Being English, it's perhaps inevitable that many of the books I've reviewed as part of my monthly look back at classic children's genre fiction were written by British writers, though I have included a Dutch author, Paul Biegel, and I started out with an American, Madeleine L'Engle. This one's an American classic that's as old as I am, having been first published in 1971, but I don't believe that I've ever read it. I'm pretty sure that I've seen the 1982 Don Bluth animated feature, 'The Secret of NIMH' but I don't remember it at all, so this was effectively new to me.

It's a very easy book to like, because it eases us into the story as a rather simple affair of survival told through animal fantasy. Mrs. Frisby, whose first name we never learn, is a mouse who lives in a field on Mr. Fitzgibbon's farm. She's also a widow raising four children alone, with the youngest of them, Timothy, generally frail and, as we join the story, stricken with pneumonia. He's going to be fine, because Mrs. Frisby visits a doctor mouse, Mr. Agee, who prescribes the right medicine to get him back to rights. However, he needs three weeks of bed rest but Moving Day is only five days away. Mrs. Frisby has to figure something out urgently.

For a while, this seems to be our story. Moving Day is when all sorts of animals living on this farm have to move to avoid Mr. Fitzgibbon's plough. After all, it's a working farm and thus he's going to work it. They figure out when and move to safety in time to avoid being churned up by machinery. It's the sort of drama that we tend to expect from animal fantasy, where animals are given human traits so as to make their lives more accessible to us. They live in families, communicate in English across species and generally constitute a complete community existing right next to us without us ever having a clue.

Of course, there's danger beyond the plough because this is nature and that's personified here in the form of Dragon, who may be an animal but is a working cat who belongs to the farm, so sits on the wrong side. It isn't just the mice who fear Dragon but the crows too, and that's how Mrs. Frisby ends up helping out a young crow called Jeremy, who returns the favour by flying her up to talk to a wise old owl who might be able to suggest a solution to her problem. When he realises that she's the widow of the celebrated Jonathan Frisby, about whom we know nothing, he tells her to go see the rats.

And here's where this becomes something very deliberate, because there are two stories going on here and this is the point at which Mrs. Frisby encounters the other one. The rats are maintaining a compound underneath a rosebush, complete with electricity, an elevator, even a library, and the reasons why that's viable move away from traditional animal fantasy firmly into science fiction. It continues to be a story about community, how working together is beneficial, even across species lines, but it also becomes a story about civilisation, how such things are built and why.

The rats of NIMH have a Plan with a capital P and that's why I wanted to dive immediately into the sequel that Robert Conly, the man behind the pseudonym Robert C. O'Brien, never wrote. I do see that his daughter, Jane Leslie Conly wrote a pair of them over a quarter of a century later: 'Racso and the Rats of NIMH' in 1986 and 'R-T, Margaret and the Rats of NIMH' in 1990. I should check out the Don Bluth movie and those sequels, because, now I have the original in mind, I want to see the way it was adapted to a very different medium and how it was continued so much later on.

While 'Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH' was immediately successful, winning the Newbury Medal in 1972 and a host of others over the next couple of years, it seems to have substance that renders it all the more interesting as the decades pass. Written at the tail end of the sixties, a tumultuous decade of change in American history, it looks at fears about science and technology that are only more interesting today, with both so pervasive in our daily lives. We love science and technology, which has brought us so many conveniences, but we fear it too, not only because of what it can do but in how it can change so quickly and leave morality behind. Morality is very much a focus here, as epitomised in the Plan of the rats of NIMH.

Given that NIMH is in the title of the book and is explained in the very first paragraph of the back cover blurb on my Scholastic paperback, I don't think it's a spoiler to do likewise, even though it's quite a way into the book before we find out what it is. NIMH is a medical laboratory, the National Institute of Mental Health, which I'm shocked to discover is a real thing and has been for seventy-five years, and the rats who live there are being experimented on. The scientists working on them have made them better in a number of ways: stronger, longer lived and more intelligent. Crucially, however, they don't realise just how successful they've been and the rats fashion an escape.

I don't believe that's a spoiler because what matters isn't what happens to them in the laboratory (other than how that reflects on us); it's what happens to them afterwards. One glorious detail is that they've figured out what words are and how they're put together to deepen meaning. After a winter of reading books in the library in an empty house, they're all set to forge a future. It's been pointed out that this is a perfect message to send to the sort of young readers who would pick up a copy of 'Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH', that reading is effectively a power up. You don't need the NIMH laboratories to become better. You're already intelligent. Now you just need to read.

It's also telling that the animals in this book were already intelligent too, animals like Mrs. Frisby who can't read but understands her environment and looks after her children and does whatever a single mother needs to do. However, she also has the opportunity to become better, should she choose to do so. What's more, we can define what better means, which brings this into a morality lesson. Is better about being able to harness electricity and build elevators in your underground compound? Or is better something else? I won't spoil where that goes but the questions O'Brien asks here are wonderful ones to ask budding young readers who will, after all, forge our future as a species.

In short, there's a lot here and I'm still thinking about a lot of it. I have a feeling that this is one of those books I'll come back to periodically to see how it will change along with the world around us. I'll continue to dive back into classic British children's genre fiction, which feels like part of my own cultural heritage, whether I've read them before or not, but I'll try to add more American classics into the mix too, because they come with very different perspectives. ~~ Hal C F Astell