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The Green Child is the only completed novel by the English anarchist poet Herbert Read. First published by Heinemann in 1935, the story is based on the 12th-century legend of two green children who mysteriously appeared in the English village of Woolpit, apparently speaking in an unknown language.

The book is written in three distinct parts. The first begins and ends with the apparent death of the story's main protagonist, President Olivero, leader of the fictional South American Republic of Roncador. Parts two and three also end with Olivero's apparent death, in each case an allegory for his translation to a "more profound level of existence".

Biographical background and publication

Read wrote The Green Child relatively quickly, most of it in eight weeks or so. He was at that time becoming increasingly interested in the idea of unconscious composition, and the the first 16 pages of the manuscript—written on a different paper from the rest—have the appearance of recollecting a dream.

Plot summary

The story begins in 1861, with the faked assassination of President Olivero, dictator of the South American Republic of Roncador, who has has staged his own assassination. He returns to his native England, to the village where he was born and raised. On the evening of his arrival Olivero notices that the stream running through the village is flowing backwards, and he decides to follow the water upstream to discover what may be causing it to flow apparently uphill.

The stream's course leads Olivero to a mill where, through a lighted window, he sees a woman tied to a chair, being forced by the miller to drink the blood of a freshly slaughtered lamb. Instinctively, Olivero hurls himself through the open window. The miller offers no resistance and allows him to release the woman, whom he recognises by the colour of her skin as one of the two green children who had mysteriously arrived in the village on the day he left 30 years earlier; Olivero also recognises the miller as Kneeshaw, an ex-pupil at the village school where he had once taught. During a struggle between the two men Kneeshaw is accidentally drowned in the mill pond. The next morning Olivero and the green child, Sally, resume Olivero's quest to follow the stream to its destination, a pool in the moors high above the village. Paddling in the water, Sally begins to sink into the silvery sand covering the bed of the pool. Olivero rushes to her, and hand in hand they sink together beneath the pool.

The book's second part recounts the events between Oliver leaving the village as its young schoolmaster and his return as ex-President Olivero. He travels to London initially, hoping to find employment as a writer, but after three years spent working as a bookkeeper in a tailor's shop he takes passage on a ship which lands him in Cádiz, Spain. Unable to speak the language and in possession of a book by Voltaire he is arrested as a suspected revolutionary Jacobin. Held in prison for two years he learns Spanish from his fellow prisoners and determines to travel to one of the liberated American colonies he has learned of, where the possibility exists to establish a new world "free from the oppression and injustice of the old world".

Freed in an amnesty following the death of King Ferdinand of Spain, Oliver makes his way to Buenos Aires. There he is mistaken for an expected revolutionary agent and taken to meet General Santos, an officer in the Roncador Army. Together they hatch a plot to seize the country's capital city and assassinate its dictator. The revolution is successful, and "Don Olivero" finds himself leader of the Assembly, making him the new dictator of Roncador. Olivero remains in that position for 25 years, but comes to realise that his style of government is leading the country into stagnation and "moral flaccidity". He also begins to feel nostalgia for the English village where he was brought up, and resolves to escape. Wishing to avoid any suspicion that he is deserting Roncador, Olivero fakes his own assassination.

The final part of the book continues the story from when Olivero and Sally disappear under the water. A large bubble forms around them, transporting them to the centre of the pool and ascending into a large grotto, from where they proceed on foot through a series of adjoining caverns. Sally tells Olivero that this is the country she and her brother left 30 years ago. Soon they encounter a group of her people, to whom Sally, or Siloēn as she is properly known, explains that many years ago she wandered off and lost herself, but that that she has now returned with one who "was lost too, and now wishes to dwell among us". Olivero and Siloēn are welcomed into the community, where life is ordered around a progression from lower to upper ledges: the first ledge teaches the pleasures of youth; on the second ledge the pleasure of manual work is learned; on the third of opinion and argument; and finally, on the upper ledge, the "highest pleasure", of solitary thought.

Olivero soon tires of the first ledge, and leaving Siloēn behind he moves to the second, and eventually is allowed to move to the highest ledge of all, "the final stage of life". He selects a solitary grotto in which he is destined to spend what remains of his mortal life. Food and water is brought regularly, and Olivero settles to the task of preparing his body for "the perfection of death", which when it comes he meets with a "peculiar joy". Removing Olivero's body from the grotto the attendants encounter another group carrying Siloēn, who has died at the same time. The pair are laid together in the same trough, to "become part of the same crystal harmony".

Autobiographical elements

Read was born near the small Yorkshire market town of Kirbymoorside, to which he returned in 1949. One of his favourite walks was along the course of Hodge Beck, the inspiration for the stream followed by Olivero. Hodge Beck too led to a mill, which Read called his "spiritual hermitage".

References

Notes

1. Barker 1998, p. 100.
2. ^ Barker 1998, p. 102.
3. Barker 1998, p. 101.
4. Read 1969, p. 57.
5. Read 1969, p. 118.
6. Read 1969, p. 133.
7. Read 1969, p. 134.
8. Read 1969, p. 148.
9. Read 1969, p. 152.
10. ^ Read 1969, p. 154.
11. Harrod, Tanya (2004), "Read, Sir Herbert Edward (1893–1968)", Dictionary of National Biography (subscription required), Oxford University Press, retrieved 2008-04-25
12. Barker 1998, p. 103.

Bibliography

• Barker, Bob (1998), "Herbert Read as Novelist: The Green Child", in Goodway, David (ed.), Herbert Read reassessed, Liverpool University Press, pp. 100–122, ISBN 978-0853238621
• Read, Herbert (1969) , The Green Child, Penguin Books, OCLC 59144583