Farley Follows His Nose and Finds an Adventure

For Better or For Worse will always have a special place in my heart as the comic strip that convinced me to start reading the Sunday comics. My mom had read one of the strips aloud, and it felt so pertinent and true-to-life that I was intrigued and had to read it for myself, and then I decided that I really ought to make a regular habit of it. Since Elizabeth had many of my personality traits and was just a little older than me, I always found plenty to relate to in the strip, in which the characters aged at a normal rate and creator Lynn Johnston crafted many complex storylines.

With the strips covering nearly 30 years in the life of the Canadian Patterson family, it was only natural that Farley, the great big English Sheepdog who was the family pet, would not make it to the end of the strip, and the storyline dealing with his death was one of the most touching and heartbreaking of the strip’s long run. However, in 2008, Johnston decided to go back in time, creating new strips involving the Pattersons as a young family, and in 2009, she and her daughter, Beth Cruikshank, collaborated on a picture book that brought Farley roaring back to life.

Farley Follows His Nose is not a collection of comic strips. Johnston’s distinctive style is stamped all over the pages, but she has huge spaces to work with instead of the usual tiny boxes. There’s something really visceral about that, as refreshing as a big wet dog shaking himself out over a verdant lawn, as Farley does early in the book. We see matriarch Elly, the strip’s main character, at the beginning and end of the book, and we get enough of a glimpse of the children to see that Elizabeth is a toddler – clutching the stuffed bunny she loses in the television special The Bestest Present – and Michael is in elementary school. The focus, however, is on the exuberant Farley.

This is a very simple story that reminds me a bit of Beverly Cleary’s Ribsy, in which the beloved dog belonging to Henry Huggins gets loose and traverses the town on a series of adventures. Ribsy’s trek lasts longer; Farley’s is restricted to one day. But the dog’s-eye – or, more accurately, dog’s-nose – view is similar, as is the series of friends he makes, only to quickly continue on his way. The story is held together by the device of a wave of words or phrases, four of them all smooshed together, each in a different color. Each phrase is a smell that captures Farley’s attention, and the rainbow-colored list is followed by an “and…” that takes readers to the next page, where the most exciting smell of all is presented in extra-large, colorful letters and followed by an exclamation point.

Farley does a lot of sniffing in this book. We often see him raising his nose to the air or snuffling in the dirt as onomatopoeic words describing his olfactory activities surround his head. It’s his sense of smell that leads Farley to the next stop on his uncharted adventure, and when he decides the time has come to head back, all he has to do is follow the smells backward, reminding me of the classic animated Sesame Street sequence in which a lost child was advised, “Try to remember the things you passed, and when you come back, make the first thing last.” He doesn’t do it entirely consciously; he’s mostly thinking about the possibility of returning to the site of the best smells of the day, which included hot dogs, popcorn and children. Still, it’s a good strategy, and it makes me wish my sense of smell was a little more fine-tuned.

This is a story that is repetitive and uncomplicated, but with just enough variation from page to page to keep things interesting. Most pages include only a couple sentences, with the pictures doing most of the talking. The primary audience is clearly children about Elizabeth’s age; even Michael could probably consider this a bit below his reading level. However, when it comes to longtime fans of the strip, Farley Follows His Nose is fantastic fun for all ages.