Learning Some of the Dangers of Playing God

The Return of the Indian by Lynne Reid Banks, illustrations by William Geldart (Doubleday: $12.95)

Fantasy is a bubble, a fragile, shimmering world. One puff too many bursts it in an instant.

In the beloved fantasy tradition of toys-come-to life, British writer Lynne Reid Banks blows a 1980s bubble, peopled not with rag dolls and wooden puppets but with tiny plastic figures made human by the turn of a magic key.

In Banks’s earlier book, “The Indian in the Cupboard,” a boy called Omri discovers that by placing a miniature plastic Indian and friend Patrick’s tiny cowboy into a discarded cupboard and turning the key, he can bring them to life. Her new book and sequel, “The Return of the Indian,” blows that marvelous bubble dangerously bigger.

Omri is a natural for this rich world of the imagination. The youngest of three boys (one older brother is a jock, the other a brain) Omri is also the object of harassment from neighborhood skinhead punks. At first it seems like great fun, having these tiny, living humans to play with.

Omri has both enormous power and enormous responsibility, and he quickly learns the perils of playing God. The reader enjoys Omri’s resourcefulness in caring for his people and cheers his efforts to protect them from the menaces of the real world, such as the family cat.

Through a Time Warp

The tiny characters pass through a time warp on their way to becoming humans in an English boy’s attic bedroom: Little Bear is an Iroquois at the time of the French and Indian Wars, and Boone, the Texas cowboy, belongs at the end of the 19th Century. They are natural enemies.

In the earlier book, protecting the tiny beings--from a marauding rat, from each other--and keeping them secret became so complicated that Omri sent Indian and cowboy back to their own time and place. But eventually the temptation was too great, and in “The Return of the Indian” Omri again invokes the magic to bring them back.

It’s a fantasy rich in possibilities. The reader can happily believe that a plastic Indian becomes real, calls himself Little Bear, and marries a plastic figure transformed into beautiful Bright Stars; that Boone actually bursts into tears at the slightest provocation. The reader enjoys Omri’s battle to keep parents and siblings from discovering his wonderful secret.

But Banks pops our bubble of suspended disbelief. She blows too often and too hard. It happens when Omri’s fantasy world intersects with his real world. The bubble that enchants when Omri is busy dealing with the tiny people on his own turf begins to falter when Omri himself is transported back through time to the Indian’s era. And it finally bursts when Omri turns a platoon of plastic soldiers into real troops to fight off the skinheads who try to burglarize his parents’ home.

Characters Are Well Drawn

The characters, both life-size and tiny, are well drawn. But how they talk! Banks has clearly spent too much time watching Grade B Westerns. Here is our introduction to Bright Stars, wife of Little Bear: “Soldier come village. Braves fight. Soldier make fire in house. Kill many. Take prisoner. Braves chase. Out, out--far! Bright Stars hide. See Little Bear fall.” (“The Return of the Indian” won some prestigious prizes for children’s books when it was published in 1981. One wonders if Indian readers have not objected to the pidgin speech.)

Indians are not the only ones to suffer from Banks’s tin ear. She also has an irritating penchant for hard-to-read dialect spelling. Listen to Boone: “Ah ain’t puttin’ up with it! No, sir, it ain’t fair, it ain’t dawggone well right! I ain’t bin drinkin’. Ah ain’t bin fightin’. . . . Ain’t no law kin sling a man in jail when he’s inny-cint as a noo-born babe. . . . “

Readers of Omri’s age (he’s young enough to have his mum tuck him in at night) may enjoy the fantasy if they can put up with some incredible plot twists and tolerate the grating sound of magic creatures who talk like characters from a Saturday morning cowboy-and-Indian cartoon.