It seems wrong to call Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are a “picture book”. The story of Max — a mischievous boy in a wolf suit who, banished to his room, finds himself on a magical island, ruling over a gang of rumbustious monsters, and then, pining for home, returns to a hot supper — is closer to a visual poem: strange, profound, enchanting; like Kubla Khan it seems to have leapt directly from its author’s unconscious. On its publication in 1963 one reviewer called the story “pointless and confusing”, but readers since have found a rich meditation on fear and comfort, anger and imagination, survival and self-control.

Adapting it for the screen, as Spike Jonze and Dave Eggers have done, is a tall order, but not as tall, perhaps, as turning its 338 words into a 280-page novel — a secondary project that was Sendak’s idea. The result is an odd, clumsy beast, with plenty of spirit but little direction; an “all-ages adventure” that will amuse adults and engage children, but that is unlikely to fully satisfy either.

The story, we are told, “hews closely to the movie in many places, and departs in others”. It shares with the film — but not the original book — a detailed picture of Max’s background. He is 7, and troubled. His parents are divorced, and his needy mother has an uninspiring boyfriend. Max’s thoughts do not “line up” as they should, but veer and scatter, hiding in the “thicket of his mind”. He is a creature of extremes, feeling “fathomless rage” at his older sister’s unfairness, and primal, howling joy at the freedom of the air and the Moon.

This is the most vivid part of the novel, drawing not primarily on Sendak but on Eggers’ own wild boyhood, and his anger at today’s sanitisation of youth. “In any other era”, the introduction says, “[Max] would be considered a boy. In 2003, he is considered wilful and deranged.” In a brilliant parody of overprotective parenting, Max is chased down the street by a neighbour, who is appalled to see him cycling alone without a helmet: “What are you gonna do to me?” Max asks, frightened by her psychotic zeal. “Keep you safe,” she huffs, “from all this” — indicating the “quiet street of tall elms and oaks, ending in a cul-de-sac”.

After inflicting, in his mother’s dreaded phrase, “permanent damage” on his home, Max escapes, finds a boat and sets sail. When Max reaches the island, Sendak’s illustrations are invoked in the “barbed and crosshatched vines”, and the half-comic, half-sinister monsters, who “all looked different, as humans do”. But then, of course, we need to get to know the wild things, who have everyday names, like Judith, and speak in a wisecracking sitcom-ese: “We just got caught up in the moment”; “Your voice is one I don’t need to hear right now.” This is deftly done, and, initially, funny. But Eggers makes the monsters more obviously different parts of Max’s psyche, losing much of Sendak’s suggestive power. And as Max engages them in a series of activities — a rumpus, a procession, a war — the events become aimless and circular, and the voices begin to grate.

In the end, the original template proves too dominating, too restrictive. Wild Things is at its best when it leaves Sendak behind and sails into Eggers’ own Land of Lost Boys: a place he knows like the back of his hand.

The Wild Things by Dave Eggers (Hamish Hamilton, £14.99; Buy this book; 281pp)

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