The “Preposterousness” of John Burningham: Complexity Made Accessible

John Burningham, the British candidate for the 2012 Hans Christian Andersen prize for illustration, has been a prolific author-illustrator of picture books, producing more than a book a year for over half a century. His works appeal to children, adults, critics, and teachers in different but overlapping ways. Although he claims “I am not thinking about [children] when I do this at all. I never do anything differently because it’s for children. I am not trying to make a landscape that children can understand. I am just making a landscape” (qtd. in Jones), he is revered precisely for his ability to make complex ideas and emotions accessible to his young readers.

Burningham’s debut picture book was Borka: The Adventures of a Goose with No Feathers (1963), and it remains one of his most loved picture books with its delicious blend of realism and fantasy. Borka the goose is born without feathers, and so her mother knits her a grey woolen jumper to keep her warm, but she can never learn to fly. So when her companions migrate, Borka must make her way down the British coast without flying. She boards a ship and earns her passage by coiling ropes and picking up crumbs. She finally makes a home for herself amongst the other unusual birds in Kew Gardens.

The key to Borka’s success, as Brian Alderson explains, is that the “low-key presentation of these preposterous events helps to suggest a complete normality.” This suggestion is evident not only in the story lines, but also in the illustrative technique as slightly different techniques are used to distinguish the “preposterous” from the expected. In the 1970s, the division is made manifest in Burningham’s two books about Shirley: Come Away from the Water, Shirley (1977) and Time to Get Out of the Bath, Shirley (1978). These counterpoint picture books use the gutter to separate the mundane world of the adult from the imaginative interior world of the child’s imagination. So while Shirley’s parents focus on the prosaic concerns of the coldness of the seawater or bath water on the floor, Shirley imagines herself into a fantasy world where she can fight pirates and find treasure. Her parents are depicted in subdued sketches lightly washed with color, images which only lightly intimate the adults’ physical environment and so suggest they are out of touch with what is going on around them. Shirley, by way of contrast, is depicted in thickly painted mauves, pinks and yellows, and mixed media is incorporated to add further texture to these imagined environs. She is deeply connected to her imagined environment. Despite her silence (we only read what her mother says, never what Shirley has to say or think), Shirley’s feisty adventures demonstrate she does not lack autonomy.

Shirley’s parents “are easy prey for the satirist or the social critic, but they are in Burningham-land where the criteria are different. The reader does not despise so much as feel sorry for them” (Alderson). And herein lies Burningham’s main contribution to children’s literature. He takes a deeply complex subject—in this case a parent-child relationship that seems somewhat awry even though it is far from abusive or uncaring—and he makes it, not simple, but accessible. To make it simple would be to remove the subtle nuances, to treat the child reader as being incapable of understanding the complexities of their own lives. Instead, Burningham celebrates the complexity of the child’s emotional world without taking cheap shots at the adults in their lives.

The same standards apply in the opposite direction when Burningham explores the so-called “bad” behavior of children. Julius, the child character of Where’s Julius? (1986) never manages to join his parents for their well-cooked, varied meals because he is always off having imaginative adventures and exploring. Instead of berating their son, Julius’s father patiently brings his son meals to eat in the exotic fantasy worlds Julius has created. At the end of the book, Julius is ready...