Magical realism meets Paranormal Time-Travel
Ransom Riggs’ novel, Miss Peregrines Home for Peculiar Children, follows the story of young Jacob Portman, a sixteen-year-old who grew up idolizing his Grandpa Abe. Abe was one of the few people in his family to survive and escape World War II in Poland. His grandfather uses his final breaths to give Jacob a cryptic mission to find “an old wise bird” that could help him find the secrets his grandfather kept about their family history.
Jacob’s life after his grandfather passes away makes it difficult for him to decipher between his imagination and reality. Clues in his grandfather’s memorabilia lead Jacob and his father to adventure to a small island off the coast of Wales in search of Miss Peregrine after piecing together clues that Grandpa Abe left him.
Throughout his life, Grandpa Abe encountered an array of extraordinary creatures and shared his tales to Jacob, enchanting him with stories of peculiar children that lived in a magnificent home in a small town in Wales. Grandpa Abe lived in Poland for most of his younger life until he had to seek refuge in Wales. He lived among peculiar children with some having the ability to levitate, exist without a head attached to their neck, and set fire to anything with a touch of her fingers. Presumably, Grandpa Abe left Miss Peregrines home and started a life on his own. Many years after, she wrote to him to request his return to her home.
The last moments of Grandpa Abe’s life were only witnessed by two people, Jacob and the half man half animal monster that killed him. Jacob was the first one to arrive at Abe’s house and only received a glance at the monster that attacked his grandpa. Jacob is left to become saturated in the trauma of his grandpa’s death, and the reality of it all dissociates him, and his perception of the world around him shifts into a dark and uncertain place.
Ransom Riggs
Miss Peregrines Home for Peculiar Children is the first of a five-book series of graphic novels. Riggs grew up on the shoreline of Maryland but soon moved to Englewood, Florida, where he began drafting short stories paired with photography. Riggs, from a young age, was an avid photographer and became interested in filming just the same. Currently, he and his wife Tahereh Mafi live in Los Angeles.
Riggs has always been inspired by the little things in life. For example, he would write stories on his father’s typewriter as a kid. In his teenage years, he would collect antique and grotesque snapshots of people. His local flee market would have enormous bins with random snapshots for sale. Riggs would spend hours rummaging through the bins not looking for anything specific, just anything that would catch his eye. Each bin would have thousands of photos each only costing a quarter so he would spend a small amount of money for a handful of pictures from each visit.
Curation
Riggs began publishing the Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children series at the peak time of hand-held camera phones and social media. The first book in the series, Miss Peregrine’s home for Peculiar Children, was published in 2011, only one year after the launch of Instagram. It is bold to have a novel that contains numerous pictures, especially considering that the younger generation was going to have a new outlet to display and view pictures. What separates Riggs’ work from journalists that utilize platforms such as Instagram is that his photography is supplementary support. The main object of Instagram is to caption the exact picture that is being shared. When using supplementary photography like Riggs, a story is first told and then represented visually, or vise-versa. It demands the audience to pay more attention and to read and re-read until they clearly form the image intended by the author.
All of the photographs are black and white, which forces the writer to enhance the shadows and highlight the white space. Some of the photos are intensely darkened and made to allow white-space to pop out of the images.
Technique
Riggs weaves the letter Miss Peregrine sent to Jacob’s grandfather only after describing the contents of the gift Jacobs’s mother gives him for his birthday. He uses text first to develop an image in the mind of the readers. It isn’t until after a few pages of developing text that Riggs inserts a picture of the hand-written letter. All of the children are introduced one by one throughout the book as well, but before Riggs includes a picture of them, he describes their characteristics such as their gift, personality, and appearance thoroughly.
Riggs includes a picture of The Selected Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, and on the bottom of the title page is a note from his grandpa. The note ends with the sentence, “and the worlds he has yet to discover.” After Jacob pieces together each clue that his grandfather left behind for him, he finds himself in Wales, but he has no idea what kind of world he is going to enter.
