What Book to Read?

I am not a very successful gardener at the best of times, so it was incredibly frustrating for me to come out one morning recently to find that overnight, something had eaten all my ripening tomatoes and the only two red peppers. ‘Rats,’ said a knowledgeable neighbour. ‘You’ll either have to poison them or set traps.’ But I just can’t bring myself to do it. And the rats of NIMH are to blame.

Mrs Frisby and the Rats of NIMH is a children’s story published in 1971. It won the Newbury Medal for the best American children’s book for 1972 – the same year the better known Watership Down by Richard Adams won the Carnegie prize for the best British children’s story – and in plenty of time for us to read it to our children before they grew out of bedtime stories. And it has left an indelible mark on me as well.

Mrs Frisby is a field mouse who winters in a cement block that will be moved once the farmer begins spring ploughing. But she can’t relocate her family as she usually does because her delicate son Timothy is sick. She must make the dangerous journey to visit another mouse, Mr Ages, for medicine for him. In the course of her journey she meets the rats who live under the rose bush in the farmyard. But these are no ordinary rats; they have escaped from NIMH – the National Institute of Medical Health, where experiments on them have made them smart and strong. But why should they help Mrs Frisby?

It is interesting that two books which anthropomorphize animals – and ‘vermin’ at that – appeared so close together, just at a time when there was a resurgence of interest in animal rights, ecology and the preservation of flora and fauna. It is easy to write off such stories as being merely sentimental; of course animals don’t have human desires and feelings (which is not to say they have no desires or feelings). Watership Down is probably a more thoughtful, even adult book than The Rats of NIMH; the characters of the rabbits in it are more finely drawn, they are more true to the nature of animals and Adams raises more profound problems about freedom, authority, art and culture. But O’Brien’s book isn’t sentimental. The birds and animals are variously wise, brave, kind or cruel in part by choice and in part by nature; they have human feelings but are clearly not human. The book’s main attraction is that it is an exciting story. Who can resist courage in the face of adversity? But there are more serious issues. The moral compass in the interaction of humans and animals, once so emphatically weighted in favour of the humans, has now swung back a little. Why should humans have it all their way? Surely the rats have a right to live free of them?

Well, my rats are not living free of me, but I still don’t want to harm them. Anyway, perhaps it’s not rats, but possums. Not that that would help much – Mem Fox’s Possum Magic (1983) has seen to that.

You can find out more about Mrs Frisby and the Rats of NIMH here, about Watership Down here, and Possum Magic here.

Robert O’Brien is the pen name of Robert Conly, who was a journalist with the National Geographic Magazine. He wrote three other children’s books, the best known of which is Z for Zachariah. His daughter, Jane Leslie Conly, has written two sequels to Mrs Frisby and the Rats of NIMH.