Prince Silencio
by Anne Herbauts
Monday
by Anne Herbauts
I often ask if writer/illustrators have too much of an advantage over just plain writers of children’s books, who cannot always control how their vision is transferred to the page. Or perhaps people who can think both in words and images are just a notch higher on the evolutionary scale.
Herbauts, a Belgian who lives part-time in France, says she works “in the space between the two” and though that sounds a tad pretentious, I pretty much get it. Both of these books have a very European sensibility to them: us Yanks are more accustomed to a straightforward narrative, even if it’s not strictly chronological. So Herbauts, in Monday, uses chronology with no firm narrative. And where those of us stateside have become accustomed to character arcs and decisive transformations, in both books we’re submerged in metaphor and ambiguity.
That’s not to say it aims over kids’ heads, unless you want to admit your kids are not all that smart. They are. Children “read” pictures, and there’s plenty to interpret in her distinctive illustrations that blend watercolor, colored pencil and textured paper. But rather than bring the story to life—again, a standard trope in American and even most British picture books—she hints, allegorizes, fantasizes and leads you in several complicated directions at once. Very, very French, non?
Monday is about friendship, the passage of time and the seasons, but also about losing yourself, loneliness, and silence. Deep stuff. The paper changes with the story: a heavy bond in spring, then a lighter weight as winter sets in, with texture used to indicate snowflakes and finally a blinding whiteness, where Monday, the main character, is only distinguished by a cluster of bumps and ridges.
Her prose is similarly ripe with imagery. This is Summer’s soliloquy:
I watch colors deepen as fragrances thicken and intensify.
Content, I continue the light of midday through
the hours, as the shadows steal away, afraid.
Tellingly enough—or maybe it’s a quirk of Herbauts’—she also employs ample white space in Prince Silencio, where the title character is charged by his father, a grumpy despot, to keep the kingdom quiet. All we know about the prince is that he’s shy, but she shows us this as well. He’s dressed head-to-toe in white, fading into the background while tiptoeing to the edge of the crowded village with its boisterous and vividly colorful villagers. White=silence, in case you missed it.
The king is cleverly represented as a castle turret, with an open door for the roaring mouth and frowning windows for eyes. When the king dies, people rejoice, and Silencio’s drawn to their celebrations, where they act out common expressions like “cat got your tongue”. There’s a full list in the back, but the real point seems to be reinforcing the bond between words and images.
Silencio is turned away, becoming invisible. But then the cacophony begins to grate and people long for some space between the noises. And these people fade into whiteness too.
Both Prince Silencio and Monday return, but not in the same form. Their transformations aren’t from revelation or inward growth or heroic journeys or whatever Campbellian twist we’re accustomed to reading. Rather, they get reinterpreted by the people who miss them, who will them back into a new, albeit weaker, existence. I think of how conscious Europeans are of the weight of their long and not always glorious history, and cannot help but interpret these books in a larger context, as a call to see what’s invisible, ephemeral and fleeting.
Rating: *\*\*\*\
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