Once there was a boy, and a bear, a penguin, and a heart in a bottle - A Blog in Two Parts on the Incredible Book-Making Oliver Jeffers

Part 2

I am inherently a fan of things by nature... 

Once I discover a favourite illustrator/author/musician/you-name-it, it doesn't take me long to accumulate their work, at times a little over zealously too... And after The Incredible Book Eating Boy, I was an over-night and understandably zealous Oliver Jeffers fan. It seemed little coincidence then when the fourth and, at the time, newest title by Jeffers presented itself to me in the children' section of Fogarty's Bookshop less than a week later. It was The Great Paper Caper, "a thrilling tale of suspense, crime, alibis, paper planes, a forest and a bear who wanted to win at all costs!" the blurb bragged. I called it kismet.

     

Beginning as a story about a forest that is mysteriously losing its trees in the dead of night, it ultimately becomes a story about changing worlds, old traditions, and a bear who wants to uphold the family name in the 112th Biennial Paper Airplane Competition next Saturday at 2p.m. In Jeffers' typically heart-warming but unique fashion, it takes a beaver, deer, duck, pig, anxious-looking owl and one curly-haired boy to help the bear achieve his dream while ensuring that the trees are unharmed in the process. Gathering up all of the bear's old, discarded paper planes, they send him soaring over the finish line in one great big recycled one instead. Cut to the book's end, or "fin," and our paper airplane champion is watering a freshly-sprung sapling.

Whether it is a little boy who loves stars so much that he wants his very own to "play hide-and-go-seek" or "take long walks" with, or the little boy who one day finds "a penguin at his door," or the boy who runs "out of petrol" and gets "stuck on the moon," Jeffers' stories always begin within that magical framework of the child's mind, where anything is possible and nothing extraordinary too out of the ordinary. However, it is where he takes them that really demonstrates a true appreciation of the nuanced child. 

When asked as to the moral of The Great Paper Caper, the author replies, "Don't chop down trees to make paper planes and then get caught doing it... Or if you see a bear, report it." And yet, there is a great deal more to the story, of friendship, and the inheritance of damaging traditions, of community, and of the importance of fun and dreams. But as the author knows, these are not things that need to be spelt out to the child in a heavily moralistic, finger-pointing tone. Rather, they are issues of subtlety that the intuitive child is more than capable of figuring out in each of his picture book's own mystery. And readers, old and young alike, will be rewarded by this process of investigation in his endings.

   

In How to Catch a Star, our little boy eventually resigns from his fervent pursuit of the star, and waits on the beach shore, hoping that the star reflected in the ocean's surface might wash-up. It does, and as the adult will guess (and perhaps child too), in the form of a starfish, nevertheless the boy's very own star.

(It reminded this slightly older girl of her younger days, of a similar love of starfish and mermaid's purses and pumpkin shells that might turn into carriages drawn by a band of seahorse, of hours spent combing the sandy beaches for these immeasurable rarities.)

      

Meanwhile, in Lost and Found, our protagonist learns that the penguin at his front-door did not look sad because it was lost. After he has made it all the way to the South Pole and back again, the boy realises that the penguin was sad because he was "lonely." Without a moment's hesitancy, our enterprising protagonist undertakes yet another journey, a return-journey to find his friend...

And "so the boy and his friend [go] home together, talking of wonderful things all the way."  

      

And in The Way Back Home, the boy stranded on the moon is not as alone as he at first thinks, but is in fact joined by an equally stranded Martian whose spaceship has a broken engine. Forming an unlikely pair, each conspires to help the other get back home. So doing, they discover the similarities in their otherwise striking differences.And although they are forced to part and each go their own way, on the final page readers are greeted by a knock at the door and the postman, delivering an intergalactic walkie-talkie to the boy back home.

It stands to reason then that a man like Jeffers has kept something of his own little boy (describing himself as he does, as a man who "makes art as well as books and has climbed more than one large tree in his time"). Kids of many ages (and more adults than you'd think) are known to *lomp about sometimes, yelling for whoever cares to hear, 'You just don't get it!' Well, Jeffers gets it, of that there is no doubt.

How to Catch a Star, Lost and Found, and The Way Back Home currently 
available in this little gem of a boxset, Once There Was A Boy ...

