Novel: Once on a Time

Overview
A. A. Milne’s 1917 novel Once on a Time is a sprightly fairy-tale pastiche set in the neighboring kingdoms of Euralia and Barodia, where courtship, cabinet meetings, and campaigns are played as much for wit as for stakes. Milne borrows the props of romance, princesses, princes, a meddling fairy, a looming war, and uses them to lampoon performative statecraft, fashionable philanthropy, and the easy pageantry of martial glory. An arch, confiding narrator punctures pomposity at every turn, yet keeps a warm regard for ordinary decency, making the book both affectionate and sharply satirical.

Plot
Euralia is ruled by King Merriwig, a genial enthusiast for the idea of soldiering, and his daughter, Princess Hyacinth, whose good sense and conscience mark her out amid the courtiers. Across the border lies Barodia, always ready to be affronted. A petty quarrel mushrooms into a formal war, and Merriwig sallies out, delighted to be camping with banners and bugles. In the king’s absence, government falls to those who can seize it. Chief among them is Countess Belvane, a glittering and unscrupulous grandee who writes proclamations in polished verse, organizes lavish public “benefactions,” and sees to it that the beneficiaries are chiefly herself. She flatters, blusters, and audits the treasury with a velvet glove.

Hyacinth, earnest rather than artful, tries to preserve the kingdom’s dignity and turns for help to Prince Udo of Araby, reputedly handsome and heroic. Belvane intercepts the idea before the man, and with the help of a not-quite-competent fairy arranges that the prince arrive under an enchantment. Udo steps onto Euralian soil not as a rescuer but as a ludicrous composite creature, saddled with mismatched features and an appetite that can’t decide between hay and meat. Mortified, he hides in the woods, sustained by Hyacinth’s kindness and the practical ministrations of Wiggs, a clear-eyed young attendant who sees through grandeur and into need. Efforts to undo the spell produce only variations on the joke; the fairy is bound by fussy rules and literal readings, and each attempted cure adds a new inconvenience.

Meanwhile the supposed war plays out as a comic-opera campaign. Merriwig and Barodia’s monarch stage marches and countermarches, exchange compliments and stratagems, and somehow contrive to miss the point of fighting at all. Back at court, Belvane’s pageants and charitable regulations grow more audacious, her diary of self-congratulation more revealing. The strands meet at a decisive moment when Hyacinth’s quiet firmness exposes the Countess’s pretenses. The fairy’s spell at last behaves, restoring Udo to humanity; his trial has punctured his vanity, leaving him less of a pedestal figure and more of an actual person. With the glamour dispelled, romantic and political alike, the kingdoms settle their quarrel not by triumph but by mutual recognition of its absurdity. Stability returns to Euralia, the court chastened, the Princess secure.

Characters and Themes
Hyacinth is the moral center: perceptive, patient, and unflashy, she learns to rule by insisting on plain dealing. Belvane is Milne’s star villainess, charming and magnificently hollow, a satire of public virtue used as a mirror. Udo is the punctured ideal, transformed outwardly to reveal inward emptiness and then rebuilt. Merriwig’s boyish delight in soldiering turns warfare into a picnic, deflating heroics without condemning courage. Wiggs embodies common sense and kindness, the book’s preferred answers to spectacle. Around them Milne plays with themes of make-believe and power: how words make worlds in court and in fairy magic, how appearances seduce, and how good governance looks a lot like honesty.

Style and Legacy
Milne’s narrator speaks in sly asides and mock-authoritative footfalls, treating readers as accomplices. The prose favors nimble turns, Gilbertian rhymes, and deliberate anticlimax; the magic is mechanical on purpose, its rules parodying bureaucracy. Once on a Time stands beside Thackeray’s The Rose and the Ring as a modern fairy tale for adults that children can love, anticipating the warmth, wordplay, and humane mischief that would later make Milne famous.