Janelle's Reviews > At the Back of the North Wind

** spoiler alert ** I am indebted to one of my fellow reviewers for my review, whose horrified thoughts on the death of Diamond, prompted me to think more deeply about it myself. For this reader, Diamond’s death was a pointless, disappointing waste, and killing him spoilt the beauty Macdonald’s creation. This reviewer felt that Diamond should have had his happy ending, one where he grew to a happy, successful and accepted adulthood. In saying this, I believe the reviewer has forgotten who the author is and what he intended in writing this novel.
From my perspective, I believe that George Macdonald could have written no other ending. Diamonds' death wasn't pointless at all. In fact it was a vital culmination to all that had gone before. Diamond discovered in the course of his interactions with the North Wind that there was more to this world than what we can see. The longing to see and experience this world beyond clung to him and set him apart from the world of people around him. Throughout At the Back of the North Wind, Macdonald demonstrated to his readers a spiritual world that is beyond what our eyes perceive. However, to have ended there, to only show the unseen world of the living, would have been to truncate and hobble his message. As a man of faith, George Macdonald would not have seen death as a pointless waste, but simply a doorway into the great forever. As such, he needed to show that the unseen extends beyond this life. He could only do this through the death of Diamond and his innocent crossing from this world into the next.
The reviewer is also forgetting the era in which this was written. Modern children in the western world have little occasion to encounter death. It is sanitised and segregated, and given our healthcare, the death of children is not common. This would not have been the case in Victorian England. Death, including child death, was frequent and children would have been familiar with it. Indeed, Macdonald himself experienced much death, having lost his mother as a child, his sister, brother and father as a young man and later four of his own children. In that context, I believe the death of Diamond was intended as a fantastical comfort and encouragement to Macdonald’s readers, and a reminder that there is something better beyond this world.
At the Back of the North Wind is one of those books that take time to digest. It’s been a privilege to encounter it as my introduction to the works of George Macdonald, and I look forward to reading more of his writings in the coming months.
As I note, I really appreciate the hard work Librivox volunteers put into providing public domain audiobooks. In this case, most of the narrators were very good, with just a few that I didn’t enjoy. But I do wish the book could have been read by just one narrator.