Siglo XIX. Olivero vuelve a su pueblo natal, donde había sido profesor, tras treinta años de ausencia y de una vida trepidante de peligros y aventuras en Cádiz y en una esperanzada nación sudamericana. Sin embargo, a su regreso, parece que el río de su infancia corre en sentido contrario a su recuerdo.
Desconcertado, pasa frente a la casa de uno de sus antiguos alumnos y observa con horror como éste intenta alimentar, con gran violencia, a una criatura delicada y fascinante como el jade. Oliver la reconoce: es aquella Niña Verde de su juventud, que había aparecido con su hermano conmoviendo y trastornando a los habitantes del pueblo. No puede permanecer indiferente y decide salvarla.

Imagine if you were watching a film like 'Lady in the Water' and just as things were getting interestingly weird you find someone's spliced a film about Napolean into it.
Now you may enjoy a Napolean biopic but you're not very likely to want to watch it in these circumstances.
In the end this becomes a lost/alien civilization tale with some interesting philosophical leanings. It should leave you very thoughtful but somewhat unsatisfied due to its odd structure. ( )

An interesting series of tales revolving around one Olivero. The tale of Olivero's relationship with the Green Child is presented in two parts, as book-ends to the story of Olivero's success as governor of a small region in Argentina. Read is bearing ideas of existence, thought, perception, and human government along the often adventurous stories of Olivero's life. The book waxes and wanes. Sometimes it turns deeply philosophical, while other segments seem simply to be entertainment. ( )

Philosophical-utopian - generally a genre in which I'm ready to be forgiving for structural lapses, or things like lack of character development or conventional plot. But on this re-read (decades after I read it originally, in college), I think I might have preferred straight exposition of Read's political and aesthetic ideas. Olivero's presence in all three of the novel's very disparate sections is not enough to make the thing hang together - although the "Green World" section, still my favorite, has both imagery and ideas that are fun to contemplate. A utopian work should be like a mental rest-cure - and this one, at least in its final section, fits that bill. ( )

Part mystical, part political, certainly philosophical with a sense of a search for a Utopia, Sir Herbert Reads only novel has a magical feel. I first came across Herbert Read through his poetry, a celebrated first world war poet whose better poems were heavily anthologised in the 1950’s and 60’s. You could hardly open a poetry anthology without coming across ‘The Naming of Parts.

To-day we have naming of parts. Yesterday,
We had daily cleaning. And to-morrow morning,
We shall have what to do after firing. But to-day,
To-day we have naming of parts. Japonica
Glistens like coral in all of the neighboring gardens,
And to-day we have naming of parts.

This first stanza depicts a soldier recruit attending a lecture on how to operate a gun, but the droning voice of the instructor cannot hold his attention, which wanders to the garden through the window outside. Another world from the lecture room and it's as though the recruit is caught between the two worlds. Olivero the hero of The Green Child is also a man caught between two worlds, the brutal present and a world of his imagination which becomes almost tangible as he first tries and fails to shape a better world, but must then settle for following the mystical Green Child into her own very different world.

This short novel published in 1935 has three distinct parts: we first meet Olivero on his way back to England in 1861 after having faked his own assassination as President of a South American Republic. He is drawn back to his home village in a search for the Green Child who had mysteriously appeared in the village of his youth and who was clearly not of this world. He finds her by following a stream that is flowing the wrong way back to its source, she has grown into a woman and is being held captive by the evil Kneeshaw who owns the village mill. Olivero realises that he must release the woman (Siloen) and she leads him to the source of the stream. This first part reads like a mystery/fantasy story and ends with Olivero and Siloen sinking down into the sandy bottom of the pool at the stream head.

The second part is a long flashback describing Olivero’s adventures from the time he left England restlessly searching for a different life. After being imprisoned in Spain as a suspected Jacobin (revolutionary) he is mistaken for an ideological leader who will assist a planned revolution in South America. He goes along with the deception and finds himself eventually President of a small South American Republic. Using Volney and Rousseau as models he puts forward a new constitution for the Government of Roncador based on egality, fraternity and liberty. He is so successful that the people of this agrarian country, now saved from exploitation, lose interest in government and revolution and Olivero becomes President for life and sets about creating a seemingly Utopian society. However once this Utopia has been created he discovers it is not enough and the human condition reasserts itself:

“This condition lasted for several years, until finally I could no longer evade the truth . My spiritual complaint was produced by the very stagnation around me, which I regarded as the triumph of my policy. In the absence of conflict, of contending interests of anguish and agitation, I had introduced into my environment a moral flaccidity, a fatness of living, an ease and a torpor which had now produced in me inevitable ferment…… Without eccentric elements, no progress is possible; not even that simple progress which consists in whipping a spinning top from one place to another.”

This long second part has been told in the first person but Read reverts back to the third person when he takes us back to the pool at the source of the upward flowing stream. Olivero and Siloen enter into another world, another Utopia of sorts and we are back into the fantasy world that this book had always threatened to take us. Is this world the solution to what Olivero describes as the agitation of the soul? He has no choice, now there is no way back for him and when at his death he finally merges into the living rock he is conscious that he has stilled that agitation in his soul.

I found this novel absolutely enchanting, from the mystery of the first part, to the excitement and adventure of the second and finally to the fantasy and introspection of the third. Herbert Read writes like an angel with just enough continuity of style to link the three parts together. There is certainly much to think about as Olivero’s quest raises essential questions about the meaning of life, but this is no dry philosophical tract, Read combines elements of mystery. adventure and fantasy in his story telling to keep most readers interested until its deeply satisfying conclusion. This is the book that C S Lewis (author of the Narnia chronicles) may have wished he could have written, had his Catholicism not got in the way. It really is a little gem of a book, a four star read. ( )