The Five Love Languages of Children by Gary Chapman

Equally, there is a sense, at times that the narrator and the Swede are victims of their own imaginations.

The world around them may be shifting and something unfamiliar, unbound by the physical laws to which the world is subject is projecting into our reality. We have only the narrator’s (unreliable, shifting, if rich) description of the world around them to keep the reader informed of the situation in which they find themselves. Can we trust the narrator? Can the narrator trust that what he is experiencing is real?īlackwood never really makes it clear to the reader what the truth of the situation is. This shifting reality could be considered evidence of psychological trauma in the characters.

Their perception shifts, seeing the willows as protectors, friendly to them. This view of the world is not consistent, though. This refuge from the rising water is slowly being destroyed by the river while they are assailed from all sides what they, in one breath, rationalise as otters, dark shapes in the water, the other a sinister figure, threatening them whilst the willows surrounding them hem them in, like an army. This takes the narrative from the banal (though the majesty of nature can only be considered commonplace and everyday in the sense that it is all around us) and into the realms of the weird. Our narrator and his companion find themselves, as the story progresses, trapped on an island. Though the story, to this point, has acknowledged the awesome power of nature and its ability to reshape the landscape, this destructive power is within the realms of the everyday. Though the narrator is respectful of the river it does occasionally seem that the respect is born as much of fear as awe at its power. The mercurial nature of the river, the tendency of it to throw tantrums and destroy that which it has tired of seems, to the reader at least, to be clear. Sleepy at first, but later developing violent desires as it became conscious of its deep soul, it rolled, like some huge fluid being, though all the countries we had passed, holding our little craft on its mighty shoulders, playing roughly with us sometimes, yet always friendly and well meaning, till at length we had come inevitably to regard it as a Great Personage.” “From its tiny bubbling entry into the world among the pinewood gardens of Donaueschingen, until this moment when it began to play the river-game of losing itself among the deserted swamps, unobserved, unrestrained, it had seemed to us like following the grown of some living creature. A playful being which is capable of emotion and desires. It is an entity seemingly possessed of agency. The river of this story is alive not just in the sense that it is the home to flora and fauna. In The Willows, the narrator and his companion (‘the Swede’) are paddling up the Danube. Algernon Blackwood is one of the author’s with whom I was familiar although, I realise having read this, not familiar enough.

The Five Love Languages of Children by Gary Chapman