Wednesday, December 10, 2014

Baddies in books: The Gruffalo’s double-edged menace

He’s great to have around when you want to terrify anyone coming after you, but watch out when he gets hungry

The Gruffalo
Toothsome … The Gruffalo as seen in the 2009 BBC adaptation. Photograph: BBC/Magic Light Company
In one episode of much-loved sitcom Father Ted, the young priest Dougal confesses that the spider-baby he saw on TV was actually something he’d dreamed. Ted shows him a diagram of a man’s head. Inside it is the word Dreams. Outside, is the word Reality. “Have you been studying this like I told you?” Ted asks.

For the mouse protagonist of Julia Donaldson and Axel Scheffler’s bestselling picture book The Gruffalo, no such convenient distinction exists between the outer and inner worlds. To fend off a series of murderous, though beguiling, invitations to dinner from ravenous predators during his stroll through the dark forest, the trickster mouse invents a previous invitation with an imaginary friend.

This friend is the Gruffalo, who has “orange eyes”, a “black tongue”, “purple prickles”, “knobbly knees”, a “poisonous wart”, “turned-out toes”, “terrible tusks”, “terrible claws”, “terrible teeth and terrible jaws”. Naturally, his favourite food is “roasted fox”/“owl ice-cream”/“scrambled snake”, depending on circumstances.
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