Thatchers and Thatcherites: Lost and Found Empires in Three British Fantasies

There is certainly no shortage of children’s fantasies that reflect the sociopolitical tenor of their times. The classism and threatened class insurrection of The Wind in the Willows; the Christian evangelicalism of The Water Babies; and the imperialism of Lofting’s Doctor Dolittle books come to mind. The presence of sociopolitical elements in children’s books should not surprise us. Writers, including writers for children, have political ideologies that, perhaps unconsciously, creep into their work. Such ideologies may be fairly easy to identify in realistic fiction but can be hard to detect in fantasy. If realistic fiction takes us one step from the real world, fantasy takes us at least two steps, and it disguises ideology in the form of dragons or wizards or miniature people. In fantasy meant specifically for children, the ideology can be particularly difficult to detect, since writers may consciously attempt to hide it, in an effort not to offend librarians, teachers, and parents.

One series of books, popular with children and generally approved of by critics, that has such a hidden ideology is Lynne Reid Banks’s The Indian in the Cupboard series. It, like at least one other fantasy series of approximately the same period (Susan Cooper’s The Dark Is Rising series), reflects the author’s preoccupation with Britain’s loss of primacy in the world, as well as its longing for a better, more ordered, and ideal society that seemingly exists only in the past. By contrast, Terry Pratchett’s Truckers (and its sequel, Diggers) presents us with a fantasy world of miniature people who rise above their physical status and indeed reach for the stars. All of these books, consciously or not, are responses to the profound conservatism of Britain under Margaret Thatcher, Prime Minister from 1979–1990.

Banks’s series, set in contemporary England, has at its center the ten-year-old Omri, a schoolboy who discovers that through the agency of a cupboard and a key he can turn small plastic toys into real, living, miniature human beings. Omri, despite his exotic name, is white and middle class, and had he been a nineteenth-century boy hero, would be assumed (by both author and reader) to be the rightful heir to all the spoils of the British Empire and all the rights and powers due a citizen of that Empire. His unusual name further suggests that empire and royalty should be part of his patrimony. He is named for King Omri, one of the greatest kings of Israel, whose reign saw the rise of the merchant class. This has some bearing on the deeper meanings of the story, as we shall see.

Omri, by virtue of his nationality, his gender, his race, and his name, is linked with Britain’s colonial past, with her former strengths as a formidable economic and military force. Yet Omri lives in the last quarter of the twentieth century, when Britain is no longer an imperial empire but has shrunk back into just another European power, and not the strongest one at that. In the 1970s, Britain saw accelerating inflation, rising unemployment, and negligible real economic growth, quite a contrast to the British imperial past. Omri, had he been invented by Kipling, would have had much to inherit. As things stand, his future is uncertain and linked to the fortunes of the European Economic Community.

Omri’s powerlessness is further suggested by his position in the family. He is not only a child, but the youngest of three boys, and hence the least powerful member of his family. Perhaps because of his lack of familial power, Omri is preoccupied with privacy and with keeping his brothers and parents away from his “property” of toys and various collections of boyish “stuff.” In fact, Omri at first appears to have more in common with the disenfranchised and the colonized—with Little Bear, the en-livened American Indian who is Omri’s companion—than with the empowered and the colonizing: he is powerless, he has little control over who “invades” his territory, he must struggle to keep his...