At the Back of the North Wind by George MacDonald

George MacDonald taught C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien how to write fantasy. Fool that I am, until 2025, I'd only read two of his books: The Princess and the Goblin and The Princess and Curdie. Wonderful books, but neither is as good as At the Back of the North Wind.

But, had I done my duty and read it as a child, I might have missed out on how good it really is. It's like That Hideous Strength by Lewis and some of the slower bits of Tolkien: Some stuff that might seem boring on the surface is actually the best stuff. It's like Narnia, and like the Bible itself: The story grows with the reader.

This story is about a child named Diamond. He makes friends with North Wind--her preferred name, not "the North Wind" or "Mrs. North Wind." She takes him out on her back on a few adventures, and then helps him get to the warm country at her back--where the Hyperboreans were supposed to live.

You see, in the northern hemisphere, it's cold when the north wind blows on you. If you can get behind it, it's warm. But the ancient Greek report of the Hyperboreans isn't quite right. What's up there is a sort of heaven on earth.

Or so it seems.

Diamond falls asleep on North Wind's back on the return journey and wakes up in bed. Even though he's been gone for more than a week, his mother is only pleased to see him well again:

“Oh, Diamond, my darling! You have been so ill!” she sobbed.

Shouldn't she be freaking out over where he's been all this time? And Diamond didn't even know he'd been ill! This is proof that things aren't quite what they seem, and Diamond never went to the North Pole. In addition, some--not all--of his conversations with North Wind take place after he's fallen asleep and (seemingly) woken up again; it's easy to suspect he's been dreaming all this time.

But there's also proof that Diamond was not just dreaming in his bed when he met North Wind. She told him a ship had sunk and some had made it to a desert island. These events are confirmed to be true later in the story.

Something happening here is very, very real. But it's also not what it seems.

And that's only the first third or so of the book! In most of the rest of the book, Diamond doesn't talk with North Wind at all. But because he has been to the back of the north wind, he carries with him the thoughts and the music of that blessed place wherever he goes, making the world around him better. My second-favorite bit in the book describes Diamond helping the neighbors. The description of the drunken husband and beaten wife and screaming baby is heartbreaking. Diamond's help holding and singing to the baby is wonderful, and MacDonald's description is sublime:

Now the way most people do when they see anything very miserable is to turn away from the sight, and try to forget it. But Diamond began as usual to try to destroy the misery. The little boy was just as much one of God's messengers as if he had been an angel with a flaming sword, going out to fight the devil. The devil he had to fight just then was Misery. And the way he fought him was the very best. Like a wise soldier, he attacked him first in his weakest point—that was the baby; for Misery can never get such a hold of a baby as of a grown person.

Towards the end of the book, North Wind shows up for some last conversations with little Diamond. He wants to know if she's really real.

Now it's time for me to tell you what's going on in this book in four lessons.

Is It Real?

First, it is real. It's not what it seems, but it's real. Here's the passage that tells us how to interpret the book:

“Could it be all dreaming, do you think, sir?” he asked anxiously.

“I daren't say, Diamond,” I answered. “But at least there is one thing you may be sure of, that there is a still better love than that of the wonderful being you call North Wind. Even if she be a dream, the dream of such a beautiful creature could not come to you by chance.”

The back of the north wind and Diamond's adventures with North Wind certainly were no mere dream or illusion. Nor was it that obnoxious Hollywood trope of "Maybe it’s real, maybe not--who knows?" (Curse that spinning top in Inception!) But neither did Diamond ever visit the North Pole.

What it really was was--not what it seemed. It was seeing through a glass darkly.

But if it were not what it seemed, then it would only be an image of something even better!

But What? What Was Better?

Second, what's better is who North Wind really is. Here's her own description of herself:

I don't think I am just what you fancy me to be. I have to shape myself various ways to various people. But the heart of me is true. People call me by dreadful names, and think they know all about me. But they don't. Sometimes they call me Bad Fortune, sometimes Evil Chance, sometimes Ruin; and they have another name for me which they think the most dreadful of all.

