The Baronet's Song

[A Saturday Feature of the First Road Blog]

Some books you want to get to the conclusion but not to the end. I revisited one recently:  The Baronet’s Song, a 1983 Michael Phillips abridgment of George MacDonald’s 1879, four-hundred-plus page classic, Sir Gibbie. The book is of the fiction genre which features a hapless waif wrapped in mystery of which you are only slightly more aware than anyone else in the story. That awareness, albeit meager, drives you to know if and when the other characters discover it themselves and if you can catch on before they do. A glance at the reviews under the links I’ve provided will find the work compared with Melville’s Moby Dick in terms of light versus darkness. Some think it the best of MacDonald’s works.

Sadly, George MacDonald (1824-1905) subscribed to an early form of "Christian" Universalism. His influence on such men as C. S. Lewis was not in the realm of his theological system (or lack thereof), but his ability to use fiction and fantasy to make a reader think. Both Lewis and G. K. Chesterton attribute his book, Phantastes, as a positive watershed influence in their writing careers.

The reader will (or should) struggle with Sir Gibbie, the waif of the book. We meet him at around age eleven and he seems too good to be true. That’s because he is.  MacDonald uses him to expose us to ourselves through the ways others respond to him. There is the kindly old wife who knows Jesus so well through the Scriptures that she naturally reaches out to the child as Jesus would. There is the self-centered grounds keeper who never reconciles to the boy. The motives of a minister and his wife puzzle us as they eagerly become the boy’s guardians and seek to mold him to "good society" which doesn't quite square with Jesus' admonition to love one's neighbor. And there is the scholarly seminarian whose sermons “make someone think more of a preacher than Him that he comes to preach about.” Then of course, there is the evil step-uncle and his daughter. Oh the intrigue!

As an added feature: I don’t know if it was MacDonald’s intention, but I also found myself prodded to wonder through the narrative how people responded to the one Child in history who was both good and true. 

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