Goodbye Christopher Robin - Ann Thwaite

Published by Pan Books/Pan Macmillan: London, 2017.
An abridged version of A.A. Milne: His Life, first published by Faber & Faber in 1990.

I don't normally read abridged versions of things. I always want to read the full version of a work in order to get the full perspective of the work in question. This one tricked me. It is a 'full version' of Goodbye Christopher Robin, but the text is taken from the longer work, A.A.Milne: His Life, by the same author.

I didn't really enjoy the book.

And I think the biggest reason is that it was not what the title made me expect. 

So, although I haven't seen it, I am aware that Goodbye Christopher Robin is a book about the relationship between Alan Alexander Milne and his son, Christopher Robin Milne. The younger Milne became immortalised in fiction when his father used his name for one of the main characters in the Winnie-the-Pooh stories, and Christopher at times resented the intrusion that becoming one of the 'most famous children in the world' had on his life.

The problem with the book is that this is not its main focus. The book is focussed on A. A. Milne's life (as one would expect if one was reading A.A.Milne: His Life) and references are made to Christopher Robin only when they directly impact on the senior Milne. At the same time, because this is focussed on the senior Milne, we also get examine on elements of his life that had very little impact on Christopher - for example, Ken Milne, who was Christopher's uncle, gets quite a focus. This is because he was suffering from tuberculosis and Alan had taken it on himself to look after his brother. For a life story about A. A. Milne, this is obvious a very important aspect, but in a book called Goodbye Christopher Robin it seems sadly off-topic. And yet, because the book is focussed on Alan Milne and is only interested in the part of his life surrounding the creation of Winnie-the-Pooh, we also get less contextual information about Alan Milne than we would have had if we had read A.A.Milne: His Life, meaning that although the focus is too much off Christopher it is also not quite enough on Alan.

Another more minor quibble I had is that the book chooses to extensively quote contemporary reviews of Milne's work, as well as letters to and from the author, yet very little of his actual published writing is quoted. For someone, like myself, who knows of Milne without having read much of his work, this became another frustration, as I was forced to fill in the blanks myself based on the responses to various poems Milne had produced without knowing the poems in question. This was even stranger when Thwaite would quote parodies of Milne's poems. I assume the parodies were hilarious... but without knowing the original it is hard to be sure.

Overall a fairly frustrating book, even while giving a (bit) of a glimpse into the life of an author I knew very little about to begin with.

At least I can tick off another letter for Alphabet Soup!

Completed 7 April 2022.



(Alphabet Soup Books)

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