Summary:
Written by
Lemony Snicket and illustrated by Jon Klassen, The Dark tells the story of Laszlo, who is afraid of the dark. The dark in the story is personified as a
character, and Laszlo will visit and greet the dark every morning where it
lives during the day by saying hello at the basement door. He hopes this will keep the dark from
visiting him when it spreads out at night.
One
night, however, Laszlo’s nightlight burns out and the dark does visit and wants
to show the boy something. Armed with a
flashlight Laszlo searches all the parts of the house trying to find what the
dark wants to show him.
Eventually
the dark leads Laszlo into the basement, where he explains the importance of
the dark, and reveals a supply of light bulbs to Laszlo in a small chest of
drawers. Laszlo thanks the dark and
replaces the bulb in his nightlight and is able to sleep once more. From this point own Laszlo continues to visit
and greet the dark, but is no longer afraid nor bothered by it.
Snicket, L.
(2013). The dark. New York, NY:
Little, Brown and Company.
My
Impressions:
The artwork
is what really makes this story for me.
Klassen is able to play so well with the contrast between the light beam
and pure black darkness that each page can be strikingly visual. The story it self is a great take on the
“afraid of the dark” trope as well, which could help give smaller children
piece of mind when coming to terms with this fear. The fact that the Dark itself is a character
is what makes the story so clever.
Reviews:
You
do not know the temptation I am fighting right now to begin this review with
some grandiose statement equating a fear of the dark with a fear of death
itself. You have my full permission to slap me upside the head if I start off
my children’s books reviews with something that bigheaded. The whole reason I
was going to do it at all is that after reading a book like Lemony
Snicket’s The
Dark I find myself wondering about kids and their fears. Most
childhood fears tap into the weird id (see, here I go) part of our brains where
the unknown takes on greater and grander evils than could possibly occur in the
real world. So we get fears of dogs, the color mauve, certain dead-eyed
paintings, fruit, and water going down the drain (or so Mr. Rogers claimed,
though I’ve never met a kid that went that route), etc. In the light of those
others, a healthy fear of the dark makes perfect sense. The dark is where you
cannot see and what you cannot see cannot possibly do you any good. That said,
there are surprisingly few picture books out there that tackle this very
specific fear. Picture books love to tackle a fear of monsters, but the idea of
handling something as ephemeral as a fear of the dark is much much harder. It
takes a certain kind of writer and a certain kind of illustrator to grasp this
fear by the throat and throttle it good and sound. Behold the pairing of Lemony
Snicket and Jon Klassen. You’ll ne’er see the like again (unless they do
another picture book together, in which case, scratch that).
“You might be afraid
of the dark, but the dark is not afraid of you.” Laszlo is afraid but there’s
not much he can do about it. Seems as though the dark is everywhere you look
sometimes. Generally speaking it lives in the basement, and every morning
Laszlo would open the door and say, “Hi . . . Hi, dark.” He wouldn’t get a
reply. Then, one night, the dark does something unprecedented. It comes into
Laszlo’s room and though he has a flashlight, it seems to be everywhere. It
says it wants to show him something. Something in the basement. Something in
the bottom drawer of an old dresser. Something that helps Laszlo just when he
needs it. The dark still visits Laszlo now. It just doesn’t bother him.
There is nothing
normal about Lemony Snicket. When he writes a picture book he doesn’t go about
it the usual route. Past efforts have included The Composer Is Dead which
effectively replaced ye olde stand-by Peter and
the Wolf in terms of instrument instruction
in many a fine school district. Then there was 13 Words which
played out like a bit of experimental theater for the picture book set. I say
that, but 16 copies of the book are currently checked out of my own library
system. Besides, how can you not love a book that contains the following tags
on its record: “cake, depression, friendship, haberdashery, happiness”? Take
all that under consideration and The Dark is without a doubt
the most normal picture book the man has attempted yet. It has, on paper
anyway, a purpose: address children’s fear of the dark. In practice, it’s more
complicated than that. More complicated and better.
Snicket does not
address a fear of the absence of light by offering up the usual platitudes. He
doesn’t delve into the monsters or other beasties that may lurk in its corners.
The dark, in Snicket’s universe, acts almost as an attentive guardian. When we
look up at the night sky, it is looking back at us. In Laszlo’s own experience,
the dark only seeks to help. We don’t quite understand its motivations. The
takeaway, rather, is that it is a benign force. Remove the threat and what
you’re left with is something that exists alongside you. Interestingly it
almost works on a religious level. I would not be the least bit surprised if
Sunday school classes started using it as a religious parable for death. Not
its original purpose but on the horizon just the same.
