Book Review
Books of Beast
- Wallace Edwards (Author)
Alphabeasts. Kids Can Press (purchase at Amazon.ca)
- Aubrey Lang (Author) and Wayne Lynch (Illustrator)
Baby Elephant. Fitzhenry & Whiteside (purchase at Amazon.ca - Aubrey Lang (Author) and Wayne Lynch (Illustrator)
Baby Fox. Fitzhenry & Whiteside (purchase at Amazon.ca - Aubrey Lang (Author) and Wayne Lynch (Illustrator)
Baby Lion. Fitzhenry & Whiteside (purchase at Amazon.ca
Reviewed by Nicholas Brown-Considine and John Considine
The alphabet poem is a genre which has been giving satisfaction to the young at least since the seventeenth century: the Opies quote a polemical text of 1671 in which a version of the rhyme “A was an apple pie” is referred to with casual familiarity. It is still going strong, and Wallace Edwards’s Alphabeasts shows its vitality. Edwards honours tradition in giving each letter a line, building his rhyme up in couplets: “A is for Alligator, awake from a dream. / B is for Bat, slurping ice cream. / C is for Cat, who reflects on its self.” Assigning an animal to each letter is also traditional: the title of this book has been used at least twice before, by the English writer Dick King-Smith in 1990 (with pictures by Quentin Blake) and by the American illustrator Durga Bernhard in 1993.
This book does not, then, do a new thing—but it does an old thing very well indeed, presenting each line of verse on a separate 31-centimetre page with an elaborate, pleasing, and oddly naturalistic illustration. The alligator sets the scene: it awakes, not on the edge of a body of murky water, but draped over a richly upholstered armchair, tail hanging over the back of the chair, belly on the seat, chin on two cushions piled on an upholstered stool, forelegs dangling. Every picture is set in the same opulently furnished, not-quite-Edwardian house, and suggests the same domesticity: “O is for Octopus, changing a light” shows an uncompromisingly loathsome octopus changing several light-bulbs at once in the chandelier with which it is intertwined, and faces the “Pig, tucked in for the night,” which has irises on its bedroom wallpaper and a box of chocolates on the patchwork quilt. Edwards is really taking up a theme from just the period of his furnishings, that of the story from Saki’s Beasts and Superbeasts in which an artist makes his reputation by painting “Ox in a Morning-room, Late Autumn” from the life and goes on to “Barbary Apes Wrecking a Boudoir,” or of the passage in Hardy’s “Convergence of the Twain,” in which the sea-creatures glide through the grand rooms of the Titanic. But this house has not been invaded by animals: they live there, and like it.
Every page of Alphabeasts is richly decorative, and the book is full of jokes, some of them enigmatic: why does the narwhal sit below a picture of a late twentieth-century office key? Why is the frog wearing an opera scarf and carrying a brush dipped in white paint? These questions may amuse the adult reader of this book more than the child for whom it was bought. The older of the present reviewers finds himself reflecting on the possibility of framing some of the most gorgeous images in the book; the younger has been left a little cold by it. It won the Governor-General’s Award for children’s book illustration in 2002.
The three books Baby Elephant, Baby Lion, and Baby Fox look suspiciously formulaic at first glance. They belong to a “Nature Babies” series (the seal, penguin, owl, and ground squirrel are others)—and this series of superficially attractive and informative little books for children have in the past been produced by marrying stock images with a sketchy commentary. These books, however, are in a different class. They are the work of an expert and prolific Canadian wife-and-husband team of wildlife writers and photographers, widely travelled but with a particular interest in cold-climate work, which has led to books on loons, the boreal forest, the prairies, the Arctic, bears, and penguins. Wayne Lynch’s photographs are original, the record of long expeditions in the Serengeti plains and boreal North America respectively. Aubrey Lang’s text comes from the same commitment to patient and respectful observation as the images.
Each of the three books is arranged in the same way. A prefatory note tells the reader that the photographs were taken in the field without distressing the animals. An unnecessary table of contents faces it, and then a first page of scene-setting text is followed by openings in which a mix of text and photographs faces a page devoted to a single photograph or, occasionally, a block of photographs. A page of factual information headed “Did you know?” and a simple index follow, and the authors’ biographical note concludes the book. The full-page images are the most arresting feature of the books; they are consistently beautiful. The smaller pictures which face them are likewise all attractive and interesting, although small enough to be better appreciated in solitary reading than by parent and child sitting together over a book. The text is unpretentious and well integrated with the pictures, though the small child who likes baby animals will find some of it out of her or his reach: “The strange smell is the urine of a male red fox. It is the winter mating season. The young female fox has never had a mate before . . . soon she accepts him as her mate.” But the small child, or the parent reading to one, can skip over this, and the older child can learn from it whatever she or he is ready to learn. The narrative is certainly never condescendingly written, and it never degenerates into cutesiness: the foxes are irritated by fleas, the elephants by tsetse flies, the lions by hunger. Young male elephants and lions are driven away from herd and pride as they mature; young foxes are ignored by their parents until hunger forces them to move on. These are real animals.
Lang and Lynch lead tours for a “photo safari” company, and the “Nature Babies” books offer a perspective on their subjects which is something like that of ecotourism. Each claims to record a single expedition (though one very fine picture in Baby Fox, whose preface says that to photograph the foxes “we camped on the edge of the Arctic Ocean,” is described by Lynch in an online gallery as having been taken in Saskatchewan). Each takes a holistic approach to the lives of the animals it describes, being concerned with their places in their habitats, and with their interactions with other species, with the marked exception of humans. This last point suggests the obvious central dilemma for eco-tourism as a whole. Lang and Lynch write in the newsletter of the company for which they lead tours that “Many subjects are naturally unwary and they scream out to be photographed with small focal length lenses”; one need not be exaggeratedly scrupulous about human attitudes to wild animals, or “critters” as the same column calls them, to find this a little disquieting. How far does this attitude feed into the “Nature Babies” books, one may ask—were those lions by any chance hungry because there were two photographers tailing them in a car? Very possibly not; and anyway, since humans do inevitably interact with other species, work like Lang and Lynch’s offers the young as good a model of interaction as one could ask for.
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MLA: Brown-Considine, Nicholas and Considine, John. Books of Beast. canlit.ca. Canadian Literature, 8 Dec. 2011. Web. 18 June 2013.
This review originally appeared in Canadian Literature #182 (Autumn 2004), Black Writing in Canada. (pg. 122 - 124)
***Please note that the articles and reviews from the Canadian Literature website (www.canlit.ca) may not be the final versions as they are printed in the journal, as additional editing sometimes takes place between the two versions. If you are quoting from the website, please indicate the date accessed when citing the web version of reviews and articles.
