The Prism Tree

by Kate Andrew, Chris Riddell

Paperback

First published June 21, 1990

Reviews

[Capn · Rating 4 out of 5]

One for the pun-hungry fans of The Phantom Tollbooth, this can-be-read-as-a-standalone sequel to Beyond the Rolling River is also a treat for admirers of Chris Riddell. I picked it up on a whim from The Children's Bookshop (Hay-on-Wye), and was at first immediately annoyed that even the back cover doesn't specify that this is a "book 2" situation:

"All cats are grey at night," said Slubblejum, leader of the nethercats. "Well, if we cut down that old Prism Tree, there will be no more colours in the world. Just imagine it - the nethercats will just be darker shadows in a shadowy world, and we'll soon be top dogs!"

When Toby and his chameleon friend Hardly Visible overhear Slubblejum's terrible plot, they know they have to reach the Prism Tree before the nethercats - but they are prisoners on the nethercats' ship . . .

You can read more about Toby and the nethercat Slubblejum in Beyond the Rolling River.

Slimy HarperCollins, deliberately obscuring that this is a sequel... I'll not forgive them (and their shareholders) for what they've done to OpenLibrary and Internet Archive (read about that here - link to the Wikipedia article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hachett... ). So I'm almost strictly sticking to buying used books from now on. Not a spare cent from me, Hachette (a hatchet to your profit margins, a plague on your publishing houses), HarperCollins (..I gave up trying to think of a Lions-related burn..), Wiley (douchebags - had issues with your textbooks in my school days, you overpriced jags), and Penguin (waddle off elsewhere, you fishy gits).

Anyhoo, greedy major publishers aside, this was a good read! I didn't like Slubblejum's propensity towards misquoted adages. I remember having the same problem with Archie comics - there was a Josie and the Pussycats gag with Melody (the dumb silver-blonde one, anyway) who was constantly tacking the wrong conclusion onto well-known idioms, adages, proverbs, etc. Only here's the problem - when I was twelve, I didn't know how they were meant to go. I could see the joke, and sort of smirk at it, but it wasn't very funny without the full knowledge of just how wrong she was. And I still remember it, because I was usually pretty well informed in comparison to my peers, and I wondered if anyone in the target age range would get those references...

Well, it's the same with this. I'm in my 40s now, and I still don't know the original sayings in a large chunk of Slubblejum's garbled ones. I can tell they're wrong, but... well, maybe it is just me and a huge gap in my knowledge. Here are some examples from the book:

"After all, you can't make an omelette if you keep all your eggs in one basket."
"Look after the roundabouts, and the swings will take care of themselves."
"Look before you leap if you want to keep your head above water."
"Idle hands spoil the broth, you know."

There are many more sprinkled throughout, but that's just the first 19 pages.

Fortunately, Hardly Visible's limericks are delightful, and the rhyming here - very little that is jarring to non-British English speaker's ears. Which makes for a change (for example, in Agent Llama, "llama" rhymes with "Palmer"... allegedly; and The Runaway Pea has "force" and "sauce" paired up as a rhyming couplet... just, no. These words don't rhyme. It's painful!). The rhymes are silly, but just the right amount of silly for me, and honestly Hardly Visible was by far my favourite character besides The Toothsayer. (Side note: pretty sure that Kate Andrew could have words with Jane Clarke, author of Neon Leon, who appears to be a copyright violation of Hardly Visible, day-glow tangerine colour and all!).

The Toothsayer lives in China (Cathay, actually). She wears a coolie hat. She's an old woman without teeth. I started to get uncomfortable at this juncture (is this all going to be racist jibes that I just can't stomach? Please no!). Mercifully, my fear was in vain. There is some punny "this sounds vaguely Chinese to me" content, which I don't personally find offensive per se, but I do find about as tasteful as something a drunken elderly uncle would come out with at the Christmas dinner table over his third glass of brandy. The only one I laughed at was the translation of Hardly Visible's name to No See. The Toothsayer is "a wise person who can say 'tooth' in four hundred and thirty-eight languages, and three thousand, nine hundred and ninety-nine dialects". She was funny.

"Glad you speak English - it's one of my favourite languages, though Swahili is good for the finer points of philosophy, and Serbo-Croat is better for swearing. Well, what do you want? HEEL, SHEP!"

(Shep is Small Hairy Earth Pig, her semi-feral pet pig. Shep was pretty amusing, too, come to think of it). I love how her exclamations and swears are all 'tooth' in various languages.

There is all manner of memorable creatures here (a dragon who is what you believe him to be, and a yeti who will do anything for candy), and the creations of The Toothsayer (a Walkie-Talkie: a robot who walks the dog while making chit-chat with the neighbours for you; a digital quartz-powered clockwork Nightingale who sings Jingle Bells; and Flee-Powder). There are emperors and arrogant court officials, and of course dastardly pirates in the form of the Nethercats (aquatic (scaled) felines). And all of this unfolded when poor Toby took a rowboat out in the Lake District, too.

I'm looking forward to reading the first book in this series, Beyond the Rolling River, whenever my next WOB order arrives.