be in a filmed version of Masefield’s play Good Friday. If Richard Burton had been in a biblical play that was shown every Easter, you would still know about it, but that play has just been forgotten.” Although not hugely familiar with John Mansfield’s 1935 children’s book, The Box of Delights, and only having a vague memory of the 1984 TV series adaptation, we knew enough of the story as an adventure into a world of magicians and time travel to expect to be blown away by the mystery and illusion of Piers Torday’s adaptation (which had previously run at the atmospheric Wilton’s Music Hall in East London) at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre in Stratford upon Avon.This witty and wonderful children's novel by the onetime Poet Laureate of the UK is widely beloved on the other side of the pond, but lesser known here. A travesty, that, since it's a magic box in itself: a magical adventure that begins with a boy on his way home for Christmas, stopped by a man who implores him, 'And now, Master Harker, of Seekings, now that the Wolves are Running, as you will have seen, perhaps you would do something to stop their Bite?' Enter wizards and witches, mice, Roman soldiers, the toughest little girl you'll ever meet, and Christmas just might be saved after all. Young Kay Harker, returning from school to his family home Seekings and his festive visitors in the shape of a gang of cousins, is given the Box of the title to care for and protect by a mysterious travelling Punch and Judy man, Cole Hawlings. As is the case in these types of books, the Box is a treasure of such magnitude that by rights it should be entrusted to a private army rather than a small boy, and it isn't long before a gang of crooks with a rather magical bent, led by the dark Abner Brown, are on its trail and menacing Kay and his cousins. In fact, the whole book is shot through with a folklorish, mythological flavour, and even the "real" world that Kay inhabits is peopled by a cast of often eerie, mysterious, enigmatic and sometimes downright scary figures. Masefield then, at the drop of a hat, switches between his poetic descriptions and episodes that are downright fairytale-ish or Narnia-esque, with talking animals and mice armed with sewing-needle rapiers. Eleven-year-old me would have been enchanted with all the period detail & would have giddily given it four stars. Old-old me says, eh, it's a three. What a difference a few decades (and the full text) make! I’m so glad I’ve returned to this amazing story. I see it as a bridge between George MacDonald and C. S. Lewis, bringing in elements of almost every story before and after it. It is a continuous story, but it’s also a series of episodes that sometimes veer into the bizarre. For example, most of the town is “scrobbled” by a gang, and no one, including the police, seems to care very much, even about small children being whisked away for days at a time. Kay seems to have total freedom to do anything he likes, which sometimes involves adventures that could be extremely perilous. For me, though, all of this works together in a dreamy story that invites all kinds of symbolic interpretation but will never reveal whether any particular interpretation is intended. I wouldn’t want it to make any more logical sense than it does—though I see that this mysterious, mystical aspect of it was surely too much for my elementary-school understanding. I only wish I’d rediscovered it in time to read it to my kids. We would have had a grand time laughing and puzzling through it together.

This is a curious mixture of reality and fantasy: we have gangsters, magic, time travel. At times it was difficult to know just what was imagery and what was fantasy. It was interesting that, unlike in a lot of books, here we get children operating both on their own and with adults. I enjoyed the old-style British reality, such as the interactions with the police. I also liked the integration of religion into the essence of the book. Young Kay still drove me crazy and I never knew when he was speaking to others or muttering to himself. This edition thankfully explains some of those issues by explaining that Masefield's original manuscript had never been corrected until now, which explains my original childhood bias. Long story short, the first publication of this book left several passages out, which the NYR edition fixes. At the train station on his way home from school for the Christmas holiday, Kay Harker, the main character of The Box of Delights, encounters a mysterious Punch and Judy man named Cole Hawlings. The two hit if off so well that when Hawlings needs someone to hide and guard his box of delights he entrusts it to Kay. As Kay enjoys the powers given to him by the box - to move swiftly, to shrink, to travel through time - he also becomes aware of a strange series of disappearances around town. Not only have several local clergyman been "scrobbled" but some of Kay's houseguests, Kay's guardian Caroline Louisa, and Cole Hawlings himself have gone missing as well. Kay realizes all of these kidnappings must be attempts to gain access to the box of delights and in trying to protect it, he has a variety of thrilling adventures.

Then the WORST happened. The WORST THING that can possible happen in ANY book EVER... happened in this book. The most horrible faux pas of ALL writing of all time! The last sentence of the book... "Kay woke up, and it was all a dream." It starts well with some very atmospheric scenes – the men on the train and Cole Hawkins magic show are particularly good, as are the trips to the fort – but as it goes on it has become very repetitive and convoluted. How many times do we have to have Kay 'go small' to spy on Abner talking to himself in exposition to reveal endless details of the non existent plot?