A mouse took a stroll in the deep dark wood…..Four years ago this month, and I am in the deep, dark basement of the Primrose Hill Bookshop rootling around for a good picture-book to buy my son, just five. Like all working mothers with small children I’m very tired. Suddenly, my son pulls out an odd-looking hardback with a picture of a mouse walking past a grinning brown-furred creature.
“ Read!” he commands. So I begin to read. It is written in rhyming couplets, which we both immediately approve of, in dactylic tetrameters - the commonest rhythm in English poetry, appearing in nursery rhymes, ballads and Donne’s songs.
“ A mouse took a stroll in the deep dark wood/ A fox saw the mouse and the mouse looked good.”
It doesn’t occur to me that we are reading something special, but I happen to be immediately interested in this beginning simply because I’m in the middle of writing a particularly difficult novel, In a Dark Wood, about someone who writes and illustrates picture-books. A kind of female Maurice Sendak, my protagonist is also fatally drawn to stories about dark woods, which she illustrates with manic intensity. This has made me very interested in picture-books as a unique art-form. While bad picture-books are two a penny, a great one is very rare indeed – more rare than a great poem. Like opera, it is a fusion of two arts, and the illustrations need to not just match the text but deepen it in unexpected ways. Beatrix Potter, Maurice Sendak, Dr. Seuss, John Burningham, Allan Ahlberg have all had this quality. They not only speak to childhood but shape it, building a bridge between the glorious lunacy of a child’s perception of the world and the essential sanity of the adult’s. They are about our deepest fears – being lost, being eaten, being separated from our mother – expressed in seemingly simple language.

“Where are you going to, little brown mouse?
Come and have lunch in my underground house.”
“ It’s terribly kind of you Fox, but no –
I’m going to have lunch with a gruffalo.”

The average picture book uses a vocabulary of not more than 200 words, and yet it has to share essential characteristics of a great poem. It has to use the best words in the best order, as Coleridge defined poetry, and you have to be able to read it again and again, at least once a day for a year, without it driving you absolutely crazy, because another characteristic of the great picture book is that a child of between 4 and 6 may become completely obsessed by it. It is their comfort-blanket, their drug of choice, the first and purest response to a work of literature that takes no notice of what a parent likes or dislikes. I am going to read this book so often that my children will know it off by heart, and go to sleep murmuring its words.

“A gruffalo? What’s a gruffalo?”

As the little mouse outwits first a fox, then an owl, then a snake – progressively more dangerous predators – who want to eat him, my son laughs, bouncing on my lap.
“ That’s me!” he says, “The mouse is me.”

Since 1989, when The Gruffalo was first published, it has become as big a phenomenon in picture books as Harry Potter in children’s novels. It has sold over 1 million copies, 600,000 of them in the UK; been translated into 26 languages and become the best-selling picture book of the last five years. It won the Smarties gold Award, the children’s equivalent to the Booker, and will probably outlast most Booker-winners you could think of. The parsley wreath, as Roald Dahl called it, confers an immortality the laurel can only dream of. There have been travelling stage-shows nation-wide, and a Broadway show of the book. It is only 700 words long, and took about two years to write – something which, as one caustic critic remarked, averaged about 10 words a week – but which isn’t so slow when you consider how very difficult it is to write something that will become part of the fabric of childhood. The author, Julia Donaldson has, with the illustrator Axel Scheffler, become one of the publishing phenomena of our time, transformed from a struggling writer of 17 children’s plays and books to the most successful duo since Allan and Janet Ahlberg.

Subsequent picture books have shown this to be no flash in the pan. Monkey Puzzle, Room on the Broom, The Whale & The Snail and The Smartest Giant in Town have also leapt up the best-seller charts. Like Donaldson’s new novel, The Giants and the Joneses (Egmont) which shows the tale of Jack & the Beanstalk from the giant’s point of view, (and which has just been bought by Warner Bros for film) what they share is a twist, a sudden change of perspective that children thrill to. In Monkey Puzzle, you can’t understand why the friendly butterfly trying to help a little lost monkey find its mother keeps finding it wildly improbable parents. All is explained in the end: it’s because “none of my babies looks like me”, the butterfly says. The tiny Snail is the creature that saves its gigantic friend, despite its apparent powerlessness, thanks to its slime. The Smartest Giant gives away his new clothes to find that real smartness is making friends with those you’ve helped.

