THE SECRET HISTORY OF TOM TRUEHEART, BOY ADVENTURER
by Ian Beck
OUP, £7.99; 316pp
IT’S AN ODD THING, MEETING someone whose books have saturated your children’s infancy. All the way to leafy Twickenham to meet Ian Beck, I keep seeing the London suburbs as if they were drawn by his graceful, quirky pen. The blossoming cherry trees, the bridge over the Thames, the Georgian elegance of Richmond could all have come straight out of his classic book of nursery rhymes,
The Oxford Nursery Book.
For more than 20 years Beck has been as much a part of the earliest memories of modern children as Kate Greenaway and Arthur Rackham were for grandparents and great-grandparents, with books such as Five Little Ducklings, Peter and the Wolf and The Nutcracker keeping traditional songs, games and stories alive.
You can have too much tradition, however, and now, at the age of 58, Beck has produced his first children’s novel, The Secret History of Tom Trueheart, Boy Adventurer. It’s the story of a 12-year-old boy who lives with his mother and six brave, bold and beefy brothers, all of whom are called Jack. Unlike the Jacks, Tom isn’t brave, but when they disappear on quests in the Land of Stories and get their adventures sabotaged, it’s up to young Tom to follow their footsteps and restore the proper endings to Sleeping Beauty, Cinderella, Rapunzel and so on. Post-modernism for kids has been a hit ever since the Ahlbergs’ picture book, Each Peach Pear Plum, but recently the Shrek films have made new fairytales hot stuff: not surprisingly, the Jim Henson Company is interested in the film rights.
Long ago, Beck was a successful commercial illustrator, who most famously did the cover for Elton John’s Good-bye Yellow Brick Road. He did magazine advertisements, record covers and even worked in the toy department of Harrods until the birth of his first child Ed, now 25, encouraged him to go into children’s books. “I thought, this is the nicest fun I’ve had for ages, and never went back.”
His first picture book, Round and Round the Garden, was published by the children’s editor David Fickling in 1982. Through Fickling, he also started a long and fruitful association with Philip Pullman, then as humble an author as Beck was an illustrator. Two more children and 63 picture books later, Beck has sold more than a million copies worldwide, with his version of traditional nursery rhymes, The Oxford Nursery Book, being the most successful children’s book published by Oxford University Press. He did not think of writing a novel of his own, however, until he shared a taxi two years ago with a fellow-illustrator, Sally Gardner. Each encouraged the other to try to write a full-length novel, and where Gardner produced the bestselling I, Coriander last year, Beck came up with an extended version of a story he originally began on the menu for a printers’ club dinner.
“I liked the name, Tom Trueheart; it was a good, sturdy fairytale name and I wanted to find out what happened to him,” he says. “I’ve done a lot of traditional fairytales for other authors, and once you get inside them you think, ‘Wouldn’t it be interesting if . . ?’. It grew like a little seed.”
What makes Beck’s work so fascinating is that, like Maurice Sendak, he understands that a picture book is not just about illustrating the words. In Five Little Ducks, for instance, the pictures accompanying the familiar song tell a story about how the fifth duckling silently tries to warn his siblings and mother about a fox: like Tom Trueheart, he eventually rescues them all and reunites the family. This form of double narrative, far from confusing two-year-olds, is so stimulating that you can see why he was Philip Pullman’s perfect partner for books such as Puss In Boots.
“I save up the bits I want to draw in a story like a treat,” he says. “I somehow know what each scene should look like.” Edward Ardizzone, his hero, said that illustrations should be drawn from memory, and distilled into an essence; it is this surreal purity of vision that makes Beck’s pictures so pleasing, and so archetypal. Every hill is round as a dumpling; the Moon always has a face or a cow jumping over it; the children are equally at ease riding an enormous sheep or quietly reading in a tiny walled garden. It is an idyllic nursery world whose shadows, thorns and clouds are purely decorative, and whose nostalgia never curdles into sentimentality. Yet he is also capable of much darker, more sophisticated drawing, as his work with Pullman shows. A new version of His Dark Materials has just been published by Scholastic with additional endpapers by Beck.
“It’s delightful to be associated with anything like that,” he says. “Philip is an artist himself and takes a keen interest in how the speech bubbles and pictures work around the words. We both like variations on a known theme. Stories go so deep, they are so well-known that they seem as if they’re set like cement, but as soon as you twist them round, they become playful.”
Children’s books are a lifelong passion for him — he collected those illustrated by Dulac and Rackham as a student at Brighton College of Art, where he shared a flat with Pullman’s other illustrator, Peter Bailey, and was taught by Raymond Briggs. Part of a generation of exceptional British illustrators, he is an immensely likeable man, who is as happy to talk of the Shinto philosophy behind the anime films of Studio Ghibli as his own work.
Even as we discuss our mutual admiration for the Japanese director Miyazaki, a lovely new picture book, Winston the Book Wolf, arrives from Bloomsbury. Also, he has just finished a special exhibition of his work in the psychiatric ward of the Chelsea and Westminster Hospital. His sudden burst of productivity is caused by the recent death of two close friends.
“It took me a long time — 20 years of learning in public — to work out what I was best at doing and I’d always written things in a frustrated kind of way; but after my friends died suddenly I realised I’d better get a move on.”
Tom Trueheart, which looks likely to become one of the hits of 2006, now has a sequel, In the Land of Dark Stories, which promises to be even more exciting because the rescued princesses can stop being passive and join Tom in the battle against the evil Ormerod and his sidekick Rumplestiltskin. It is all rollocking, rumbustious stuff, with plenty of jokes and a lot of input from Beck’s grown-up children. Ed, a film-maker, has directed a trailer for the website (www.tomtrueheart.com), largely shot in the garden of his old friend Nicola Bayley, where Beck’s 15-year-old daughter Lily is spotted as a princess. There’s no doubt our hero, a nice young lad with a toy wooden sword, will graduate to the big, beefy type (Beck’s other son, Lawrence) shown holding a real metal broadsword and preparing to tackle something nasty in the dark woods.
It is just right for children of 6-10, but at the same time you can’t help hoping that the earlier, innocent world of wooden swords won’t fade away completely.
www.tomtrueheart.com