But as touched as I have been by all of Jeffers books, and by the predominant child-like stylization of his characters, in their charming watercolour palettes, none have quite hit the spot like his most recent addition, The Heart and the Bottle.

"Once there was a girl whose life was filled 

with all the wonder of the world around her. 

Then one day something occurred that caused the girl 

to take her heart and put it in a safe place. 

However, after that it seemed that more things were empty 

 than before. Would she know how to get her heart back?"

So having read the blurb, the reader turns to the first page and is again told that "[o]nce there was a girl, much like any other, whose head was filled with all the curiosities of the world" and "thoughts of the stars"... But always with the comforting presence of her grandfather (or father, or uncle) to reassure her, from reading aloud to her on the subjects of botany, the whale and the universe in one scene, to pointing out constellations in a midnight sky in another, and flying a red kite on the sea shore while the little girl combs the beach for new discoveries. 

 And our little girl takes "delight in finding new things..." Until, that is, "the day she [finds] an empty chair." 

"Feeling unsure," the girl resolves that the "best thing to do" would be to "put her heart in a safe place," "[j]ust for the time being." And putting her heart neatly away in a bottle and hanging it round her neck, everything seems momentarily "fix[ed] ... at first." 

"Although in truth, nothing was the same." 

With her heart encased in glass, the little girl - slowly growing up as the story progresses - begins to forget about the stars, and ceases "taking notice of the sea." "[N]o longer filled with the curiosities of the world," the only thing she does notice is how "heavy" and "awkward" the bottle has become around her neck. "But," she comforts herself," "at least her heart [is] safe." 

However, the reader knows otherwise, when the scene depicted here is one of the girl grown now into a young woman, eating alone, washing her solitary dish alone, while the heart in a bottle continues to hang heavily.

But there is hope for our now young woman yet, when walking down the length of the beach one day, she comes upon a little girl building sandcastles and talking of elephants in the sea. In fact, it "might never have occurred to the girl what to do had she not met someone smaller and still curious about world," and she remembers "a time when [she] would have known how to answer" the awe-struck questions of this little girl. Sadly, "not now." 

"Not without a heart."

"And it was right at that moment she decided to get it back out of the bottle. 

But didn't know how. She couldn't remember." 

A pair of pliers, a hammer and a tool-bench equipped with saw, drill, mullet and axe, and still "nothing seemed to work." The bottle simply won't be broken.

Bouncing off, and rolling "right down to the sea" instead, it occurs to that "someone smaller and still curious about the world that she might know a way." And with a single, effortless motion, the "someone smaller" has reached into the bottle and retrieved the now young woman's heart. 

(Here again the reader is rewarded by Jeffers' delicious details, in that the girl's initial sandcastle of little more than a few upturned buckets, has become a two-tiered castle with both bridge and turret, a small yellow bucket and blue spade sitting modestly in the sand behind it.)

Having had her heart returned to her, it is now time for the young woman to face her loss.

Standing with her hands on her hips, she reproachfully regards the empty chair,and literally-manifested seat of her hurt, the chair that first made her put her heart in a bottle. And how does our protagonist meet the challenge of the empty chair?

Well, she fills it, of course. Turning over the page, the reader learns that while the bottle may be empty, the chair is no longer so... And in it, the girl sits happily reading from one book while a tower of books builds next to her, filling her head once again with all the curiosities of the world around her, with sandcastles and sea-elephants.

The entire book speaking as it were, in metaphor, what Jeffers has captured in this heart in a bottle hung around a neck, is so succinct in capturing that simultaneous feeling of the weightiness and emptiness of loss. Beautifully aimed at an audience not yet discouraged by the notion of a thing being far-fetched, the metaphorical becomes brilliantly literal and the literal, pictorial renderings totally unforgettable.

Perhaps close to my own heart because I was similarly taken to a library brimming with the all the curiosities of the world, after which a grandfather would sit me snugly, while reading The Mrs Pepperpots Omnibus aloud. I have not yet suffered any such loss as the little-girl-grown-older in our story... 

But I imagine that if I were to, The Heart and the Bottle by Oliver Jeffers might just be the literal way of reaching into a glass case and finding the heart.

(*a kind of lumpy, stomping motion)

Avid readers of Oliver Jeffers can eagerly anticipate 
the nail-biter of a sequel to Jeffers' Lost and Found, 

in the up-and-coming Up and Down.