The story opens with Ambrose, something of an eccentric scholar, and his thesis that true evil is even rarer, especially in this materialistic age, than true good. I’m usually not enamored of dreamy stories with indefinite plots, and I tend not to like young protagonists in stories.īut I think the story has an aesthetic problem in what goes on before all this, a philosophical discussion that could have been done away with, but Machen wants to explicitly use the main story to illustrate a point. I am not that much of a fan of the story.

There is some indication that the girl has damned herself by entering some pit in a cave which the nurse warned her about.

There are also a lot of nested fairy tales told by the nurse (literal fairy tales, probably) that illustrate the power of the white people and their witchcraft. Was it the water that tasted like wine in that mysterious realm? There is some hint (and this section of the story wanders back and forth in time in recounting things) that she poisons herself. The journal is full of not only things like curses, poltergeist-like powers, and clay effigies, but the girl’s seeming trips to another, magical dimension via a tunnel in the wood, and living beings taking the form of rocks. The nurse is always saying that nobody knows this stuff anymore except her great-grandmother Her nurse introduces her to the ways of witchcraft after the girl sees a beautiful white woman in the forest one day. No one else seems to see them indicating that, perhaps, she has some genetic affinity for witchcraft. It talks of how she talked to white people she saw when she was in the crib. The Green Book is the journal of a dead girl, written when she was at least thirteen or fourteen, maybe older. He realized the “great sorrows of life” were passing trifles.Ī new productive period started that included the writing of this story. Then one morning, while walking with his friend, Machen was transformed. His first wife had died that year from breast cancer. In 1899, Machen was a man in “dreadful misery and desolation and dereliction of the soul”. He liked it for its indefinite and dreamy plot, qualities it certainly has in its section titled “The Green Book”. After Algernon Blackwood’s “The Willows”, it was H.

Written in 1899, this story is regarded as one of Machen’s best.

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