PICTURE BOOKS:Classic tales, chaotic graphics and poignant plots burst from these pages, writes Robert Dunbar
FIRST PUBLISHED in 1909 and widely anthologised since, O Henry's The Gift of the Magihas many claims to be considered the perfect Christmas story for our financially challenged times. At its centre are Della and Jim, a young, impoverished married couple who place generosity and self-sacrifice above all other considerations as they choose gifts for each other, only to see their intentions thwarted by the ironic twists of fate and circumstance. PJ Lynch's new illustrated edition of the story (Walker, £10.99) doesn't merely trace the twists and turns of the original and capture its quickly changing moods; its succession of beautifully composed paintings - starting with the cover - provides its own interpretative commentary.
Thus, the room described in the text simply as "a furnished flat . . . (which) did not exactly beggar description" becomes a double-page spread evincing a threadbare existence in every detail: the furnishings, the stove, the fire place, the discoloured walls all compel the reader's attention before it comes to focus on the figure of the despondent Della stretched out on "a shabby little couch". Fans of Lynch's pictorial realism, his play of light and shade and the richly revealing body language of his characters will not be disappointed here.
The theme of life's sudden reversals characterising O Henry's story lies also behind the fairytale story of Cinderella, now the subject of a retelling by Max Eilenberg, with full colour illustrations by Niamh Sharkey (Walker, £9.99). The emphasis throughout text and layout is on the colloquial and the humorous. Of the stepmother, the narrator tells us that "she was snobbish, mean and foul-tempered: Ooh, she was horrid", that "Ooh" striking a totally appropriate pantomimic note. Sharkey's sequence of playfully stylised pictures is especially striking in its portrayal of facial expressions, not least those of a very benign fairy godmother, complete with pince-nez spectacles, and those of two rather less than benign stepsisters.
With a jacket and end-papers which provide both material and instructions for making paper aeroplanes, Oliver Jeffers's The Great Paper Caper(HarperCollins, £11.99) mischievously combines elements of picture book and manual. It conveys also, within the context of an engaging whodunit, a strong plea for environmental awareness. The setting is a forest where, we are told, "everything was not as it should be", the problem being that the trees' trunks and branches are disappearing: who is responsible?
Jeffers's trademark minimalist artwork wittily re-creates the forest world and the diversity of its wildlife, while simultaneously reflecting the brevity of his text.
The note of restraint in Jeffers's work becomes, in Ralph Steadman's Garibaldi's Biscuits(Andersen, £10.99) a note of wildly hilarious exuberance. The extravagance of its pen and wash illustrations, allied to its general layout and typographical inventiveness, is the ideal medium for what is, in effect, a tale of two biscuits, the Bourbon and the Garibaldi, and their alleged origins.
These, apparently, date from the time of the great leader's mission to save his native country from French domination. With soldiers' pantaloons given to falling down once their pizza buckles have been eaten, and with a formidably wily woodpecker among its supporting cast, this is graphic art at its most joyously entertaining.
"The song wrote itself. Some songs are like that.'' So said Bob Dylan of Forever Young, his paean to paternal-filial dreams and aspirations, the lyrics of which now serve as content for picture book interpretation by Paul Rogers (Simon Schuster, £12.99). Strongly redolent of the New York of the 1960s, the book imagines a young boy growing up in a time of cultural and social change, for which the numerous verbal and pictorial allusions to Dylan's own musical journey act as evocative background. Dylan fans - old or forever young - are going to enjoy this nostalgic trip through his back catalogue and their chance to appreciate Rogers' suitably folksy (and occasionally kitschy) art.
From Dylan's focus on father and son we shift, in Roddy Doyle's Her Mother's Face(Scholastic, £10.99), to the relationship between mother and daughter. But the poignant point here is that the mother has been dead for seven years and daughter Siobhán, now 10 and an only child, lives alone with her father.
Try as she will, she cannot recall what her mother may have looked like; her father is determinedly silent on the topic. A meeting in the park with "a beautiful woman'' will, however, transform her life, and we see her grow into adolescence and, eventually, into motherhood. Doyle's text moves delicately between the sentimental, the wistful and the realistic. It may once or twice fail to strike a totally harmonious balance, but it is consistent in its emphasis on the healing potential of time.
Its occasional touches of humour - though very subdued by Doyle's usual standards - are well reflected in Freya Blackwood's illustrations, skilfully capturing a family's lighter and darker moments across the generations.
Numerous illustrated versions of L Frank Baum's The Wizard of Oz, not to mention its many stage and screen adaptations, have given us often strongly held notions about how its characters should be imagined. These assumptions are going to be dramatically shaken with the arrival of Graham Rawle's quite stunning new version (Atlantic, £25), an interpretation which blends photography, collage, model-making and typographical experimentation in a surreal rendition of the (unabridged) original text.
Given the imminent changes in the White House, it may well be an ideal time to revisit an earlier expression of American optimism and experience what Baum himself called "a modernised fairy tale, in which the wonderment and joy are retained and the heartaches and nightmares are left out''.
• Robert Dunbar is a commentator on children's books and reading.