Forget the Famous Five – did Enid Blyton invent the multiverse?

Derivative, repetitive and short on basic compassion, Enid Blyton’s massive back catalogue is like AI fiction a century before such a thing was imaginable. What it did imagine may be something that was previously unthinkable, though. For all her (many) literary flaws, Enid Blyton might just have invented the multiverse.

Blyton churned out books at an astonishing rate, sometimes as many as 50 a year. Through series such as Noddy, The Famous Five and The Secret Seven she has sold more books than Beatrix Potter, C. S. Lewis and Stephanie Meyer combined. Even J. R. R. Tolkien and Stephen King would have to form a supergroup to equal the number of volumes Blyton shifted over the past century.

Yet, the popularity of Blyton’s writing has always been in inverse proportion to her respect within literary circles. Publishers often rejected her submissions, while the BBC blacklisted her stories from broadcast. Her response was to call her critics “stupid people who don’t know what they’re talking about”, the mid-century British equivalent of “haters gonna hate” – and her casual dismissal of negative feedback bore all the hallmarks of someone who could light their cigar with a hundred pound note.

Her stories were frequently called out as sexist, racist, xenophobic and excessively cruel. Modern editions scrub out all the corporal punishment, while her weird habit of giving characters names like Dick and Fanny has been softened to less nudge-nudge-wink-wink titles like Rick and Frannie.

Despite all of these shortcomings, her Faraway Tree series does feature a central mechanic who was well ahead of its time. Long before the notion of alternative realities went mainstream via films like Everything Everywhere All At Once or Into the Spider-Verse, Blyton imagined a giant tree whose top granted access to a countless series of strange new dimensions.

From the childish wish fulfilment of the Land-of-Take-What-You-Want to the seismically unstable Rocking Land to the brutally violent Land of Dame Slap (or Dame Snap as she’s now known), the basic laws of physics at these destinations are always up for grabs. In The Land of Upside Down, everything and everyone is inverted; Roundabout Land never stops revolving; and the Land of Dreams is positively Lynchian in its lack of logic.

You could argue that none of this was particularly novel. Didn’t Alice, Dorothy and those kids in the wardrobe visit fantastical lands? Sure. But none of them were frequent flyers to a seemingly endless array of worlds, and each of their authors was more interested in conjuring a magical realm to comment on our own.

Historian James Gleick has convincingly argued that a similar notion, time travel, didn’t really exist before the late 1800s. It just didn’t strike anyone that we could jump in a machine or step through a magic portal and end up in a different era. For most of human history, the difference between the world of your childhood and the one in which you died was very little; it was only when technology and society began to undergo rapid, widespread changes that jumping through time became something you might want to consider.

If a concept now as ubiquitous as time travel has been around for just a little over a century, why should its even nerdier cousin, the multiverse, be any older? You could point to the various heavens and hells and other mythological spaces in different cultures as evidence that the postulation of other realities goes back millennia. But many of those were presented as real places you could physically travel to, with a bit of effort. From Mount Olympus to the Isle of Avalon to the many gates to hell scattered across the globe, gods and demons didn’t inhabit other dimensions so much as real places it was a hassle to get to.

Blyton’s own daughter Gillian said the Faraway series was inspired by Norse myths, which centre on an immense tree that connects the nine realms of the universe. It would be an understatement to say that Blyton played fast and loose with that premise, though. The Viking cosmos has its elves and goblins, but it’s a long way from the Land of the Old Saucepan Man or the one that traps people who lose their temper.

If Blyton didn’t conjure the concept of the multiverse from whole cloth, she may at least be responsible for its inception in a more sidelong way. It could be that her writing inspired those who would go on to popularise the idea of multiple, perhaps infinite alternative realities.

The scientific concept of the multiverse – technically named the “many worlds interpretation” - is typically traced to physicist Hugh Everett. Everett would have been nine when the first Faraway Tree book hit the shelves, but he grew up in the US, where Blyton-fever never really took off, so it’s unlikely the budding maths geek was ever exposed to the adventures of Joe, Beth and Fanny/Frannie.

An earlier lecture by Erwin Schrödinger – of dead/not dead cat fame – presented its audience with the possibility that hard maths can prove that several different histories exist simultaneously. Schrödinger was living in Dublin at the time of The Enchanted Wood’s release, but he held a visiting position at Oxford, a pleasant half-hour’s drive from Blyton’s home in Beaconsfield, England. His first daughter Ruth was born in the university town, and she was five when Blyton’s Faraway series became a bestseller.

Did Schrödinger read to his kids? In the absence of one of those time machines, it’s impossible to tell, but someone probably did. The scientist was living at the time with both his wife and his mistress – Ruth’s mother – and his two other children had different mums again. That certainly ups the likelihood that someone was versing the young ’uns in the various lands at the top of the Faraway Tree, and it’s not a great leap to imagine little Ruthie passing on those stories to her dad.

It’s perhaps worth noting that Blyton’s romantic life was equally unconventional for the time. Biographers write of her extramarital affairs with men and women. It’s a mystery how she found the time to pump out 6000 to 10,000 words a day.

The evidence thus far: Blyton’s series hypothesised the existence of an uncountable number of alternative realities that differ from our own to varying degrees. At the time of their release, one of the fathers of the many worlds interpretation of physics was himself a child, and the other had kids of the same age and lived just down the road. An open-and-shut case, clearly.

But to any cynics yet to be convinced by this ironclad argument, consider one final way in which Blyton must be considered the creator of what we now call the multiverse. According to the current leading model of multiverse theory, by which I mean the Marvel Cinematic Universe version, an infinite number of universes will mean every possibility exists as a reality in at least one of them.

There’s no denying that somewhere out there, accessible to us or not, there exists The Land Where Enid Blyton Invented the Multiverse.

And if you don’t accept that, you don’t have to guess what she’d call you.

The Magic Faraway Tree opens nationally March 26.