The 13 Clocks by James ThurberThe New York Review of Books, 2008 (Originally 1950)

Coffin Castle, the setting of this fairy-tale-like book, is not a happy place: it’s cold, and the thirteen clocks of the book’s title have all stopped, and the Duke who lives there with his “niece” (she’s not really his niece: she’s a princess he stole away from her family when she was a baby) is fond of killing people and feeding them to his geese. He relishes telling knights they can marry Princess Saralinda as soon as they finish some impossible task; meanwhile, he’s biding his time and planning to marry her himself as soon as she turns twenty-one. But you know how stories like this go: there’s one prince who’s clever enough to do the seemingly-impossible task set for him. Except actually, he’s not: the prince in this story (who’s disguised as a minstrel, but not for long) succeeds only because of the help of a kindly double-agent called the Golux, and really only because his success has already been foretold. Which makes this kind of a funny book: you know the shape the plot will be, because of what kind of story it is, and the characters don’t particularly feel like real people so much as types, so what’s left is the way the story’s told, the rhythm and humor and language of it.

In the introduction to this edition, Neil Gaiman talks about how he read this book when he was a child and noticed the language, how it “slipped into poetry and out of it again in a way that made you want to read it aloud, just to see how it sounded” (8). He writes about how Thurber “wrap[s] his story tightly in words, while at the same time juggling fabulous words that glitter and gleam, tossing them out like a happy madman, all the time explaining and revealing and baffling with words” (9). Which is a pretty excellent way of putting it. Thurber plays with rhyme and meter, but I think what I liked best was the humor. One character tells the disguised prince that the duke “breaks up minstrels in his soup, like crackers” (24). The Golux, talking about how his mother was a mediocre witch, says that “when she changed her rivals into fish, all she ever got was mermaids” (43). And there’s a great moment when the Duke says, “We all have flaws,” followed by, “and mine is being wicked” (114).