A Children's Sampler

By Timothy Foote

MIDNIGHT is A PLACE. 287 pages. Viking. $6.95. ARABEL'S RAVEN. 118 pages. Doubleday. $4.95. Both by Joan Aiken. The author of that incomparable melodrama The Wolves of Willoughby Chase has two remarkably different books out this year, both splendid. Midnight Is a Place is a savage yet romantic tale about what befalls a boy and girl, suddenly homeless and penniless, in a terrifyingly real and at the same time satisfyingly imaginary industrial city in 19th century Britain. This smoke-filled place is appropriately called Blastburn. Among other chores for survival, the girl collects cigar butts from gutters to salvage the tobacco for resale, while the boy stays alive scrounging for junk in sewers. A happy ending eventually sets in but not before the forces of meanness and darkness, not to say evil, seem overwhelming, and the author proves once again that she writes about children in distress better than anyone since Dickens.

Arabel's Raven is considerably less intricate. It concerns a large, grumpy bird named Mortimer who takes up residence in a lower-middle-class British household, also inhabited by a small girl named Arabel. Mortimer's unquenchable hope is to find diamonds in the family coal scuttle, but he soon branches into carpet eating, letter spearing and serving as unwilling accessory to a diamond heist conducted by a trained squirrel and a pair of inept gangsters.

Mortimer can only speak one word--yes, it's "Nevermore." He specializes in giving black looks. All this sounds awful but in fact is very funny.

THE LITTLE TRAIN and THE LITTLE FIRE ENGINE. Both by Graham Greene and illustrated by Edward Ardizzone. Both 48 pages. Doubleday. $4.95 each. Novelist Greene has elsewhere paid tribute to the influence of Beatrix Potter's Tom Kitten on his work. These two more or less charming British classics, first published in 1946 when Greene was 42, are self-consciously linked to a whole school of children's homilies about wayward tugboats, ambitious trains and old snow shovels that have cruelly been retired too soon. In the first, a small, bored little engine chuffs away from the town of Little Snoreing toward such smoke-filled cities as High Yelling and Great Scolding only to learn that freedom isn't as much fun as it's cracked up to be. In the second, a pony-drawn fire engine and a faithful old fireman named Sam Trolley are briefly, agonizingly rendered obsolete by a scheming mayor and a big new fire engine--until, of course, they heroically put out a blaze that the big new fire engine has missed.

Greene's text is a touch parodic and patronizing, but Edward Ardizzone's marvelous new pen and ink and watercolor washes use the soft hues of Thomas Rowlandson to celebrate a detailed affection for Little Snoreing and its inhabitants.

THE COMPLETE GRIMM'S FAIRY TALES. Introduction by Padraic Colum. Commentary by Joseph Campbell. Illustrations by Josef Scharl. 864 pages. Pantheon. $12.95.

The shades of Freud and Jung, of magic, myth and racial memory, now hover (drearily or provocatively, depending on one's point of view) around any collection of the Brothers Grimm. There is no need to be owlish, however, about the clear fact that fairy tales address with considerable delight some persistent human need, at the very simplest, to half-believe that every life is a mysterious personal adventure worth pursuing to the bitter end. Why? Because --who knows? -- every faithful goose girl may become a princess, every mean, usurping maid become a deserving corpse. This fine re-edition of the 210 Grimm tales first printed in the U.S. in 1944 is full of wonders and murders, long-suffering younger sons who make it and bad giants who don't. It is a great buy in drops of blood, talking foxes, poisoned apples, unparalleled cruelty, earthy wisdom, dumbfounding stupidity and sheer excitement. Every literate household (with or without children) should own one.

THE ADVENTURES OF TINTIN: THE SECRET OF THE UNICORN; RED RACKHAM'S TREASURE; THE CRAB WITH THE GOLDEN CLAWS; KING OTTOKAR'S SCEPTRE. All written and illustrated by Herge. All 62 pages. Atlantic-Little, Brown. Paperback $1.95 each. No one should be put off by Tintin himself, a boy in knickers with a muffin face and a tuft of hair rising to a curled peak like a Hokusai wave. Or by Captain Haddock, his bearded rum-sodden sidekick. Or by the small white dog, known as Milou in the original French versions of these stories, but for some inexplicable reason called Snowy in English.

All three grow on the reader who is soon lost in comic-strip chronicles marked by great wit, suspense and true humor rising both from character and from a remarkably sophisticated view of the world. These four books variously send Tintin, Haddock, Snowy and two idiot detectives in black bowlers into the desert to chase opium smugglers, into central Europe to try to keep King Ottokar from losing the throne of Syldavia, back into history to recall the voyages of Haddock's pirate ancestor Red Rackham on the ship Unicorn, and, finally, down to the bottom of the Caribbean in a sharklike submarine after Rackham's treasure. Herge, the nom de plume of a Belgian genius named Georges Remi, who has had Gallic readers in thrall for more than 40 years, fills his small frames with marvelous detail. If he draws a 1955 Peugeot 403 or the old Geneva Airport, everything is exactly right. Occasionally he breaks out into a full-page picture recreating such things as a complete Persian miniature version of a 15th century battle with the Turks, or the havoc wreaked by an Alfa Romeo slaloming through a European square on market day.

Much is lost in translation. Even so, these books amply prove that 50 million Frenchmen can't be wrong.

LUMBERJACK. Paintings and story by William Kurelek. Unpaged. Houghton Mifflin. $6.95. Painter Kurelek worked in Canadian lumber camps after World War II to help pay for a taste of the artist's life in Paris. Since lumbering nowadays is largely done by tree harvesters that can cut 40 cords of wood in eight hours, Kurelek has drawn and written his way into the past. After the flapdoodle and sheer flapjackery often associated with lumberjack nostalgia, Kurelek's quiet combined memoir and illustrated how-to book (notching trees, washing socks, grinding axes, dynamiting log jams) is refreshingly simple, grubby and authentic. Some of his paintings have a crabbed look, as if done by a Peter Bruegel with arthritis of the drawing hand, but they open an affecting window on the life and times of lumbermen in the Northern bush.

THE BOOK OF OWLS by Lewis Wayne Walker. 247 pages. Knopf. $12.50. The flammulated screech owl stands seven inches high and gives a "mellow hoot."

One family of barn owls that the author discovered in the belfry of a church as a boy caught 758 rats and mice in 96 nights' hunting. Owls have fabulous vision, but many can catch their prey by hearing alone. The tufts on their ears are mainly for camouflage, however, giving them a ragged, barklike outline to make them invisible against trees.

The book proceeds from owl to owl, full of fascinating facts and recollections.

Most important, it has nearly 100 amazing photographs of owls of all sizes and shapes doing everything from pretending to be stumps to attacking Author Walker in midflight.

qedTimothy Foote

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