There is a power in this world that makes trouble for us for our own good. It calls us to repentance. Here's one example from the story:

It is a hard thing for a rich man to grow poor; but it is an awful thing for him to grow dishonest, and some kinds of speculation lead a man deep into dishonesty before he thinks what he is about. Poverty will not make a man worthless—he may be worth a great deal more when he is poor than he was when he was rich; but dishonesty goes very far indeed to make a man of no value—a thing to be thrown out in the dust-hole of the creation, like a bit of a broken basin, or a dirty rag. So North Wind had to look after Mr. Coleman, and try to make an honest man of him.

Of course, this sort of thing happens time and again, in story after story after story.

This power that makes trouble for us for our own good serves a higher power. It serves G-d. Boethius explained all this in The Consolation of Philosophy. (And you can be sure MacDonald got much of his own book from the Consolation.)

North Wind is the personification of that power.

In the story, she's real, she does this, and she's benevolent.

She's also a person--and that's the only part of At the Back of the North Wind that's fantasy. Unless there really is a person who does that in the real world. I wouldn't be surprised.

What Happened to Diamond at the Back of the North Wind?

Third, let me tell you what happened to Diamond earlier on in the book.

That place up there is heavenly, but North Wind tells Diamond near the end of the book that he never saw the real place behind her. Only an image of it. He also had had to pass through her to get there, which was hard. He might have to do that again to really get there.

SPOILER ALERT--he does!

To be precise, little Diamond dies on the last page. (The other name by which people call North Wind must be "Death.")

So what happened earlier on his sickbed when he thought he went to the utter north of earth? What happened was--Diamond almost died then, and he had a glimpse of Heaven.

Who Is Diamond?

Fourth, let me tell you what categories you need to have in mind for understanding Diamond.

Some characters in the book think Diamond isn't all there--"He's not right in the head, you know. A tile loose.” Others think he may be a genius, and maybe that's why sometimes he has trouble connecting to people. (These days we'd say he might be a little autistic.) We're also tempted to say he was sick, and he was only dreaming.

But none of those are the right categories, even though some of them may be at least partially right.

There are two correct categories for understanding this most excellent story and thinking through who Diamond is.

One category is--a person with a better spiritual perception than most. That's who Diamond is. He had a very real interaction with a very real, a benevolent, and (as we now use the term) a supernatural person. However, many of the details were accommodated to his understanding--understanding her as North Wind, interpreting his glimpse of Heaven as a geographical place at the top of the earth.

Another category is--someone who has a near-death experience and caught a glimpse of Heaven. But we must add this--for the rest of his life, he keeps a lobe of his brain tuned to the thoughts of Heaven, and one ear tuned to its music.

This is why I think At the Back of the North Wind is very nearly not even a fantasy. All the geographical and historical details are entirely consistent with real-world ones, for they were not exactly real; they were what happens when a spiritually perceptive human being sees the higher realities through a glass darkly.

This happens in the real world, too, where a kind child might sometimes see these realities better than the rest of us fools.

The only element of the story that qualifies it as a fantasy is that there is a person working difficulty in the world for the greater good--and working for G-d. Even that may be a real-world fact, for all I know. But if no grand person does this work of G-d in the real world, yet the work is done, that is quite enough.

At the Back of the North Wind reminds us to respond to this work properly, and to prepare our hearts to hear what G-d is saying to us so that we may hear in the best way. Let's go back to the poor drunken man and his beaten wife and crying baby, and little Diamond coming to the rescue. This I take to be the best line in the book:

The father of him sat staring at nothing, neither asleep nor awake, not quite lost in stupidity either, for through it all he was dimly angry with himself, he did not know why. It was that he had struck his wife. He had forgotten it, but was miserable about it, notwithstanding. And this misery was the voice of the great Love that had made him and his wife and the baby and Diamond, speaking in his heart, and telling him to be good. For that great Love speaks in the most wretched and dirty hearts; only the tone of its voice depends on the echoes of the place in which it sounds. On Mount Sinai, it was thunder; in the cabman's heart it was misery; in the soul of St. John it was perfect blessedness.