Milo's Meanderings (The Phantom Tollbooth - Norton Juster)

Member Name: ruth_cole

Product:	The Phantom Tollbooth - Norton Juster
Date:	14/10/04 (1010 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: ingenious and totally lacking in condescension, accesible, intelligent

Disadvantages: none

On the back of my copy of this book, under the blurb, is the customary quote. This time it comes from Amanda Foreman, writing in the Sunday Times.

"I want to shout about The Phantom Tollbooth from the rooftops. I want to stand in Waterloo and press copies into people's hands. This is a book that should be in every home."

Lofty praise to live up to. So do I agree? Look at my rating- what do you think?!

As a child, I loved to read and to be read to, loved the sound of words and the sound of my own voice (still do, I'm afraid - frankly if a job were available where I could do nothing but read aloud all day, complete with silly voices, I would kill for it). But there was never in all the books that I loved, one like this.

Juster has created in Milo your average, disaffected, bored child. When Milo is home, he wants to be out. When he is out, he wants to be home. There is nothing to do, and nowhere to do it. His apathy and mental lethargy clings to him like dense smog and although he's a perfectly nice, polite child; it's all dull, dull, dull. Until one day a package arrives. It's a tollbooth, equipped with a map showing places Milo has never heard of: Dictionopolis, Digitopolis, the Doldrums, the Mountains of Ignorance, the island of Conclusions and the Foothills of Confusion, to name but a few. So Milo pays his fare, gets in his little electric car and sets out...

What follows is like a hybrid of The Hobbit and Alice in Wonderland, touched with its own ingenious originality and mostly without the hefty hint of menace that made me wary of both of those others as a child. Milo arrives in a world where anything could happen, where words grow on trees, numbers are dug from a mine, you can swim in the Sea of Knowledge and come out completely dry ("most do") and people sometimes grow down, so that their point of view never changes. What's more, before long he has a mission. Many years ago, the Princesses Rhyme and Reason were banished from the kingdom of Wisdom, and it's Milo, along with his new sidekicks, Tock, the faithful watchdog that ticks, and the Humbug, to get them back.

In the afterword, Juster explains that his book was an attempt to dispel the confusions of childhood- to restore order to a world so illogical and boring. Why learn mathematics? So that when you do something at long last, you know how long the last is. Why should I concentrate? Because lack of attention leads to the Doldrums. What is the penalty for failing to choose my words carefully? Eating my words- literally. By transplanting Milo into a world where there are very good reasons to do all these things, he learns his lessons gently, and slowly a vibrant, interested boy emerges, full of curiosity and enthusiasm. And because everything is unexpected and unusual, neither Milo nor the younger reader is overtly aware when they are being taught a valuable lesson. For that matter, the older reader doesn't feel they are being force fed the point. There is no moralising here, but vast helpings of good humour peppered with a generous portion of utter insanity and a cracking adventure.

Best of all, the book begins with a map! Wasn't the Lord of the Rings or the Hobbit rendered infinitely more exciting by the fact that you could trace the adventures of the characters across an unfamiliar terrain? Juster himself says "one of the reasons I wrote the book at all was so that I could have a map in it, like the Arthur Ransome books I had loved". In fact, he drew the map, and then enlisted the help of a friend, Jules Feiffer, to provide the scratchy, sketchy, illustrations, that complement the book perfectly. They are a little dark, and vague, and rough, but that means that they help along the imagination without fettering it, in the way Quentin Blake's artwork did when married to Roald Dahl's writing, only this is less twee than Blake, and more eyebrow-archingly ink-stained (I wouldn't go so far as too suggest Steadman, it's too childlike, but there's an undercurrent of dishevelled artist with ink-blot fingertips).

As far as parents and teachers go, the age at which a child could read this would range with their literacy skills. I would say from seven or eight, year 3 up, although I would start by reading it to them at an even younger age; with so many characters it will be a pleasure to read. There are some difficult words and concepts for younger children, but this is the kind of book to build in layers, reading again and again so they take in a little more every time. It's also great to read with a child; there's a lot of wordplay and clever names, and they will start to pick out the jokes and puns on their own. As an adult, it is an endless joy. A smart and loopy plot offsets the apparent simplicity of the sentence structure, etc, and the wisdom of it is funny and not at all overbearing. One of the best sections of the book is near the end, where Milo seeks to escape from the demons of the Mountain of Ignorance. It will probably be a bit tricky to follow for smaller children, but there are some hilarious demons, for instance:

"Just to the left...were the Triple Demons of Compromise- one tall and thin, one short and fat, and the third exactly like the other two... on the right... came the Overbearing Know-It-All, talking continuously... Next to him, but just a little behind, came the Gross Exaggeration..."

My personal favourite is the Threadbare Excuse, which repeatedly mutters the same thing: "Well, I've been sick- the page was torn out – I missed the bus- but no one else did it- well, I've been sick..."

Each one has a matching, gruesome, physical description as well, to suit perfectly. Add to this more benign characters such as Faintly Macabre the Which, the Mathemagician, the Spelling Bee and the great Chroma, the conductor of colour, and if you and/or your child is not charmed, then there is nothing more that can be done for you. The Phantom Tollbooth is also occasionally staged, sometimes in musical form (the adaptation by Juster), and it would be wonderful to round out a reading of this with a child by taking them to see it. I've only seen one production, and a school one at that, but it is entertaining.

I've loved many a children's book in my time, but I wish that I'd had this. First published in 1961, it was long since available when I was little, but obviously my parents were not acquainted with it. It seems to me to be in some ways the perfect book- the right style, length, wit, passion and morality. Even if you prefer not to read children's literature for your own entertainment, if reading to your children or your class, I defy you not to be enchanted, or at least wryly amused.

Alex
xxx

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