“I’ve always loved fables,” Donaldson says, yet the moral point of her stories is never in your face. In fact, one of the deep pleasures of The Gruffalo is that the mouse and the Gruffalo do not become friends. They are enemies, and remain so in the long-awaited sequel published next month, The Gruffalo’s Child. Donaldson is not politically correct:

“I suspect that a lot of books are more likely to reassure parents. But I’m not sure the average child needs that kind of reassurance. I think children are far more likely to relate to, say, the child animal who strikes out on their own,” she points out.

Striking out alone is what both the mouse and the bored Gruffalo’s Child do, but there is an essential difference. The mouse is a trickster. The only non-predator in the deep dark wood, he just wants to find a nut to eat, but in order to survive he has to tell lies. His lies are very similar to those told by children facing bullies, or the two smaller Billy Goats Gruff: don’t hurt me; I’ve got a big friend on my side. So convincing are his details about the Gruffalo – “He has terrible tusks and terrible claws, And terrible teeth in his terrible jaws”- that each would-be predator is scared even before the punch-line – that his favourite food just happens to be the creature menacing the mouse.

Trickster stories come out of the dark, the world over. They are never on anybody’s side but their own. The Vikings had Loki, who won back the goddess Freya from the giants before murdering Baldur with evil cunning. Afro-Caribbean peoples have Anansi the spider, who is sometimes a hero, outwitting a snake who wants to swallow him by getting him to swallow a big stick, and sometimes a lazy good-for-nothing thief. The poet Ruth Padel discovered two very similar trickster tales to The Gruffalo in Bhutan and Sumatra for her forthcoming book Tigers in Red Weather (Little,Brown).” In Bhutan, a frog convinces the rather stupid tiger that he is a very ferocious tiger-eating frog. In Sumatra, the hero of forest stories is a tiny fragile mouse-deer who always ends up getting the better of the tiger,” she says.

Mice themselves only became trickster figures when Disney came along, although Beatrix Potter’s town-mice play dreadful pranks on their lumbering human hosts. Disney’s version of Cinderella has the mice Jacques and Gus as the true heroes of the fairy-tale, making Cinderalla’s first ball-gown and outwitting her evil step-mother and her cat, Lucifer. Margery Sharp’s The Rescuers has them springing prisoners from dungeons with wit and brio, and the most recent mouse-hero, Kate di Camillo’s Despereaux, defeats death and an evil rat through some fancy footwork involving red thread.

How innocent Axel Scheffler’s mouse looks with his big round eye – we always see him in profile – his pure white tummy and pale fawn body! He waves his tiny paws about most expressively, closing his eye when telling his big fat lies, and when he does so big round details of the Gruffalo appear on the page. Being able to only glimpse a monster, as the opening of Jurassic Park showed, builds tension and makes the climax far more terrifying.

The German illustrator was the one who picked Donaldson’s book up and showed it to Macmillan, who took it to Bologna book fair, the big book fair for children’s books. The unsung hero of the team, Scheffler’s vision has played a huge part in making The Gruffalo, and subsequent Donaldson picture books, a success. His animals, boulders, trees and flowers have black outlines round them, and clear, pale colours. They look simple, but like Donaldson’s poem, they are anything but. This is the authentic dark wood of fairy-tale, even when, as in The Gruffalo’s Child, there is snow on the trees and ground. It has density and a sense of the dark. Bruno Bettelheim wrote in The Uses of Enchantment of the forest as the place where a hero “feels lost, having given up the organisation of his life which the parental home provided,”; Francis Spufford’s The Child that Books Built is more accurate when he says the wood “is a place of formless impressions you must somehow understand, of aboriginal darkness and confusion…In psychoanalytic tradition the forest is therefore identified as the great symbol of the unconscious.” In fairy-tales, it’s the kind of place where anything can happen: where you can lose your mind or find your heart’s desire, where fortunes are mended, hopes reversed, and predator becomes prey.

