Book Review: The Whisper of Glocken

Title: The Whisper of Glocken

Author: Carol Kendall

Date: 1966

Publisher: Holt 

ISBN: none

Length: 221 pages

Illustrations: drawings by Imero Gobbato

Quote: “Once upon a whisper-time—so it is said but who would believe it?--when the Minnipins, hotly pursued by the Mushrooms,wished to enter the Land Between the Mountains, the Glocken of Then played upon his bells and opened a passage through the mountain known as Frostbite, and through this passage traveled all the Minnipins...But the wall...did break, and the water went gushing into the tunnel...Thinking to put matters right, the Glocken of Then played again upon his bells and caused rock to fill his tunnel...Whereupon, the Glocken of Then sat in a place on the mountain and thought about how to get himself across...And still thinking, he finally died. And this I believe, for certainly he never entered the Land Between the Moun­tains.”

Minnipins are like humans, only smaller. How much smaller Carol Kendall never made completely clear. The first book about them, The Gammage Cup, began by asserting that it's not true that they were a lost people because they knew exactly where they were: in a high valley completely surrounded by unclimbable mountains.  In The Gammage Cup, however, their enemies “The Mushrooms” did climb the mountains and fifty Minnipins defeated heaps upon heaps of Mushrooms, using magic swords that are normally rusty and useless, but turn sharp and “Bright when the Cause Is Right.”

In The Whisper of Glocken the title character, Glocken the Bell Ringer, has spent a lot of time fantasizing about the glamorous heroes who led the Army of Fifty—the splendid old chieftain Walter the Earl, the poet Gummy, the warrior Mingy, the wisewoman Muggles, and the beautiful Curley Green. Then aflood forces him and his neighbors to leave their village. Glocken, a young man whose hair tends to fall into his eyes, is embarrassed by his four utterly unheroic companions, Scumble the young presser of fish oil, Crustabread the young woodsman, Gam Lutie the bossy village nurse, and Silky the blonde...until he realizes that five disreputable-looking town-character types who take them in are none other than the Five Heroes of the recent battle against the Mushrooms. Walter the Earl is growing old, Gummy is clownish, Mingy is grumpy, Muggles is getting fat, and Curley Green makes no effort whatsoever to look good. Nevertheless, the Five arm Glocken and friends with five magic swords and instructions to discover the cause of the flood and, if possible, the source of the magic healing salve taken from the Mushrooms.

The cause of the flood turns out to be some engineers, described as three times the size of the Minnipins, nicknamed Hulks for that reason. The Hulks aren't evil, and except when one of them tries to detain a fleeing Minnipin the swords won't harm them. The Hulks are selfish, inconsiderate people who would rather take the Minnipins prisoner than dismantle the dam that is flooding their valley. The magic swords just sense that they're not the right magic device for the Minnipins to use.

According to Glocken's family legend, somewhere in a cave or tunnel in one of the mountains is a set of bells containing the magic Whisper Bell whose vibrations can accomplish all kinds of things...

The five New Heroes don't find that in the desert that mysteriously surrounds their lushly green valley. They find Diggers, a sort of desert monkeys, and “egg-shapes,” a fantastic carnivorous plant of the desert that eat wounded flesh and grow hand-sized balls of pure healing salve. (The idea of egg-shapes has to have come from aloe veras, which could be described as pure healing balm wrapped in tough prickly skin.) Diggers are very strong and fast animals who like doing what they see someone else doing, so it's easy to get them to dig.

As a child I remember thinking that both of Kendall's whimsical adventure stories were just about right—the right length, the right level of difficulty, the right proportion of comedy to adventure—for middle school readers. As an adult...the characters are adult Minnipins, but Minnipins aren't precisely human. The characters seem more sensible, nicer, than full-grown humans. Even if we imagine that Silky is too young and Gam Lutie is too old to have any sex appeal to Glocken, Scumble, and Crustabread, which the story makes easy to imagine, still, the freedom from ego competition...Gam Lutie is the only member of this party who has any problem with egotism at all. Nevertheless, these are delightful books to share with a child.

The copies I physically own are discarded library copies of first editions. Amazon doesn't even show their pictures any more, which is a pity, because the jade-green cover was what first attracted me to The Gammage Cup as a child. The picture at the top of this post looks like the cover of my copy but it's a British reprint. If you don't insist on a prized first edition free from library markings, which will be expensive, what $5 per book + $5 per package + $1 per online payment will get you will be a reprint, possibly, "for copyright reasons," with "special contents" i.e. new pictures. Both The Gammage Cup and The Whisper of Glocken, plus The Firelings and The Big Splash, would fit neatly into one $5 package, at which point--though Amazon prices vary--the price of the four books might become competitive. The Wedding of the Rat Family might even slide in with the other four.