Review: The Baron in the Trees

The Baron in the Trees by Italo Calvino
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

When I think of “fantasy,” my first impulse – and most people’s – is to think of something in the Tolkien vein, something in the “high fantasy,” “world building” of Game of Thrones style 1000+pagers. Then, I work to remind to myself, there’s the gentler coming-of-age, quest stuff of Harry Potter of The Wizard of Oz. And that expanded definition can help to rethink the best of what’s possible, giving us peculiar hybrids like Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell or The Night Circus (easily the two best ‘fantasies’ I know of from the last 10-15 years).

But there’s a third aspect I sometimes forget to include, too. It starts with Gulliver’s Travels, but it carries through in the 20th Century to Borges and the magical realists. That is, it’s fantasy that has a particular, pointed perspective – fantasy that’s not at all about escapism but rather understands itself as commenting on the world around it through the veil of alternate reality.

After Borges, the most important mid-century writer in that vein is probably Calvino, at least by reputation. I love If On a Winter’s Night a Traveler as one of the great works interrogating the nature of reading and the power of imagination. I’ve put off reading The Baron in the Trees for no good reason, though I think I’ve picked it up a couple times along the way.

This is not If On a Winter’s Night level brilliance. Instead, it’s a gentler, less confrontational fantasy about – as the title says – a young baron who decides, at age 12, that he will never set foot on the ground again. For much of this, we see a character having Italian-inflected Huck Finn type adventures. He invents all sorts of things to make life in the trees easier. He battles pirates and, later, participates in the Napoleonic wars. He befriends a frightening bandit who, given the chance, prefers reading to rampaging. He even has a rich and complicated love affair.

It’s all charming and clever, and Calvino is deft enough throughout that the conceit never loses steam. There’s always a new riddle to solve or challenge to confront, and our narrative perspective – from the Baron’s younger, on-the-ground brother – helps sustain the wonder of it all.

There are hints throughout, though, and an almost explicit discussion at the end, that this is also a serious intellectual interrogation. It’s no coincidence this is set at the height of the French Enlightenment. Cosimo is friends – from a distance – with Montesquieu and Diderot, and he is taken with Voltaire and others. This is an age of philosophical ambition, an age of people who – perhaps naively – refused to stand on the bedrock they inherited and, instead, tried to ascend to something greater.

We know the excesses of the French Revolution. If nothing else, we see them here where, devoted philosophe that he is, Cosimo can’t quite bring himself to acknowledge how Napoleon has betrayed the principles that motivated the Revolution.

As the novel wraps up, though, it invites us to see Cosimo as a man who made an early and rash decision to explore life from a different perspective. There’s a sweet, fantastic quality to that – and it makes the book a pleasure to read – but there’s also a call to reflect on the price and limits of challenging inherited ideas. And that makes it a pleasure to reflect on once it’s finished.


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