A review by foggy_rosamund
The Little Grey Men by B. B.

3.0

Denys James Watkins-Pitchford (BB) was an art teacher at Rugby, boys' public school in England, as well as an amateur naturalist, hunter and fisherman. The Little Grey Men, published in 1942, is very much of its time: it is full of nostalgia for a vanishing natural world, as well as precise, complex imagery of nature and animals, but like The Wind in the Willows, it's populated by male creatures who live in affable harmony, smoking, fishing, boating, and living wild on the riverside. Full of a sweet sadness: the gnomes in the book are the last of the "little people" in all of England, and feel this loneliness keenly. One of the brothers, Cloudberry, leaves, in the hope of finding more gnomes, and does not return. The other three gnomes decide to find him. The action of this book is not what makes it interesting: it's the imagery of nature, which clearly comes from long and careful observation of wild animals, as well as the magical world of the gnomes. There are many imperialist references in this, and it's not a world in which women exist at all, so in many ways it feels dated, but there's a lot of beauty too. I see flaws in this, but it's worth reading.