Peter Nimble and His Fantastic Eyes

Names are primary markers of identity. Parents or guardians use names to address their children, establishing a solid connection between the two, but in this novel, the most important names are bestowed not by loving caretakers but by uncaring adults. The magistrates of the port town call the anonymous orphan they find “Nimble,” a nickname that signals that he is agile, dexterous, and crafty; and Peter lives up to his name, becoming a skilled thief. The children of the Vanished Kingdom also no longer go by their given names, but by “whatever we are” (215)—Incarnadine has robbed the children of their names by wiping them from their parents’ memories. The only child who has managed to preserve the connection to a parent that a name conveys is Peg: When Giggle bemoans the fact that none of their parents remember them or their names, Scrape responds, “Except for the Princess […] She held on to her real name” (215).

Eventually, it turns out that Peter has no guardian-assigned name: He was set adrift before his parents could give him one. Without a name, he has no identity until he crafts one for himself—but because of his name, Peter sees himself not as a noble king but a criminal. While Peter’s orphan nickname describes his identity as a thief, it hardly captures his valor and endurance in the face of impossible odds. What he fails to appreciate, however, is that others—Sir Tode, Mr. Pound, Professor Cake—see the nobility behind the thievery. It takes the support and reassurance of others for Peter to realize his identity is worthier than he ever imagined.

The battle for control of the Vanished Kingdom pits the technology of Incarnadine’s clockwork beast against the magic of sentient ravens, a cursed knight, and Peter’s Fantastic Eyes. In fantasy literature, magic often wins against the forces of industry, engineering, and science. Like in Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings trilogy or Hayao Miyazaki’s Princess Mononoke, technology is synonymous with invasive destruction of nature, dehumanizing work, and the valorizing of greed and power over empathy and community. In this novel too, magic is the realm of imagination and dreams, while technology mines the world’s wonder and mystery to extract its resources. When Professor Cake lays out a map of the known world, he opines that cartography, the science of maps, makes the world smaller, both literally and figuratively. Cake is interested in the world beyond the map’s borders—that is where adventure awaits, and where only an imaginative child would dare to go.

Of course, one person’s technology is another’s magic. Science fiction author and futurist Arthur C. Clarke famously said, “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic” (Office of Technology Development. University of Nebraska–Lincoln). Incarnadine’s search for dark magic during Hazelgood’s reign leads him to technology, though to the brainwashed and compliant citizens of the Vanished Kingdom, Incarnadine’s massive and elaborate clockwork mechanism appears magical anyway. Incarnadine loves the predictability of technology: “unlike magic, this ‘science’ could be mastered and harnessed” (366). The king’s clockwork, however, meets its match in Peter Nimble, for whom it is simply another lock to pick, a puzzle of gears and cogs and springs, a deadly machine that can be controlled by anyone who understands it. In defeating the king’s science, Peter restores to the kingdom its magic and wonder.