More than anything else, Abel’s Island is a tale about love enduring through peril. It is also about the beauty of solitude. Over the course of its 119 pages, it tells the story of Abelard Hassam de Chirico Flint of the Mossville Flints, a foppish and well–to-do young mouse of inherited fortune, who gets marooned on an island after being swept away in a storm, while chasing after the windblown scarf of his beloved wife, Amanda.
The story traces the process of self revelation, Abel goes through during his battle for survival on the island. If this was a Hollywood elevator pitch, we’d call it Robinson Crusoe meets Stuart Little.
Abel’s initially futile attempts at escape, his gradual creation of a viable life style on the island and – most of all, the physical and mental challenges that isolation imposes upon him, and on his love of Amanda – are all beautifully rendered. Gradually, Abel gets stripped of the veneer of decadent civilization and is gradually put in touch with the wilder, more creative mouse who lies within.
Abel survives loneliness, self doubt, hallucinatory illness, physical danger – there is a marvellous series of encounters with a murderous owl – and much more besides.
The story is set in 1907, the year of Steig’s birth. As in all of his other books, Steig is uncompromising in his use of language. Children aged 9-12 should have no trouble reading it themselves, but one of the beauties of reading any Steig book aloud to children lies in the music of the words he likes to deploy. Equinoctial, drubbing, caromed, cantata, skedaddled, flotsam, mundane, verdure, parasol, fusty, opal, suspenders and constellations all crop up within the first 50 pages alone.
I’ve picked three brief episodes from the book, as evidence of its virtues. On page 81, Abel is locked in the icy isolation of the home he has fashioned in a hollow log, as his refuge from the fierce depths of winter:
“He became somnolent in his cold cocoon…It began to seem as if it had always been winter, and that there was nothing else, just a vague awareness to make note of the fact. The universe was a dreary place, asleep, cold all the way to infinity and the wind was a separate thing, not part of the winter, but a lost, unloved soul screaming and moaning and rushing about, looking for a place to rest and reckon up its woes…”
Somnolent in his cold cocoon? That’s magic. Or, take this early passage when self-doubt first enters the frame – and it begins to dawn on Abel that his rescue is not guaranteed, and that any escape is not likely to happen anytime soon:
Was it just an accident that he was here on this uninhabited island? Abel began to wonder. Was he being singled out for some reason, was he being tested? If so, why? Didn’t it prove his worth that such a one as Amanda loved him?
Did it? Why did Amanda love him? He wasn’t all that handsome, was he? And he had no particular accomplishments. What sort of mouse was he? Wasn’t he really a snob, a fop, and frivolous on serious occasions, as she had once told him during a quarrel? He had acted silly even at his own wedding, grinning during the solemnities, clowning when cutting the cake. What made him act the way he did?
Over the next few weeks and months, fate and circumstance give Abel plenty of opportunities to find answers to those sort of questions. Life keeps on testing him. Sometimes this is through the physical hardship of seasonal changes to the weather, sometimes through his own foolishness, sometimes through the indifferent violence of the natural world. Enter, the dispassionately murderous owl:
Abel also kept busy at taking it easy. Only when taking it easy, he’d learned, could one properly do one’s wondering. One night while he was resting under the stars and enjoying the noise of the river and of the November wind, a winged shadow suddenly hung over him, blacking out the stars at which he’d been gazing. Instinct brought him to his feet and sent him diving into the crevice between two rocks. In mute terror he crouched in the crevice while the owl, with grappling talons, tried to fish him out….It took off at last, and perched in a tree.
Abel could see the dark shape of the owl in the branches above, and the vibrating stars beyond. Where had this trespasser come from? Why? Had it perhaps seen Abel’s signals? He’d been astounded by the stillness with which it had dropped from the sky. There’d been no beat, no ruffle, of wings. This was bone-chilling, to be approached so noiselessly by a winged assassin….
This use of rhetorical questions – to set up a chatty dialogue with his child readers – is a regular device in Steig’s books. They serve to express the things he wishes to share with children, and to challenge them. In Amos and Boris for instance, the tiny mouse Amos falls off a boat in the middle of a reverie under the stars, and while adrift, some disturbing possibilities enter his mind:
He began to wonder what it would be like to drown. Would it take very long? Would it feel just awful? Would his soul go to heaven? Would there be other mice there?
As several reviewers of that book noted, these are interesting questions to pose to a child. In Sylvester and the Magic Pebble, the reader is asked to tackle a fairly chilling metaphor of parental separation. Sylvester the donkey has gone missing. In fact, he has been turned into a rock on which his grieving parents end up having a picnic, and he can only be rescued from his eternal prison in the unlikely event that his parents happen to wish him out of it, right then and there. Sylvester feels highly anxious. So does the reader.
