On Mrs Frisby And The Rats Of NIMH

With rare skill, this book weaves together two quite different types of stories. The ‘external’ story is about the dilemma that faces the field-mouse Mrs Frisby when her son Timothy comes down with pneumonia and needs to rest at home. Alas, this is just when Farmer Fitzgibbon decides to plough the paddock where they live, which will destroy her home, and kill her child.

The way that Mrs Frisby copes with this crisis brings her into the orbit of a separate ‘internal’ story: a science fiction allegory in which a group of highly evolved experimental rats try to escape from a laboratory called the National Institute of Mental Health (aka NIMH) and set up their own rural commune far away in the countryside. (This book came out in 1971, remember.)

Eventually, Mrs Frisby discovers what her connection to the rats really is. Thanks to their mutual dependence she also manages -spoiler alert!- to save her child. Not only is the entwined story totally gripping, but the writing is of such consistently high quality that Robert C. O’Brien thoroughly deserved the Newbery Medal he won for Mrs Frisby in 1972.

Unfortunately, many people will know of this book only through the wretched film based on it, which was called The Secret of NIMH. That’s tragic, because the differences are substantial. They illustrate the self-defeating ways that Hollywood commonly hedges its bets on a big budget film, as opposed to when someone is writing a book that will ring true to children.

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For the film-makers, the double plot proved to be far too difficult to handle. The film not only focuses almost exclusively on Mrs Frisby’s storyline, but adds a clunky fantasy element involving a magic amulet that is entirely lacking from the book.

In passing, the film-makers do deserve a shred of sympathy. At the last minute the main character had to be re-named, because the Wham-O company that makes Frisbees refused to give the producers a waiver to use the name. Mrs Frisby suddenly had to become Mrs Brisby, well after the voice tracks had been recorded. To cap things off, the film had the misfortune to be released at exactly the same time as E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial.

The Life

Robert C. O’Brien was the nom-de-plume of Robert Leslie Conly, and was born in New York City in 1918. O’Brien showed early talent as a pianist and studied at the Juilliard School of Music before starting work as a journalist. Eventually, he landed a job as a writer/editor at National Geographic magazine, where he worked from 1951 until his death.

O’Brien began writing fiction only during the last ten years of his life. He wrote only three books for children: a fantasy novel called The Silver Crown, Mrs Frisby, and the post-nuclear dystopia, Z for Zachariah.

Mrs Frisby though, is the book for which he will be remembered. It is hard to discuss it without spoilers, so I’ll give you just a rough outline. The band of rats who escape from NIMH contain an interesting array of personalities, including the natural leader Nicodemus, the erratic rebel Jenner and the noble and heroic figure of Justin. Politically speaking, they could be the rodent equivalents of Stalin, Trotsky and Lenin.

Yet as always, the book’s most vividly depicted character is its out-and-out villain: namely, Dragon, the murderous cat that lives with Farmer Fitzgibbon, and who poses a chronic threat to all small things. Here is Dragon, in repose:

He was enormous, with a huge broad head and a large mouth full of curving fangs, needle sharp. He has seven claws on each foot and a thick furry tail, which lashed angrily from side to side. In colour he was orange and white, with glaring yellow eyes; and when he leaped to kill he gave a high, strangled scream that froze his victims where they stood.

Testing, testing

Without fanfare, O’Brien deals with the moral issues inevitable in any story about animals that have been subjected to genetic modification. In this case, the mutations eventually provide the rats with the intellectual tools necessary for their escape. It is not difficult to side with the rats. Take, for example, the way that Nicodemus describes to Mrs Frisby his early memories of the NIMH experiments – when he first realizes that he isn’t actually escaping, but is running a maze while being carefully scrutinised by his captors:

The third time I was still faster; and after each trial George (or sometimes Julie, sometimes Dr Schulz) would write down how long it took. You might ask: Why would I bother to run through it at all, if I knew it was only a trick? The answer is I couldn’t help it. When you’ve lived in a cage, you can’t bear not to run, even if what you’re running towards is an illusion.

At a crucial point in their escape plan, the rats realise that they have the latitude to take some risks. The scientists have turned them into something too valuable to harm, for now at least. Balanced against this is the scientists’ need to ensure they do not escape – and once the rats have escaped, the scientists then have a pressing need to kill them, before the public gets wind of the dangerous experiments being carried out at NIMH.

O’Brien’s book was written well before genetic modification became a political issue. In his book, the moral questions about GM are dealt with implicitly, without preaching. There is nothing remotely like the overt moralizing that occurs in Watership Down, where Richard Adams lets his readers know exactly how annoyed he is that society has forgotten the sacrifices made by those who went off to war to fight the Black Rabbit.

In Mrs Frisby, the modified rats are quite lonely, tragic figures. They do find a few allies in the Frisby family, plus an old white mouse called Mr Ages, and a young crow that Mrs Frisby rescues from entanglement just in time to escape the jaws of Dragon. This trio of outsiders are a compassionate part of the natural order from which the rats are now excluded.

Homecomings

The story ends, as it began, with Mrs Frisby and her children at home. As he was to show later in Z for Zachariah as well, O’Brien was exceptionally good at describing the natural world. (All those years at National Geographic were well spent.) Note the keen attention to detail in this unexceptional passage, which comes close to the end of the story:

So on a day in May as warm as summer, early in the morning, Mrs Frisby and her children laid a patchwork of sticks, grass and leaves over the top of the entrance to their cement block house, and then carefully scraped earth over it so that it would not show. With luck, they would not have to dig a new one in the autumn.

They walked to their summer house, taking half a day to do it, strolling slowly and enjoying the fine weather, stopping on the way to eat some spring leaves of fieldcress, some young greens and a crisp, spicy mushroom that had sprouted by the edge of the woods. For their main course a little farther on, there was a whole field of winter wheat, its kernels newly ripe and soft… As they approached the brook, towards the big tree in the hollow of whose roots they would make their summer home, the children ran ahead, shouting and laughing… Within a few minutes of arrival, her four had gone with a group of the others down to the water, to see the tadpoles swim.

Mrs Frisby set about the job of tidying up the house, which had acquired a carpet of dead leaves during the winter, and then bringing in a pile of soft green moss to serve as bedding for them all. The house was a roomy chamber with a pleasant, earthy smell. Its floor was hard-packed earth, and its wooden roof was an arched intertwining of roots, above which rose the tree itself, an oak.

Once safely settled into the summer house, Mrs Frisby decides that this is as good a time and place as any to set her children down and tell them the saga of the rats, and the role that their parents played within it.

The conclusion of the book manages to pull off yet another tricky balancing act. It provides an ending that is decisive enough to be satisfying, yet open-ended enough to encourage young readers to wonder just what the eventual fate of the rats might have been.

In Hollywood, they would call this the set-up for a sequel. But if so, it was one that the author never lived long enough to consider writing.

Previous essays: The Moomins by Tove Jansson; Goodnight Moon by Margaret Wise Brown; Badgers Parting Gifts by Susan Varley; The Incredible Journey by Sheila Burnford; Harriet The Spy by Louise Fitzhugh; The Indian in The Cupboard by Lynne Reid Banks; The Dark Is Rising by Susan Cooper; The True Confessions of Charlotte Doyle, by Avi; Abel’s Island by William Steig

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