TIGER (ANIMALS IN ART) (6+)
by Joanna Skipwith
Silver Jungle, £9.99; 48pp

TIGERS REMAIN MY son’s favourite soft toys, which may explain why I always look for books featuring them. We had Kit Wright’s Tigerella to encourage happy dreams; Blake’s immortal poem The Tyger to chant on walks through the woods, and Judith Kerr’s The Tiger Who Came to Tea for laughter. There were tigers to fear, such as Shere Khan in The Jungle Book, tigers to outwit such as those in The Story of Babaji (once Little Black Sambo) and tigers to admire in Lynne Reid Banks’s thriller about tiger twins escaping from the Colosseum, Tiger, Tiger.

While their images sell us everything from breakfast cereals to petrol, the real animals, with their solitary nature, ferocity, mystery and extreme beauty, are on the brink of extinction. Geoffrey Malone, an admired writer of animal adventures, has turned his attention in Tiger! to the struggles of Kuma, a female in a reserve in central India.

Kuma is about to give birth, and her story begins with her desperation to kill an antelope to gain the energy she needs. Malone describes Kuma’s careful tracking, her lucky kill, and her retreat to the secret cave she has found to give birth in clear, dramatic prose. Her story is one of heart-stopping courage and pathos, which adults may dismiss as anthropomorphism but which thrills the same way as London’s White Fang does.

There is a noble tradition of animal stories for children reaching back into the farthest beginnings of folk-tale and which has burst into renewed life with Michelle Paver’s magnificent Chronicles of Ancient Darkness. Here whenever Malone describes his heroine’s adventures the novel is terrific. The other half of the story is about the humans who try to protect Kuma and all the tigers in the reserve — though even tigers in zoos are not safe. Anji and Himal’ s father, Inspector Singh, is trying to stop poachers killing tigers for the £3 billion business that is traditional Chinese medicine.

Inspector Singh is a good man with a stupid boss whom he must manipulate, just as he must try to save Kuma and her cubs both from dying from infection and traps. The climax, in which the poachers are hunted down on elephants, is satisfying, but had the whole story been told from the tiger’s point of view it could have been a classic of its kind.

Joanna Skipwith’s Tiger is part of a series called Animals in Art that, like the books by the wonderful Lucy Micklethwait, groups together classic paintings under a theme. Here we have tigers in everything from Roman mosaics to Disney, with Rubens, Rousseau, Dalí and a gorgeously expressive painting of three tigers defending their prey against a brown bear by the Russian Gennadi Pavlishin.

Once again, we learn that in the past 100 years we have lost 90 per cent of the world’s tigers. A fascinating book that does not fear to use difficult words, it will make readers fall in love, even more, with the tiger. If bought from www.21stCenturyTiger.org, half its price goes to tiger conservation.

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