It is also a pleasure
to read this book aloud. Mr. Snicket’s words require a bit of rereading to
fully appreciate them, but appreciate you will. First off, there’s the fact
that our hero’s name is Laszlo. A cursory search of children’s books yields
many a Laszlo author or illustrator but nary a Laszloian subject. So that’s
nice. Then there’s the repetition you don’t necessarily notice at the time
(terms like “creaky roof” “smooth, cold windows”) but that sink in with
repeated readings. The voice of the dark is particularly interesting. Snicket
writes it in such a way as to allow the reader the choice of purring the words,
whispering them, putting a bit of creak into the vocal chords, or hissing them.
The parent is granted the choice of making the dark threatening in its initial
lures or comforting. Long story short, adults would do well to attempt a couple
solo readings on their own before attempting with a kiddo. At least figure out
what take you’re going for. It demands no less.
The most Snicketish
verbal choice, unfortunately, turns out to be the book’s Achilles heel. You’re
reading along, merry as you please, when you come to a page that creates a kind
of verbal record scratch to the whole proceeding. Laszlo has approached the
dark at last. He is nearing something that may turn out to be very scary. And
then, just as he grows near, the next page FILLS . . . . with text. Text that
is very nice and very well written and perhaps places childhood fears in
context better than anything I’ve seen before. All that. By the same token it
stops the reading cold. I imagine there must have been a couple editorial
consultations about this page. Someone somewhere along the process of
publication would have questioned its necessity. Perhaps there was a sterling
defense of it that swayed all parties involved and in it remained. Or maybe
everyone at Little, Brown loved it the first time they read it. Not quite sure.
What I do know is that if you are reading this book to a large group, you will
skip this page. And if you are reading one-on-one to your own sprog? Depends on
the sprog, of course. Thoughtful sprogs will be able to take it. They may be
few and far between, however. The last thing you want when you are watching a
horror film and the hero is reaching for the doorknob of the basement is to
have the moment interrupted by a five-minute talk on the roots of fear. It
might contain a brilliant thesis. You just don’t want to hear it at this
particular moment in time.
Canadians have a
special relationship to the dark that Americans can’t quite appreciate. I was
first alerted to this fact when I read Caroline Woodward’sSinging Away the Dark.
That book was about a little girl’s mile long trek through the dark to the stop
for her school bus. The book was illustrated by Julie Morstad, whose work
reminds me, not a little, of Klassen’s. They share a similar deadpan serenity.
If Morstad was an American resident you can bet she’d get as much attention as
Mr. Klassen has acquired in the last few years. In this particular outing, Mr.
Klassen works almost in the negative. Much of this book has to be black. Pure
black. The kind that has a palpable weight to it. Laszlo and his house fill in
the spaces where the dark has yet to penetrate. It was with great pleasure that
I watched what the man did with light as well. The colors of a home when lit by
a flashlight are different from the colors seen in the slow setting of the
evening sun. A toy car that Laszlo abandons in his efforts to escape the dark
appears as a dark umber at first, then later pure black in the flashlight’s
glow. We only see the early morning light once, and in that case Klassen makes
it a lovely cool blue. These are subtle details, but they’re enough to convince
the reader that they’re viewing accurate portrayals of each time of day.
The dark is not
visually anthropomorphized. It is verbally, of course, with references to it
hiding, sitting, or even gazing. One has to sit and shudder for a while when
you imagine what this book might have been like with an author that turned the
dark into a black blob with facial expressions. It’s not exaggerating to say
that such a move would defeat the very purpose of the book itself. The whole
reason the book works on a visual level is because Klassen adheres strictly and
entirely to the real world. An enterprising soul could take this book,
replicate it scene by scene in a live action YouTube video, and not have to dip
into the film budget for a single solitary special effect. This is enormously
important to children who may actually beafraid of the dark. This book
gives a face to a fear that is both nameable and not nameable without giving a
literal face to a specific fear. It’s accessible because it is realistic.
When dealing with
picture books that seek to exorcise fears, one has to be very careful that you
don’t instill a fear where there wasn’t one before. So a child that might never
have considered the fact that nighttime can be a scary time might enter into a
whole new kind of knowledge with the simple application of this book. That
said, those sorts of things are very much on a case-by-case basis.
Certainly The
Dark will be a boon to some and simply a well-wrought story
for others. Pairing Klassen with Snicket feels good when you say it aloud. No
surprise then that the result of such a pairing isn’t just good. It’s great. A
powerhouse of a comfort book.
On shelves April 2nd.
Bird, E.
(2013). Review of the day: the dark by Lemony Snicket [a review of the book
The Dark by L. Snicket]. School Library Journal website. Retrieved from http://blogs.slj.com/afuse8production/2013/03/11/review-of-the-day-the-dark-by-lemony- snicket/#_
Usage in a
Library Setting:
This could
be used as part of a science program where the nature of light is examined
after reading the book. Flashlights
could be used to study light beams, and prism crystals could be brought in to
examine the light spectrum.
No comments:
Post a Comment