Picture books for children

John Rowe Townsend

The Magic Tree Gerald McDermott (Kestrel £1.50) Rhymes Without Reason Mervyn Peake (Methuen £1.40) Odd One Out Rodney Pepp6 (Kestrel £1.50) Barbapapa's Ark Annette Tison and Talus Taylor (Warne £1.30) Joachim the Dustman Kurt Baumann and David McKee (Black £1.50) Where's Al? Byron Barton (Hamish Hamilton E1.10).

Picture books are a small child's introduction to art and literature, no less. It's an awesome thought. The mums who stagger home from the library with toddler, trolley and armful of flat battered volumes; the infant teachers who struggle to buy a few desperately-expensive books out of an allocation measured in pence per head per annum, are engaged (though they're too busy to ponder the fact) in an activity of profound cultural importance. The child who never gets on to affectionate terms with books is a deprived child; and here with picture books is where the discovery of books as a source of pleasure begins. But there are picture books and picture books. Some are artistically splendid. Many that are widely sold, unfortunately, are crude and stereotyped; and surely crude stereotyped picture books help to open the way for everything else that's crude and stereotyped. Visual perception is particularly open to debasement by the exploitation of meretricious techniques. Ben Shahn remarked in a lecture at Harvard in 1957 that "the popular eye is not untrained: it is wrongly trained by inferior and insincere visual representations." Good picture books obviously are a way both of associating books with pleasure and of getting mind and eye to move on paths that will be rewarding.

But the assessment of picture books is as tricky a matter as any I know. Appraisal of children's books of all kinds is confused in any case by the fact that so many different criteria are in use. There is a perpetual shifting of viewpoint between the book in its own right as a work of art or craftsmanship and the book as an acceptable communication to chi:dren; there are constant tendencies to judge by reference to social, educational or psychological considerations. Picture books are subject to the added complications that arise from being a mixed visual and verbal form. Critical assessment calls for people who are informed of and receptive to new work in the fields both of children's literature and the visual arts; and there are not many of these.

The test of what-the-children-think is clearly a vital one, because no book, however much it is admired critically, can say anything to a child who won't look at it. Yet there is no way of comparing the value of a ready appeal to many children with that of a profound experience

Shared only by a few. If a book opens windows in the minds of just a handful of children here and there, it has probably justified its existence. One incontrovertible truth can be offered to those who think serious artistic endeavour is wasted on a child audience: namely, that even if Children do not always appreciate the best When they see it, they will have no chance of anbreciatine it if they never see it. BY far the most exciting, visually, of the monks now under review is The Magic Tree,. a tale from the Congo adapted and illustrated by Gerald McDermott. This is a double adaptation, for the picture book is based on an animated film which the author himself produced. The Sto=y-is of Mavungu, who wins a princess for his bride by freeing her people from imprisonment in a tree, but who loses everything when he cannot resist telling the secret. From the film presumably comes the fierce clYnamism of the pictures, based on African art Patterns, intensely stylised, vivid and vigorous. The pages themselves are bright blue, magenta, orange or black; nothing is white but the moon and the lettering of the brief text. And the text is little more than an annotation, for the book's true language is pictorial. There is for instance ajast-moving visual poetry as the stylised ,sliaPes of people emerge from the stylised tree, `0 be propelled by boat along the stylised river, "Too difficult for small children," I can imagine niany adults saying; but I'm not sure. I am told one child who didn't appear to like the book Particularly at first, but who went back to it several times of her own accord to look at it in silent wonder. She gave no explanation of what raaY, for all one knows, have been a deep and _sting effect. Children often have less rigid lalnds than the rest of us, and their rejections 'nay not be final.

None of the other books here has the potency

The Magic Tree. Mervyn Peake, like Arthur z,?ckham, is enjoying a revival at present; but ',„,hYrnes Without Reason, first published in Za4, seems only marginally to merit a reissue. in: e verses are mainly Carrollish, with occasional Learian and other echoes undistinEnished and not as funny as they are trying to The pictures are unmistakable Peake-gronesque, but are too determinedly humorous and sitriOUsly bleary-looking; they haven't, with

exception, the sharp bite, the sinister wit,

e occasional mystery and gentleness of r,_eake's superb illustrations or his nursery tnYme book, Ride a Cock-Horse reissued two

years ago.

