My classic children's book for November is another that I read multiple times as a child and adored. It was a fourth book for Dutch author Paul Biegel and I believe his first to be translated into English, but he would go on to write over fifty, translate a few dozen more by authors into Dutch and rework much older material into newer forms. Given that this has the feel of a fairy tale, it shouldn't shock that many of those reworkings were of folk tales by the Brothers Grimm or the fables of Aesop. It's good to see that this novel was given a new English language edition as recently as 2022 by Pushkin.

It has an interesting structure, part of which isn't immediately obvious, with a host of little stories built on top of each other until they become a bigger story. And those little stories are each told by a different voice, occasionally multiple voices, only one of which belongs to a human being.

You see, the King of the Copper Mountains, King Mansolain, is very old, a thousand years or so, and his heart is close to stopping. The only cure for him is a potion with a very particular ingredient, the leaves of a plant called the Golden Speedwell, which only grows a long way away. The Wonder Doctor, that sole human being, immediately sets off on a perilous journey to acquire those very leaves. We follow his progress in between those stories, which serve as a temporary kludge until the Wonder Doctor returns and brews up that potion. Storytelling may not be the best medicine, you see, but it might just generate enough excitement to keep the king's heart ticking.

The tellers of these tales are a delightful set of singular creatures the Wonder Doctor encounters on his journey. As he heads out towards the land where the Golden Speedwell can be found, he tells them to head in the opposite direction, to the copper castle to tell their stories and play their part. Because this unfolds with fairy tale logic, they conveniently arrive one every day, just in time to do the job the Wonder Doctor wants. Just as Scheherezade kept herself alive by telling a story a night, here these creatures keep the king alive in similar fashion.

A notable side effect of their continued arrivals is that the castle, which initially sits empty but for the king and his one trusted servant, the hare, gradually comes to life again, a growing menagerie of creatures staying on to see how it goes. The results vary, but they each do the job. The king lives on and often feels refreshed enough to open up a new room of wonders, which is conveniently just the ticket for the next arrival. I did mention that this follows fairy tale logic, right? That's why King Mansolain has a beard so long that it doubles as a rug for his one companion, a hare, to sleep on.

It would be fair to suggest that these little stories are variable in quality, but then that's the point, I think. A good and vibrant story, like the first one, that's told by a wolf, perks the king up nicely. It's about a battle of wits between the Woe-Wolf of the Bare Flank and the Echo Witch and it unfolds in roughly the way you might expect it to, but then it only lasts about six pages and they also include a number of illustrations, in my Dent Dolphin edition by Babs van Wely. The collection of extra-short stories told by the Town Mouse and the Country Mouse are far less substantial, some done within a single page, and the effect on the king's heart follows suit.

My favourite may well be the one told in ten parts by ten different bees, each of whom experienced only their particular part. I'm also very aware as an adult that this story comes close to reflecting the structure of the novel as a whole, which is the newest takeaway I had, reading as an adult. The novel ought to grow with its readers, simply to six-year-olds but with progressively more depth as those six-year-olds grow up, all the way into sixty-year-olds.

Above each of the actual stories, I like how they build. Sure, we probably don't realise that they're becoming something more until a dwarf shows up in chapter 13 to return the Four Ancient Books of the Dwarfs, the set being conveniently short enough to be fully recounted within a single chapter, but we can't fail to see the potentials. Quite a few stories almost feel incomplete without a further development or appearance surely still to come and Biegel doesn't disappoint, even if he saves an overt example for the inevitably happy ending.

What's more, if you detected cynicism in these conveniences and inevitabilities, you're not wrong but Biegel's writing, as translated by the author himself with Gillian Hume, transcends them. Even if we start out with the cynicism of adults reading a fairy tale for kids, he wins us over soon enough and we're eager to sit down in King Mansolain's throne room alongside the beetle and the dragon and the rabbit-of-the-dunes and all the others to listen to another story from another new arrival. By the time Biegel wrapped everything up in a neat little bow, I'd already picked out which room I wanted to sleep in.

It's been far too long since I've read a Biegel. I remember 'Robber Hopsika' and 'The Little Captain' and 'The Dwarfs of Nosegay', but I don't believe most of his books have yet been translated into the English language and I never bumped into the dozen or more others that Wikipedia tells me were. Maybe they were only hardbacks. Everything I have is a paperback, even if the publishers vary.  My lesson from this past couple of months is to start keeping an eye on eBay to pick up what I couldn't from market stalls and charity shops way back in the day. ~~ Hal C F Astell