If there’s a twentieth-century American classic of children’s literature, this is it. A movie has been made (a Water-Babies-esque mix of live action and animation, apparently; I should track it down), it is mentioned in the same tones as Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and the works of Dr. Seuss, and it is consistently listed as a children’s classic – all in America. For some reason, it remains fairly obscure over here. I read it as a teenager, but the puns in Shark Boy were so similar in style (a ‘train of thought’, a ‘stream of consciousness’) that I was reminded of it, and desired to reacquaint myself with the quirky little story.
A series of images rather than a real narrative, rather like Alice’s Adventures or Le Petit Prince, it is less fantastical than those masterpieces, but rather less charming. Milo, a boy who is thoroughly bored with the mundane rigmarole of life, one day finds a toy tollbooth has been delivered to his room. He has a toy car that he can sit in and drive, so he drives up to the tollbooth in it, and is transported to another world – a world where King Azaz, ruler of Dictionopolis, and the Mathemagician, whose domain is Digitopolis, can never agree whether it is letters or numbers which are most important. They will always disagree until their sisters, the princesses Rhyme and Reason, return to the land, so Milo sets off to find them, assisted by Tock the Watchdog (half-dog, half-clock, naturally) and posturing insect the Humbug.
The defining characteristic of the book is the aforementioned reliance on puns. There are placenames like The Point of View, Context, Ignorance and Conclusions. You can guess which you note that you are out of, which you jump to and so on. There is some extremely entertaining imagery, but ultimately the story is rather flat and lifeless, without much in the way of characters. An enjoyable afternoon’s diversion, for the reader as well as Milo, but no classic.
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