“The Flint Heart”

A re-imagined story with a possible political message (from the New York Times Book Review)

For this revival of The Flint Heart, a wonderful British fantasy by Eden Phillpotts first published in 1910, we can thank Katherine Paterson, the well-known author, and her husband, John, who at the request of their publisher “freely abridged” the original.

At its center is an object, the Flint Heart, a heart-shaped pebble that changes whoever possesses it into an evil person. The book opens with the talisman’s back story, explaining how a shaman made the object during (appropriately) the Stone Age when a warrior wanted to become hardhearted in order to overthrow his ruler. The subject is classic, but in the Patersons’ abridgment of Phillpotts, its treatment is comic — the “Iliad” as retold by the Flintstones. “If you are one of those people that think people in those long-off days were much kinder and gentler than people are today, you are being far too romantic,” Phillpotts warns in the Patersons’ rendition. People then, as now, were “always trying to see who could throw the biggest lump at his enemy.”

Time passes, the evil stone is eventually buried and over the next 5,000 years that region in southern England, Dartmoor, is invaded by pixies, fairies, brownies, trolls, flibbertigibbets, dwarfs, pidg­widgeons…