Lions and tigers
December 3rd, 2008 | by Ben Hoare |There is a strong tradition, in children’s storytelling, of telling tales about predatory animals such as lions and tigers.
Children’s books about lions and tigers rarely present such creatures as they really are: ruthless, powerful hunters. Instead, authors emphasise qualities such as their beauty and majesty, presenting them as objects of awe or affection in stories that are fundamentally about humans, not animals.
A classic example is The Tiger Who Came to Tea, in which Sophie and her mother are visited at home one day by a tiger.
Crucially, the tiger is never depicted as being threatening. He disrupts and intrudes on the world of Sophie and her mother, but they are never in physical danger. Rather, the consequence of this unexpected visit is the reassertion of domestic happiness - with nothing left to eat at home, Sophie’s father takes the family to eat at a nearby café.
The principal quality of this tiger is its mystery. Its visit is unannounced, and the family does not know if it will come again. Like its real-life counterpart, this tiger is unpredictable, but it is not dangerous.
In another book, Library Lion, the lion displays both human and animal qualities. It is kind, and wants to help; but its lion-like roar gets it into trouble. Ultimately, though, the conflict is resolved and the predatory creature - more so than in The Tiger Who Came to Tea - is accepted into civilisation.
Both stories are made compelling because of the relationship between the mystery and unpredictability of wild animals and the civilised nature of the domestic environment they are brought into. Catherine Rayner’s Augustus and His Smile uses the predatory animal to very different effect. Despite certain familiar features, such as the mapping of human emotions onto the tiger (”Augustus the tiger was sad”), mankind is most notable in this book because of its absence. Indeed, apart from the “small, shiny beetle”, the “birds that chirped and called” and the “shoals of tiny, shiny fish”, Augustus the tiger is the only living creature to appear in the book. The story is striking because of the solitude it conveys.
In case this needs pointing out, I can reveal right now that all three of these stories are factually inaccurate. A tiger in your home would tear you to pieces and destroy your furniture. A lion running loose in a public library would not help the already fragile Dewey Decimal System. But this, of course, is not the point.
Nevertheless, I wanted to explore the specific kind of suspension of disbelief required when we read such tales of not-quite-anthropomorphic creatures. I also want to expose the con of texts like Owl Babies, which appears to be warmly reassuring, yet whose subtext conveys a world in which one family’s comfort is at the expense of another’s security.
The result is my first Christmas story, ‘A Christmas Argument’. Following on from the fun we had illustrating ‘A Cadence‘, I invited some friends to help me illustrate this one. The full story, complete with illustrations, will be posted here next week.
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