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Quentin Blake & John Yeoman
It is tempting to write this review in the style of the book itself. To expound on the fact that Belaria Bishop of Western Ontario hold the record for most wry grins reading the book while Lloyd George (yes, that one) was heard to mutter "I see what they did there," 47 and a half times when reading the text which made his grandchildren politely ask him to never read it again. I have chosen (mostly!) not to do that because it somewhat belies the craft in creating nonsense. Year after year prize lists come out full of weighty texts writing movingly of important issues, as my back will attest I love both weighty texts and important issues, but they are not all there is to reading. A book I remember fondly from childhood is one where a monster "Jumps in the jelly like a kangaroo."
It is easy to think that anyone can write nonsense, certainly we all speak it from time to time, and perhaps that contributes to our undervaluing of funny, silly books. An argument often used is that funny books are a way into reading for millions of children but, while true, this somewhat misses the point. Funny books are an art in themselves and good examples of them are as much an art as any exploration of the collective unconscious.
The process of writing this must have been great fun but it must also have been exacting, creating an appearance of irreverant randomness is much harder than it seems. Nonsense and randomness are too readily conflated, apparant randomness is key, but a consistent texture of world it also needed. There are lots of details that make it feel a world which, if not fully fleshed, has some amusing meat on the bones. I particularly like the poignant case of the highest jump by a flea with a wooden leg. There are also occasions where joke is a well observed satire, the novel of Eileen Penumbra for instance.
It is also a perfect example of a picture book where the pictures and the words complement each other. I particularly enjoyed the largest collection of cats. To quote Nick Swarbrick quoting Mat Tobin quoting Maurice Sendak (Isn't the chain of literary thought a wonderful thing!) "‘I wanted at all costs to avoid the serious pitfall of illustrating with pictures what the author has already illustrated with words’. A great picturebook is one in which the words and the pictures work together to tell the story but they never say the same thing."
The meta section at the begining is also fun and the man with the most letters after his name is very much my kind of humour, referencing page numbers that don't exist. Quentin Blake's illustration is perfect for this, the kind of whimsical nature of his drawing and the expressions that sugest whole depths to characters.
From a collectors point of view this is also a bit of an oddity. It is in the main Puffin series rather than the Picture Puffins although it shares a format with them. It has the more formal logo of the main puffin series rather than the spread wings of the 70s picture books and has the isbn number of a main series book. I am curious about how it ended up in the main series, there are a range of types of books there, but most take at least a broadly chapter book format (even when not suited to it).
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