Rodney Pe'ppe's Odd One Out is a variation on the old old idea of "Spot what's wrong with this picture." What makes it, in this case, a good joke as well as a puzzle for the young is that the odd-things-out, in a sequence of pictures that add up to a portrayal of a small boy's day, are at the same time absurd and yet appropriate in a wild, zany way. A traffic signal blooms among the flowers in Peter's garden; at the Zoo there's a keeper penned in one of the cages; among the animals on Uncle's farm gallops a roundabout horse. With its flat, cutout-looking shapes, happy disregard of perspective, and plentiful array of people, animals and vehicles to be pored over at leisure when the initial problem-solving is over, this amounts to an unusually pleasing book: not over-ambitious but worth having or giving.

Didacticism spills out over the pages of the next two books, which are picture-story books concerned with conservation and the environment. I have long lost count of the number of anti-pollution books on the children's lists; I suspect that authors and artists and publishers find it agreeable to have a cause so clearcut that we can all be on the side of the angels. (If it makes an occasional reviewer feel like going out and burning old car tyres, no matter). Barbapapa's Ark is well placed to get away with didacticism, because all the children I know who have met Barbapapa in earlier books have loved him. He's an amiable pink creature who can change his shape into any that may come in handy, such as a boat for carrying children or a dam for protecting a stretch of river.

In previous books Barbapapa has acquired a pretty black Barbamama and a multicoloured assortment of Barbababies; and now be is busy saving animals from vile atmosphere, poisoned waters, and hunters in search of furs and trophies. When the Barbapapa Refuge he has set up becomes inadequate to hold all the threatened creatures, he and they build themselves a space ark and take off for a quieter planet until such time as the people on earth miss them and let things grow green again. The pictorial style is gentle and innocent, with clear bright colours like Smarties; the book will certainly make more Barbafans, and — why should I complain? I'm.on the side of the angels too — could even make children think about threatened animals and atmosphere.

Joachim the Dustman, dedicated "to us, the litter-louts," is rather more heavyweight, a fairly sustained verbal and visual satire. Joachim is a Pied-Piperish figure called in by town councillors to deal with a growing plague of rubbish, which he builds into a magnificent high-turreted castle, a sea-cleaning submarine and a sky-sweeping aircraft. It's fine for the 'Ards, beasts and fishes, but the councillors get suspicious of Joachim and set the Army on him. In the end he tells them to keep the town clean themselves and moves on, surrounded by birds it:la cloud of bright feathers,

singing and waving his hat, and looking forward to cleaning up the next town.

David McKee's paintings are strong, slabby, solidly-composed; often funny, as in the t0A-hatted, black-coated, falsely-smiling figures of the councillors; but somehow (and I suppose intentionally) not all that funny. Where's Al? has "direct child-like pictures," saYs the blurb; and indeed the artwork lool..s Pretty artless, though in no way crude or stereotyped. There isn't any text, unless You count a few words in balloons coming from characters' mouths; but there's a story, and it is r appalling one, ingeniously presented. Al is a uog, lost in the city crowds by his young master; and the pictures show boy and dog in turn looking for each other, often in the same Places but not at the same time; drawing closer and eventually being reunited. This book leaves me still grappling uneasily With the problems of picture-book appraisal. As a sheaf of pictures. Where's Al? is nothing; its merits are the rather limited ones of simplicity, gentleness and unpretentiousness. But it works well along the time dimension; it has a sense of search and movement; it draws you in and kCaps you interested. My instinct and r(.Perience are telling me loudly that although isn't `art' this is a pretty good picture book. , It's a difficult business indeed. I think we still la.ck a proper set of instruments for measuring Picture books. Or perhaps there aren't any Instruments really; in the end, instinct and experience are what we have to rely on, helped out by the open eyes and minds of children.