In the sequel, The Gruffalo’s Child, reverses our expectations once again – how, would be telling. Donaldson and her publisher, Macmillan, “did not want to do something that was not the equal of the first book,” according to her editor, Kate Wilson. “She is a writer of enormous integrity.” Donaldson rejected offers to turn The Gruffalo into a film, which would have meant “lots of jolly adventures. I didn’t want to make it sickly.” The Gruffalo’s Child pulls off a second twist by making the child-protagonist a gruffalo, not a mouse. Who is predator, and who is prey this time?
Scheffler’s pictures bristle with uncanny wit. The woodpecker boring holes in a tree, the butterfly floating by, the frog in its bog are part of the audience, given tiny faces and expressions even though they never speak. There is a fallen tree, its thick roots just like the brown claws of the Gruffalo, and knots on the tree-trunks just like its knobbly knees. The Gruffalo is born out of the dark wood, just as it is out of the quicksilver wits of the little mouse.
“ Where are you meeting him?”
“ Here, by these rocks,
And his favourite food is roasted fox.”

The mouse is a liar, and also an artist. He thinks the gruffalo is pure invention. It isn’t.

“Literature was born not the day when a boy crying wolf, wolf came running out of the Neanderthal valley with a big gray wolf at his heels: literature was born on the day when a boy came crying wolf, wolf and there was no wolf behind him…Between the wolf in the tall grass and the wolf in the tall story there is a shimmering go-between. That go-between, that prism, is the art of literature.” So said Nabokov in his introduction to his Lectures on Literature, and so says anyone with the slightest understanding of the interplay between stories and the world.

“Silly old Fox! Doesn’t he know/There’s no such thing as a Gruffalo?” the mouse remarks cheerily – but then, in a moment of pure terror, and pure genius, discovers that it does.

Children shriek with fear and joy at this moment. They don’t know it, but The Gruffalo breaks a convention of fairy-tales, which is that the trickster’s lies are never true. Only in horror-stories, like Philip Pullman’s Clockwork, does the invented become real.

The Gruffalo is truly horrendous when first seen. The black tongue drips with saliva, the orange eyes glow with anticipation, the claws are ready to pounce and rend. He appears as unexpectedly as Lewis Carroll’s Jabberwock, when, with eyes of flame, it comes whiffling through the tulgey wood, and is clearly a relation to one of Sendak’s Wild Things. For the first time, the mouse is truly dismayed, its mouth gaping, its body jumping back. My son has frozen on my lap. He has always afraid of monsters just like this one, so much so that he sleeps with knights all round to protect him, a selection of plastic swords hanging from his bed, and a sign on the window in wobbly handwriting warning monsters that he is, in fact, a knight. Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are was too terrifying for him because he pointed out the logical impossibility of “staring into all their yellow eyes at once” and thus dominating them.

After a long while, he points out that the Gruffalo’s teeth are, in fact, blunt. Later, this will become his favourite moment in the whole book. We can turn the page.

Now Julia Donaldson makes the salmon-like twist of imagination that will guarantee immortality. Over and over again the mouse has been told it looks “good to eat”, and the Gruffalo says the same thing.

“Good?” says the mouse. “Don’t call me good!/I’m the scariest creature in this wood. Just walk behind me and soon you’ll see. /Everyone is afraid of me.”

Like the clever little tailor in Grimm, the mouse uses the Gruffalo’s strength against it. My son laughs and laughs, just as millions will do after him. It’s David vs. Goliath, child vs. parent, trickster vs. monster, and the latter doesn’t stand a chance. Every creature they meet – the mouse’s former would-be predators – runs for its life, and the Gruffalo is too stupid to realise who they are actually afraid of. The Gruffalo looks increasingly stupid and puzzled until at last the mouse says, “Well, Gruffalo, You see?/Everyone is afraid of me! But now my tummy’s beginning to rumble. /My favourite food is – gruffalo crumble!”

So terrified is the Gruffalo that it runs away, leaving the mouse to at last enjoy his nut in peace. It’s a victory that works within the rules of fairy-tales, but which also extends the pattern. Except that, one snowy winter’s night when the Gruffalo has been telling it’s own child about the Big Bad Mouse, its bored daughter creeps out, into the deep dark wood…

Amanda Craig’s new novel, Love in Idleness, has just been published in Abacus paperback, £6.99