All of this is executed, one hastens to add, with the lightest of touches. Among children’s writers, only E.B. White can match Steig for the compassion, wit and graceful intelligence that he brings to bear. Abel’s battles with the owl for instance, and the pagan state to which it reduces him – at one point he resorts to sympathetic magic – provide some of the book’s most amusing passages. As the months go by, Abel also discovers a talent for working wet clay into forms that offer him the satisfactions of art:
The red clay from which he had fashioned pots and dishes inspired him to try his hand at making something just for its own sake, something beautiful. He made a life size statue of Amanda. Though it didn’t really resemble her, it did look like a female mouse. He was amazed at what he had wrought. Good or bad, it was sculpture, it was art. He tried again and again, profiting from his mistakes, and finally he felt he had a likeness of his wife real enough to embrace.
Next he made statues of his dear, indulgent mother, from whose wealth his own income came, and of his various brothers and sisters, and he stood them all outside his log, where he could see them from the windows.
Another day he did his father. Him he carved in tough wood, fiercely gnawing the forms out with his teeth, He stood back often to study the results of his gnawing, and at last felt he had captured the proud, stern, aloof, strong, honest look of his male parent. He stood this statue next to his mother….
I won’t spoil the resolution of this story, or reveal the dangers that Abel faces, virtually right up to the finale. Safe to say, this is a love story from beginning to end.
The Life
Steig died in 2002, at the age of 95. He was the son of Polish migrants: his father a painter, his mother a seamstress, and both of them old school socialists. He began writing children’s books only in his 60s, after two successful careers as a New Yorker cartoonist (he drew 117 covers for that magazine) and as a sculptor. In Abel’s Island, finding his true vocation as a sculptor turns out to be just one of the many self-discoveries experienced by our hero. This “fortune teller and turkey” cartoon is a favourite among his New Yorker contributions.
These days, Steig is remembered mainly for the fact that one of his later books (called Shrek) provided the inspiration for a couple of terrible, badly drawn but highly profitable movies. Another Shrek movie is due later this year. (Not a single line from his book survived into the movie versions.) Steig’s verdict on the initial film was typically benign: ‘It was vulgar. It was offensive. And I loved it.’
Down the years, as Lela Olszewksi pointed out in her review, not everyone has been so generous about some of the content in Abel’s Island. At one point in the narrative, our rodent hero manages to ferment some wild berries with dizzyingly happy results: “He drank large draughts of his wine and ran about everywhere like a wild animal, shouting and yodelling.” In Clay County, Florida in 1990, this episode was treated as a violation of the school district’s substance abuse policy, and the book was banned. Abel survived everything else, but not the censors in the Sunshine State.
In his personal life, Steig never had much time for such conventions. He was married four times and, for a while, deeply immersed himself in Reichian analysis. Despair, Steig recognized, was a real and ever-present option. There is a famous New Yorker cartoon series drawn by Steig called Woe, that includes one of a man sitting in front of a typewriter with his head in his hands. Yet Steig also believed that with the right amount of optimistic energy, one could prevail.
In other words, Steig seems to have taken a path through life very similar to the one pursued to the max by the irrepressible canine hero of his book Dominic. Let me explain. At the very start of Dominic’s journey, the noble and high-spirited hound is offered a choice in life by a witch alligator that he meets by the roadside. As she says:
“That road there on the right goes nowhere. There’s not a bit of magic up that road, no adventure, no surprise, nothing to discover or wonder at. Even the scenery is humdrum. You’d soon grow much too introspective. You’d take to daydreaming and tail-twiddling, get absent-minded and lazy, forget where you are and what you’re about, sleep more than one should, and be wretchedly bored.
Furthermore, after a while, you’d reach a dead end and you’d have to come all that dreary way back to right here where we’re standing now, only it wouldn’t be now, it would be woefully wasted time later.”
But wait, there’s more :
“Now this road, the one on the left,” she said, her heavy eyes glowing, “this road keeps right on going, as far as anyone cares to go, and if you take it, believe me, you’ll never find yourself wondering what you might have missed by not taking the other. Up this road, which looks the same at the beginning, but is really ever so different, things will happen that you could never have guessed at—marvellous, unbelievable things. Up this way is where adventure is. I’m pretty sure I know which way you will go…Dominic thanked her for her good advice and went high –tailing it up the road to the left, the road to adventure….
So should we all.
For this essay, Gordon Campbell is beholden to reviews (and interviews with William Steig) contained in several volumes of the Children’s Literature Review, and to Lela Ozsewski’s review of Abel’s Island.
Previously : The Moomins by Tove Jansson; Goodnight Moon by Margaret Wise Brown; Badgers Parting Gifts by Susan Varley; The Incredible Journey by Sheila Burnford; Harriet The Spy by Louise Fitzhugh; The Indian in The Cupboard by Lynne Reid Banks; The Dark Is Rising by Susan Cooper; The True Confessions of Charlotte Doyle, by Avi