Fiction Review | May 2003
by Simon Puttock
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Greetings Dear Reader, I have been sitting at home, drumming my fingers and waiting for a steady and glorious stream of books from the future to be delivered to my door. When I say books from the future, I mean NEW books, books that have not even been published yet. There is something so exciting about a book you know nothing about. It could contain ANYTHING.

Sadly, all that has arrived so far is a small burp of books in a parcel from Viv - note to publishers: we are ready, willing and able!

So I have decided to start with books from the past (one of them is really RATHER new), that I have been thinking about recently.

First off, while visiting a twenty two month old friend of mine recently, I was kindly offered the chance to read to him (at least 37 times!) Picture This [Templar Publishing] by Alison Jay. It comes in a handy, durable board book, and a bigger paperback. Board books are so reliable, but with paperbacks you get bigger pictures. I am often torn over which to get.

Anyway, Picture This is a picture book in the most simple sense. It has pictures of things. But such pictures! Not for Alison a ball on one page, a butterfly on another. There IS just one word on every page, but the pictures are beautifully detailed scenes that, as you move through them (you can, as my young friend ably demonstrates, move in ANY direction, and skip as many pages as you like) - where was I? Yes - as you move through the book, you see how something small and insignificant becomes, as you turn the page, the focus of the next picture. Then as you look, you see many things crop up again and again, running their own little stories through the book. Near or far, the dog is almost everywhere. This is really a Very Good Thing when one of your favourite words is DOG! (And if, indeed, it is one of the only words you KNOW!) Then again, though the whole book forms a sort of 360 degree story of what we might see around us, extra little ideas crop up, like Jack and Jill, distinctly recognisable by the well on the hill. And how about a rabbit flying an aeroplane (AIRBLAY! AIRBLAY! says my young friend), or the mystery of a ship in a bottle?

I have to admit that I had known, and liked this book for some time before my recent reacquaintance. But it was somewhere around the seventeenth reading that I realised we were not only still finding new things, but new possibilities of how the stories ran. Instead of getting tired of it, I began to be very glad when Picture This was ONCE AGAIN my young friends book of choice. I especially like the horrified snail.

Now to a book which lots and lots of adults I know can quote from with pleasure and ease: How Tom Beat Captain Najork and His Hired Sportsmen [Red Fox] (words by Russell Hoban, pictures by Quentin Blake) which was around some years ago. Then sadly it went. Where had it gone? And WHY? It was a book beloved by many. Every now and then you’d find two or three people huddled together, mourning the disappearance of the Hired Sportsmen, and muttering darkly about Aunt Fidget Wonkenham-Strong: ‘Where she walked the flowers frooped and when she sang the trees all shivered.’

‘Where is this book?’ do I hear you cry? Don’t tempt us with lost treasure! Well, the book is back! In all its glorious watercolour! (And unmistakeable Blakeish black line.) How Tom... is a story with a delightfully dreadful aunt (see above), a brilliant, small and ingenious boy(who ‘did low and myddy fooling around [and] high and wobbly fooling around’), a superbly snooty anti-hero (‘seven feet tall, with eyes like fire, a voice like thunder, and a handlebar moustache’)and...Hired Sportsmen. (Oh, and another aunt.) Several seriously weird contests and a letter are also important, and there is a nice, surprising and happy ending which, of course, I cannot tell you.

Now, before you make a dash for the nearest bookshop or library to get your mitts on this wonderful book, I must tell you that it LOOKS like a picture book, and you will find it in the picture book section, but there are lots and LOTS of words inside, and it is not a story for the very small. Having said that, though, it is a story for pretty much everyone else. Reading this book to ANYONE who is not up to reading it for themselves could not possibly be classed as a chore. If you have a granny who likes nothing better than to lie in the dark with her eyes closed, try sneaking up on her with a torch and reading it aloud. I garuantee she will be hooked halfway through the first sentence.

Now, moving on to my last choice, the recently published What The Birds See [Walker Books] by Sonya Hartnett, let me first say that I am not OPPOSED to happy endings. I LIKE happy endings. I have been known to be found, sobbing joyously misereble, at the end this book or that.

Of course, I don’t like ALL happy endings. There are times, at the end of a book, when I feel as if I ought to go to the bathroom and be sick. Which says to me that not all happy endings are RIGHT. What we need, every now and then and in the right story, are downright, unashamedly unhappy endings. Bleak endings. Even nasty, fatal endings. And that is why I come to What The Birds See. Nobody skips merrily off into the sunset in this one. And I love it.

Okay, it’s one of those books that works just as well for grown-ups as for teenagers, and it’s certainly not one of those ‘does he REALLY like me even though I’m not blonde?’ type books. In fact, the main character is only nine years old. But don’t be put off by that. We were all nine once, and Adrain, our ‘hero’ is certainly not your average fictional playground twerp.

The book begins with the disappearance of three young children. This is not a magical disappearance; the children have been abducted by an all too real adult. But the story is not about THEM. The beginning sets the tone and the mood for what follows.

Adrian lives with his uncle and his grandmother. His mother and father can’t, or won’t, have anything to do with him. He’s sort of abandonned, and he definitely feels unwanted. But I don’t think this book is really, at its heart, about that, either. Adrian is scared of so many things because he does not understand so much of what goes on around him, and he WILL NOT TELL THAT TO ANYBODY. And THAT is a lot of what I think this book is about: guarded knowledge, secrets. The secrets people keep, and why. And what the consequences of keeping secrets can be. How just not knowing something can turn into this huge mystery that sits in your life like a ticking bomb. And how not telling somebody something can make it grow enormous, until it overshadows your life and blots out your personal sun.

Adrian keeps so much bottled up inside that something has to give, and when he finally decides to trust someone, she’s so screwy with secrets herself that they are probably the last two people on earth who should be left alone together. They just encourage each other’s weird ideas. But then, they’re friends. Friends do that... We all help each other make it up as we go along, don’t we?

Sometimes when I read teenage novels about ‘serious subjects’, I get the feeling that the author is laying it on with a trowel, trying to prove that THEY know just how YOU feel. What The Birds See isn’t like that. It tells you a story, and lets you make up your feelings about it as you go along. How I felt at the end of this book was very interesting indeed. How about you?

By the way, should Viv and Helen not have provided their two pennorth by the time this scrolls before your eyes, it is probably because Viv is moving house and Helen is off on her hols. Sadly, I am doing neither -
Simon.

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