When I first happened upon John Lithgow's Micawber in a bookstore
several years ago, I had my cynical doubts as to whether this esteemed
actor was equally talented in another creative area, but I was so
entranced by C. F. Payne's cover artwork, featuring an adorable squirrel
trying his paw at painting, that I shrugged my reservations aside. Boy,
am I glad I did. Since then, I've come to regard Lithgow as one of my
favorite poets. His exquisite skill as a wordsmith is enviable, and I
know that if I see his name on a book, when I crack open that cover I
will be in for a wholly engaging read.
So when I stumbled upon Carnival of the Animals
the other day, I was thrilled. This book was originally written for the
New York City Ballet after Lithgow was approached by choreographer
Christopher Wheeldon to write the narration for a ballet based on
Camille Saint-Saene's Carnival of the Animals. Lithgow complied
and even performed in the production himself, as readers can see from
the cast photograph included at the end of the book.
Though it
was designed to work alongside movement on the stage, it works very
well as a children's book. Oliver Pendleton Percy, a mischievous young
scamp as is pretty typical for Lithgow's protagonists, sneaks away from
his class on a trip to the museum and finds himself locked in for the
night, at which point he becomes immersed in a surreal dreamscape of the
sort Maurice Sendak might dream up. The illustrator on this occasion,
however, is Boris Kulikov, who uses gouache and acrylic to give us a
look at Oliver's skewed visions, which involve various acquaintances
prancing about the museum in animal form.
These include
Oliver's schoolmates, who transform into songbirds (the girls) and
donkeys (the boys), while their younger siblings become rats. Various
authority figures are transfigured as well. The school nurse becomes an
lumbering elephant, the shy librarian a kangaroo, the irate music
teacher a yowling baboon. My favorite page involves an elderly pair of
eccentric twin sisters-turned-tortoises who, much like Chuck's aunts on Pushing Daisies, hide a wealth of talent behind those closed blinds.
While Kulikov's illustrations don't blow me away like Payne's, they
work well with the text, which is just as brilliant as I have come to
expect. The rhyme scheme varies throughout the book, but most pages
include a six-line stanza in ABAAAB format. In addition to the lilting
quality of his verse, Lithgow uses some pretty fantastic vocabulary.
Among the more challenging words he incorporates: cantankerous, fussbudget, pachyderm, tremulous, manic-depressive, gargantuan and, my favorite, diaphanous.
The only real problem with this book is that it's more a list of
characters than an actual story. There is a basic plot: boy gets locked
in a museum overnight, boy has bizarre dream as a result, boy goes home.
But while all of the human-animal characters do something, what they do
doesn't really have any impact on Oliver. He watches it all happen but
isn't really involved, and the various characters don't interact much
with each other. So as a story, it's not as fulfilling as Lithgow's
other books, but it's so artfully presented that I'm not particularly
bothered by that.
Because of this book's origins, it presents a
good opportunity to introduce children to ballet, to say nothing of
museums, and the book's device of assigning humans an animal form based
on notable characteristics is full of creative possibilities. What type
of animal would you be? How about your teacher? Your neighbor? Kids can
talk about it, write about it, even draw their own dreamscape portraits
of folks they know. Carnival of the Animals is a great book for
getting those gears turning and, if you've never read him before, a
fantastic introduction to one of the most accomplished poets writing
today.
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