IN MINIATURE
HOW SMALL THINGS ILLUMINATE THE WORLD
SIMON GARFIELD
Canongate, 289pp, £14.99
Simon Garfield’s In Miniature: How Small Things Illuminate the World charmed and astonished the
Observer’s reviewer, Andrew Martin. ‘I did keep having to search the internet to make sure Garfield wasn’t fantasising…sometimes I paused just to marvel at a fact, or the implications thereof.’ This gloriously higgledypiggledy survey of miniature objects and the fascination they exert upon the human mind ‘is about scale, not size’. The story begins with a building famous for height, not tininess, the
Eiffel Tower, whose replicas for tourists constituted ‘the first massmarket souvenirs’.
At the Observer’s sister-title the Guardian, Aida Edemariam was equally intrigued. She implicitly identified a timely antagonism in Garfield’s narrative between the ‘idiosyncrasy’ of the Hampshire model village of Bekonskot, and the ‘soulless greatest-hits parade’ of Mini-europe in Belgium. In passing she alighted on HG Well’s claim to be ‘grandfather of video games’ through his ardent deployment of toy armies, and the positively filmic story of how ‘a model of a fully loaded slave ship on the Middle Passage was handed around parliament in the 1780s, instantly doing the job no amount of words had yet been able to achieve’.
But a rumble of scepticism sounded from John Carey’s review in the Sunday Times. ‘A worry for readers is that Garfield sometimes seems sick of his subject. His chapter on model villages is almost as boring as model villages.’ Furthermore, lest he appear to criticise subject rather than author, Carey pointed out certain substantial lacunae in Garfield’s reflections. ‘He says nothing about medieval miniature art, which can be matchlessly beautiful…even the great Elizabethan miniaturist Nicholas Hilliard gets only a sentence or two.’ By contrast the inclusion of Queen Mary’s fabulously camp doll’s house, decorated with the aid of the foremost artists of the day, provoked this reviewer to particularly Puritan ire.