Through solo-adventuring, Jacob finds himself in the room that he believed was his grandfather’s and begins to rummage through his belonging which mostly included the numerous photographs that his grandfather told stories about when Jacob was a child. The event of finding these photos acts as a catalyst for Jacob finding Miss Peregrine and her peculiar children.
At the end of the book, Jacob writes his father a note informing him that he is journeying to a new time loop with the other peculiar children of Miss Peregrine’s house. The note draws a parallel to the initial note left in the The Selected Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson because Grandpa Abe invites Jacob to the worlds he has yet to discover and by this point in the book, he is about to embark on a journey to discover the worlds his grandfather told him about.
The photographs of the children are purposefully redundant, illustrating both the text and the photographs, in which each mode tells the same story, providing repetition of key ideas.
Reception
Magical realism is becoming a genre that authors choose hesitantly, and not many can attain the right balance between realistic story-telling and fictional creative writing. The balance here is met by the balance of historical context that Riggs provides about Grandpa Abe. The flashbacks of Abe’s life as a child and letter that are revealed through Jacobs’s life. The connection between Abe’s life as a refugee allows any reader to develop the belief that supernatural happenings are possible. Riggs creates an understanding that through the power of story-telling, and by extending Jacobs’s journey to the home, his grandpa lived in a child.
Time travel is blended with magical realism as Riggs transports us to a time where peculiar children became brothers and sisters to form a new family with Miss Peregrine as the mother and headmaster of the home. These children were all disconnected orphans, but they were not ordinary by any means. Each child possessed a gift, a talent, something that made them peculiar. Miss Peregrine educated Jacob on her goal in life, which is why she formed her home for peculiar children. Many of the parents of peculiar children would be abandoned by their non-peculiar families, leaving them to fend for themselves. Miss Peregrine and some other headmasters had the goal to provide a stable home for these peculiar orphans.
Time is used subjectively by Riggs but tied back into the plot and is represented as ‘loops’ of existence. One of the children had the gift of controlling the functions of the loop and was responsible for preserving the peculiar children and their youth. In this universe, there was a wide array of loops that could be existed in. Loops are all different, but Miss Peregrine’s loop allows the same date of September 3, 1940, to continuously repeat the same day over and over. The loop allowed all peculiar children to remain alive before the bombing that tragically destroyed Miss Peregrine’s home. Other loops were set on a different day in older years and they were all maintained by their headmaster. The magical element of a loop is that it is a mechanism of the headmaster who typically is a bird. She explains that birds are the only creatures who can manipulate time.
Emma was a peculiar child who possessed the gift of manipulating fire. She discovers her talent as a young child when she was sleeping and woke up suddenly to her bed on fire. Her parents became dismantled from her peculiarity and accused her of lying about her pyrokinetic because every time she set a fire, she would never appear burned. Her mother believed her to be the daughter of the devil because of her power. Her father abused and tortured her thinking it would change her back to a normal girl.
Book Development with Photographs
Riggs describes the authentic, vintage found photographs that appear throughout his novel as unsettling little mysteries. Odd and disturbing, these little mysteries made their way into his novel as a way for Riggs to explain the stories of the subjects in the photos that he collects. There is a large separation, created by the passage of time and movement of place, that prevents Riggs from identifying any possible context that might have truthfully explained them.
Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children, began as an idea to use the photographs in a Halloween book and accompany the photographs with rhyming couplets, however, Mr. Rekulak ‒whom Riggs worked for hire as a freelance writer‒ suggested that the eerie photographs would work wonderfully in a novel.
Finding some of the photos at flea markets and antique shops, and borrowing others from the personal archives of ten collectors ‒people who have spent years hunting through messes of photographs to rescue images of beauty and significance‒ Riggs developed an organic writing process that included basing elements of the story off of a few of the photographs while discovering new photographs to include. Riggs states in the Q&A section at the end of his novel that “Ultimately, the photos and the story influenced each other.” Sometimes he found a photograph with punctum and then would find a way to work it into the plot, while other times he’d look for a certain photo to fit the idea that he had. He states, however, that there were plenty of photographs that he had to leave out.
