Book Review: The Boggart and the Monster

In the days of my youth, Susan Cooper’s The Boggart was one of my favorite books. Just so much as I loved that book, I loathed and despised the sequel, The Boggart and the Monster. In fact, I loathed and despised it so much that I haven’t reread it for twenty years, so I felt a great curiosity as littlerhymes and I approached The Boggart and the Monster in the great Cooper reread.

Me, a few chapters in: What did I have against this book? This is great! We’re back in Scotland… Emily and Jessup are in top form… the Boggart is pulling some wonderful tricks…

Two chapters later, after we have made the acquaintance of the Loch Ness Monster: Ah, yes, Nessie is SO pathetic. That’s why I hated this book.

Nessie, it seems, is in fact a boggart, whose castle (that is, the castle of the human family he had attached himself to) was blown up three hundred years ago during one of the Jacobite Uprisings. Distrait, Nessie sunk to the bottom of Loch Ness, and there he has spent the last three hundred years, mostly sleeping, occasionally rising to the surface in the form of a massive plesiosaur, in which shape he has gotten stuck because he’s too sad to shift.

Now I realize that the Boggart himself spent a certain amount of time grieving in The Boggart, too, but he also remained an active spirit of mischief who was having great fun stealing pizza and mucking about with traffic lights. Nessie is simply a sad sack! A wet blanket! “A sook!” littlerhymes helpfully supplied, a piece of Australian slang that I had never heard before but instantly understood.

Nessie is such a sook that when at last he realizes that he needs to leave Loch Ness (a pair of remote-controlled submersibles are searching the lake for him), he needs five people to help him hold the seal form to swim out. Five people, all thinking constantly of seals for moral support. FIVE!

Rereading this as an adult, I actually did quite enjoy the book. Emily and Jessup remain in fine form, the Boggart has some wonderful fun with the submersibles, Emily and Tommy’s budding romance is cute, and the Scottishness of it all is delicious. And I could see what Cooper was trying to do with Nessie, and even why the boggart PTSD must have seemed like a good idea: “He’s sunk in despair at the bottom of the lake” is a clever way to explain why the Loch Ness Monster is sighted only once in a blue moon.

But it was also just not any fun to read as a kid, and even as an adult I’m kind of reading around the wearisome Nessie portions to enjoy the good bits, which, again, are many. A book is not a curate’s egg, thank god, it can have both good bits and bad.

And now there will be a little hiatus before littlerhymes and I pick up with The Boggart Fights Back, as we are MEETING UP IN PARIS next week! Land of croissants, here we come!