THE GRUFFALO’S CHILD
By Julia Donaldson and Axel Scheffler
Macmillan Children’s Books, £10.99; 32pp
ISBN 1 405 02045 8
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Sequels to classics are rarely a cause for joy. Does anyone care for Paradise Regained, after it was Lost? Who wants to know what happened after they all lived happily ever after? Yet The Gruffalo, the million-selling picture-book by Julia Donaldson and Axel Scheffler, left some unfinished business in the “deep dark wood” where the little mouse tricked his way out of being eaten by pretending to have a date with a gruffalo — a creature he invented, but which turned out to be all too real. Would the gruffalo ever realise he had been conned?

It seems not. The Gruffalo’s Child begins with the Gruffalo as a parent instructing his daughter: “The Gruffalo said that no gruffalo should/ Ever set foot in the deep dark wood.” The rhythms are instantly right, echoing the start of the nursery rhyme, “My mother said/ I never should/ Play with the gypsies/ In the wood”. Children shiver deliciously because these prohibitions are always a prelude to disobedience and adventure.

Sure enough, the Gruffalo’s Child sneaks out of the cave on a snowy winter day, in search of the Big Bad Mouse. Just as the mouse scared his would-be predators with details of his adversary, so now the Gruffalo describes how “his scaly tail is terribly long/ His eyes are like pools of terrible fire/ And his terrible whiskers are tougher than wire”. You need to have read the first book to understand how funny this is, because the tiny, delicate mouse has no features that anyone could be scared of. Axel Scheffler depicts the perils of the dark wood in exquisite detail, while the expression on the face of the questing child is a masterpiece of anxious stupidity.

So what does happen when she meets the real mouse, quietly sweeping the snow from his little hole? How can he trick his way out of being eaten a second time?

As before, what saves the little mouse from becoming a snack is the effects of fear upon the imagination of the fearful. This is a good subject, but Jeanne Willis did it better in The Monster Bed, in which a child-monster is terrified by tales of how “the humans will get you”, and lies quaking under his bed until a lost boy stumbles into his cave. All children suffer, to varying degrees, from separation anxiety and night-terrors about being left in the dark, but whereas The Gruffalo triumphantly proved how you could outwit a monster, this is less scary and consequently less reassuring. Unlike the first book, there is nobody really to root for. Children want to be on the side of the Gruffalo’s Child because she’s one of them right up until the moment that she tries to eat the mouse. It needs a further twist to the tale. Despite its charm, this, sadly, is not a worthy sequel to an inspired modern classic.

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