One of the things about Anna is the incredible relationship she had with 'Mister God'. Not some distant childhood vision of a god sitting on a throne up in the clouds, but in her wonderful matter of fact way she just really knew 'Mister God'. And her insights were just incredible. And as you read you find yourself, along with Fynn, learning so much. Anna's mirror book, her understanding that you can do billions of sums when you start with the answer, the way she could see everyday objects in a way which reflected her understanding of 'Mister God' are just some of the amazing aspects of Anna. A book I loved, loved, loved when I first read it in the late 1970's. It is one of those books that stays with you for decades. . ster God. No! The whole point of being alive was to be like Mister God and then you couldn't help but be good and kind and loving, could you?” Even the dirt and the stars and the animals and the people and the trees and everything, and the pollywogs?” The pollywogs were those little creatures we had seen under the microscope.

Aside from any spiritual implications, I remember the book’s emphasis on thinking for oneself, which I have tried latterly to hang on to, even at the risk of sounding like an idiot, or – more usually – proving myself one. As children, we thrive by thinking for ourselves. As adults, we’re cursed with sophistication. We recycle ideas, parade breadth of learning, are paralysed by the thought of being wrong. We call this sophistication cultural capital, which seems to me a good term because it is a currency: a system of value rather than the thing of value. I was sufficiently troubled about all this to execute some google searching. Searching the word "Fynn", I found: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mister_G...The book gives an account of their friendship. Anna by nature is the inquisitor, the forever probing creature who likes to find a reason for everything. Fynn, a student, tries to follow her hard-to-understand, yet simple logic. Philosophical questions are investigated through the eyes of a child, who proposes simple, common-sense solutions. Many of the conversations involve religion, with Anna personalising God, calling him "Mister God".

have none of it. No! Religion was all about being like Mister God and it was here that things could get a little tough. The instructions weren't to be good and kind and loving, etc., and it therefore followed that you would be more like Mi Sydney George Hopkins (26 March 1919 - 3 July 1999), as a teenager and young adult, lived in the East End of London in the early 1930s. He was briefly drawn towards the politics of Oswald Mosley, but soon became disillusioned. He won a scholarship to a local grammar school, Cooper's Company College, [5] London E3, and left aged 15 to work for The Russian Oil and Petroleum Company, where he had aspirations of becoming a research chemist. [6] Following a fall off a cliff he suffered chronic insomnia and in 1939 was referred to Finchden Manor [7] in Kent, a therapeutic community run by George Lyward O.B.E., and later joined the staff. [8] Anna treats Fynn with her special philosophy of church, God, sex, and numbers. The reader is taken along for this wonderful ride. I don't know why I was getting the feeling that this account is partly fictionalised. Children can be precocious but this book does seem to be a stretch. So many of the conversations seem impossible for a 5-7 year old. The pessimistic part of me just doesn't let me trust this narrative to be entirely based in reality.

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I must have made some movement or noise, for she levered herself upright and sat on her haunches and giggled. The she launched herself at me and undid my little pang of hurt, cut from the useless spark of jealousy with the delicate sureness of a surgeon.

you know has got Mister God in his middle, and so you have got his Mister God in your middle too. It's easy.” There is some uncertainty about Fynn's age on first encountering Anna. Early editions of the book say he was nineteen, but this would be impossible if he was to know Anna for three years before the outbreak of war, and in the latest editions of Mister God, This Is Anna his age has been amended to sixteen. [10] Sources [ edit ] Well then,” she continued, “if we don’t know many things about Mister God, how do we know he loves us?” Es ist kein allzu trauriges Buch, da man von vornherein das Ende kennt, allerdings musste ich mir dennoch am Schluss ein Tränchen verkneifen, da es wirklich ein 'schönes' Ende war. Toll beschrieben und mit einer wunderbaren Anekdote, die zum Buch passt. Wundervoll! Although the prose is relatively simple and somewhat coarse in some parts of the book and Anna's explanations are rough and terse even to the point of being abtruse, it just goes to show you that not all beauty is created by skilled and stylish techniques of trained artists and not all truth lies in fanciful and coherent arguments. Just as Jesus lied in the manger and Buddah among the ragged, sometimes the most beautiful poetry and the deepest, truest philosophy is 'in the middle' of a field of wildflowers, a child's indecipherable scribble or the silent smile of the common prostitute. In fact, this book eventually goes to demonstrate that when you're 'full' inside, you don't need to fret about what's outside or peripheral, you can concentrate on what's 'in the middle' and being 'what I am' and Mister God.

The ending of the book describes Anna's death at age seven after falling from a tree and Fynn's profound grief. "She never made eight years, she died by an accident. She died with a grin on her beautiful face. She died saying, 'I bet Mister God lets me get into heaven for this'." [4] Fynn experiences a period of angst, blaming God, but when he visits Anna's grave and sees it to be a riot of flowers, he lets go of his anger against God. The answer, he realizes, is "Anna is in my middle". This particular reference is to a conversation between Anna and Fynn. God is part of everybody and everybody is part of God. Fynn walks away from her graveyard with renewed hope. In his preface to both the British and American editions of the book, Vernon Sproxton remarks that he has seen Anna's drawings and notes and that he believes her to be real. It sounded to me like a death knell. “Damn and blast,” I thought. “Why does this have to happen to people? Now she’s lost everything.” But I was wrong. The relationship between Fynn and Anne is very fluid. As he himself says, "I saw myself variously as father, brother, uncle, friend." I admired their immediate connection with each other and Fynn's clear devotion for the little girl. But instead of focusing on this beautiful, short-lived relationship, Fynn decides to focus mainly on Anne's thoughts about God, and the hundred thousand questions raised in his mind by her constant musings. This is what brings the book down. The conversations between the two get very repetitive and dragged. I think I should have been much more of a religious idealist or much more of a philosopher to truly appreciate this book. Sadly, I am neither. There are some who say this child could not have just come to live with this family, It did happen in the 1930's and having little children run the streets was not unheard of. There are some who may say no child could ever do or think what Anna did but I am here to tell you, I personally know of at least one. And don't forget Mozart wrote music at this same age and played his sister's violin without being taught at this same age or younger.