The Trout Beneath
May 30, 2012 | Sarah Ellis | Comments (0)
Ever alert to references to children's books changing lives, I was delighted to come across this memory of reading Beatrix Potter's The Tale of Mr. Jeremy Fisher by science fiction writer China Mieville, in the June 4/11 issue of The New Yorker, p 80 - 81:
"Your dapper batrachian hero sits on his lily pad. He doesn't see that beneath him a trout is rising. Its mouth is open, heading for Mr. Fisher's dangling right leg. The submerged, predatory yellow eye rolls. You always have to take deep breaths before turning to this page. This is where you learn the vertigo of knowing something a protagonist doesn't. For you, the tradition of the glimpsed numinous starts here. Later, there'll be Julian of Norwich, Hildegard of Bingen, Francis Thompson, Gerard Manley Hopkins. For now, there are monsters underneath -- the Devil, Quatermass's pit, Lovecraft's burrowing Dholes, "Jaws." All of which, significant as they are, are only ever echoes of Mr. Fisher's trout."