ABSTRACT
Since Gulliver’s Travels, the Lilliputian narrative idea has proved a seductive one. It is rich with ironies of perspective, remembered impulses that have to do with childhood make-believe, and the excitement and satisfaction of small clever creatures outwitting big ones. To any child who has played with toy cars, trucks, dolls’-houses, action men and model railways – or who has made bottle-tops, matchboxes and thimbles into tiny objects of furniture – the imaginative and beguiling world of The Borrowers must seem the very essence of pretending itself, transformed into an abiding narrative and toughened by an uncompromising naturalism.
