No. 62 - The Phantom Tollbooth

Hi everyone, me again. 

I hope you're all doing well in lockdown.

Last week I wrote about 7 ways to keep children busy and learning during lockdown , and I hope some of you found this post useful. 

I've been continuing to keep my eyes peeled for other things, and have something else for you today!

Here is the latest newsletter from Caboodle, the National Book Token  people. There's a children's competition  to win a £10 book token and one for every pupil in their class, just by creating a new design for the book token cards! Worth a try! I would have loved this when I was little!

There's also the annual competition to win £5,000 worth of book tokens for your child's school, plus £100 for the child too! Take a look. 

Another thing that I've found is that the Haynes Motor Museum in Somerset has got some really lovely online activities for kids (and big kids!). There are set for KS1 and KS2, and the 'My Car the Superhero' story writing competition caught my eye as a perfect literacy activity for KS2, especially for the boy's who might need a little more encouragement to get reading and writing! The bonus is that if you post your child's entry on social media and tag Haynes Motor Museum you could win a family ticket to the museum when it opens up again! Ideal! 

And talking of motoring... back to this week's book! The Phantom Tollbooth by Norton Juster. 

Firstly, what a book! The Phantom Tollbooth is just the right amount of bizarre, surreal and down right weird! Yet, it is strangely logical, and disguises a strong moral tale. It makes no sense, yet makes total sense. Confused yet? Me too! 

I'll give you a quick synopsis. The book is about a boy called Milo, who is living life, but not really experiencing it. He is grumpy about everything, bored by school, and can't seem to find much he enjoys doing, despite having all kinds of toys and games. But when he arrives home to find a tollbooth has been delivered to his bedroom, suddenly life starts getting interesting. He hops in his little electric car, pays his toll and crosses into the Kingdom of Wisdom. 

Here he ventures on to Dictionopolis, through the Valley of Sound, amongst other places, to Digitopolis, to rescue the Princesses Rhyme and Reason and help unite the Kingdom of Wisdom once again. It's a literacy and numeracy based didactic, fantasy adventure story! I told you it was an odd one! 

I'm going to be totally honest here and say I was not very keen on reading this book when I started it. It was wordy, and a map at the start of a book always puts me off a bit. I think it comes from not really being into fantasy all that much, and equating the genre with books like The Wizard of Earthsea by Ursula le Guin (which I didn't get on with at all!). So, with some trepidation I opened the book, or selected it (Kindle reading is all have at the moment! Gosh, I miss the library!), and began. 

As I've already said, it was wordy to start with and the action was very fast paced, giving me little time to digest what was going on! However, once Milo settled into his journey things calmed down a bit and I started revelling in the bizarre world Juster had created! 

This book reminded me of lots of different things, of other children's stories, of adult fiction, of pop culture, it has little hints of everything in it. It has often been said that it shares many similarities with Alice in Wonderland, and I can certainly see why! It begins with a bored child, who through either daydreams or magic (i'll let you decide), ventures into another world full of surreal situations and characters. There is also more than a passing resemblance to The Wizard of Oz at occasions. In fact this book reminded me of so many different texts. It obviously has it's roots in classic moral tales, in particular The Pilgrim's Progress, and there is also a likeness to the journeying elements of Tolkein's books. From a magical perspective it reminded me of the Chrestomanci series by Dianna Wynne Jones, of timeslip fiction like Tom's Midnight Garden, and of course The Wizard of Earthsea. It even had hints of the surreal sci-fi classic The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, Roald Dahl's creations, and Maurice Sendak's seminal picture book Where the Wild Things Are. I could go on and on! This book, as self-contained and original as it may seem, is a wonderful melting pot of different genres and can be read in so many different ways depending on what you as the reader find within it's pages. 

Something Juster does so very well in this book is puns and word play. The place names, character names and action all have a meaning, hidden or literal. For example, I particularly enjoyed it when Milo, Tock the Watchdog and the Humbug end up flying through the air to an island called Conclusions; they literally jump to Conclusions! This amused me probably more that it should have done, and there are plenty more of these wordy mind games throughout the story to keep you happy! 

But it wasn't just the places that pleased me, the characters were by far my favourite part of this story.  Here are the one's I'd like to meet!

• The Spelling Bee - literally a giant bee, who spells everything he says out loud! 
• The Dodecahedron - a very weird chap with 12 faces, who wouldn't look out of place in an episode of The Mighty Boosh!

•  The lovely Tock - he's a watchdog, so of course, he has a massive clock stuck to his side (see cover picture at the start of this post)!
•  Faintly Macabre, the not-so-wicked Which - She's not a Witch, but a Which! She used to choose which words could be used for what occasions, which ones were spoken, and which ones were written down. Quite an important job really! 
• Kakofonous A. Dischord, Doctor of Dissonance - he's a mad professor who collects sounds, especially weird ones! He asks Milo "Have you ever heard a blindfolded octopus unwrap a cellophane-covered bathtub?" I rest my case!

So, as you can see the inhabitants of the Kingdom of Wisdom are quite something! But underneath all this madness and wordplay there is a valuable tale to be found in this book. It may seem like a pointless romp through a surrealist's dictionary, but in fact it's a essay on education, childhood and learning. Milo begins the story fed up with his life, he doesn't see the point in learning, of going to school, of being taught what he considers to be useless information. He can't see any Rhyme or Reason to it! The Kingdom of Wisdom is a metaphor for Milo's relationship with learning, it's broken, at war with itself. In order to understand education as a whole, as an important activity, Milo must discover and restore both it's Rhyme and it's Reason, which in the story manifest themselves as two beautiful princesses. Once reunited with their Kingdom, the world makes a lot more sense. By the end of his adventures Milo has a greater understanding of why learning is so important, and has had his eyes opened to the joys of the world around him. He appreciates the power of nature, the sounds all around him, he sees merit in being creative, of making things, of using his imagination. Just by looking around his bedroom he can see a hundred things to do; things that he would have ignored before his trip through the Phantom Tollbooth. It is a message of enlightenment at it's best. Totally hidden, yet incredibly potent. 

Thanks for reading, L x

Next up, Tom's Midnight Garden by Philippa Pearce.