Tom's Midnight Garden
by Philippa Pearce

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Book Reviews of Tom's Midnight Garden

Book Review: A True Children's Classic
Summary: 5 Stars

Tom Long is being sent from his home and the promise of a long, lazy summer to his Uncle Alan and Aunt Gwen's dreary, boring flat, as his brother Peter has the measles. Frustrated and rude to begin with, he lives a confined and utterly restricted half-life within their cold and unwelcoming home. In fact, the only thing that proves that time is indeed moving at its normal pace is the ticking of the ancient grandfather clock belonging to old Mrs Bartholemew, the land-lady who lives upstairs. The clock keeps strange time however, often it gives more or less chimes than it's supposed to, and one night Tom is sure that he hears it chime the hour thirteen. Creeping downstairs to investigate, he discovers instead that the backdoor opens out into a beautiful, silent, vast garden. He soon becomes a regular visitor, but only by night, for in the daytime the door instead opens out onto a grimy yard. But in the garden he meets Hatty, a lonely little girl under the tyranny of her unkind aunt and three cousins, and the only being that can actually see him! After the friendship is made, the real adventures start, but threading through all of this is the continual mystery - how did the garden get there? Who is Hatty? Where did she and the garden come from? Are they ghosts or merely images from the past? *Why* is the garden there in the first place?

Pearce treats what is essentially her main character - the garden itself - not as a strange, utterly abnormal event, nor as a comfitable, familiar occurance, but as a ghostly, yet steady place. Tom's reactions to it, from his initial awe, to fright, to intoxication with it is vividly and realistically portrayed so that we too honestly share in these emotions.
It is fascinating to read of Tom's explorations of the garden and the twofold freedom he experiences - first that he is away from the regulations of his aunt and uncle, and second that of his invisibility to the denizens of the garden. Pearce creates beautiful descriptive passages of the garden and surrounding grounds, but marks them with intriguing sentences such as: 'Tom often had the feeling of people having just gone, and an uncomfortable feeling of someone who had *not* gone; someone who, unobserved, observed him. Pearce builds up the tension and in this story magnificently, as Tom gradually builds up his knowledge of the garden and slowly begins to traverse its borders.

Furthermore, Tom's decision to quit the real world to dwell forever within the 'garden-world' is a thought-provoking one, and coupled achingly well with Hatty's growth, movement into 'grown-up' things, and steady forgetting of Tom. The feelings of change and aging reminds me very much of stories concerning Peter Pan and Wendy, however in Barrie's book, where we predominatly see through Wendy's eyes, here we can see how Peter probably felt as an elusive and 'unreal' figure, loosing someone not through death or place but through the simple inevitability of growing up.

Thus the story is definitly not just for kids, as the major message of the book is a bittersweet one - that we must all someday leave our childhoods behind for the bigger realm of adulthood beyond our own backgardens. Yet we need never forget those times, nor loose the friendships we forged within them. Certainly Tom and Hatty didn't.

Summary of Tom's Midnight Garden

Tom is furious. His brother, Peter, has measles, so now Tom is being shipped off to stay with Aunt Gwen and Uncle Alan in their boring old apartment. There'll be nothing to do there and no one to play with. Tom just counts the days till he can return home to Peter.Then one night the landlady's antique grandfather clock strikes thirteen times leading Tom to a wonderful, magical discovery and marking the beginning of a secret that's almost too amazing to be true. But it is true, and in the new world that Tom discovers is a special friend named Hatty and more than a summer's worth of adventure for both of them. Now Tom wishes he could stay with his relativesand Hatty -- forever...

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