Book Footle: The Last Resort

“One lazy grey afternoon, as I was sitting in my studio, my imagination, apparently angry at being ignored, took a holiday – and never returned.”

Such is J. Patrick Lewis’s introduction to one of most exceptionally lyrical, beautiful and complex books I have ever come across… and it’s a picture book for children.

Roberto Innocenti tells, through his stunningly simple and evocative illustrations, a tale of the journey to reclaim lost inspiration. In doing so, he stumbles across a peculiar seaside hotel, The Last Resort, where a motley crew of characters is stumbling through life. He observes them: the invalid girl, the mysterious stranger digging on the beach, the woman muttering her poetry along the shore, and wonders at them. All seem familiar and yet he has not met a single one before… but you might have.

Taking a random sample from Lewis’s accompanying text, in all its haunting beauty:

“In the breezy hours after lunch, blues and whites quilted the sky. Sunlight fastened itself to the shore and would not let go. In her tented wicker sunscreen, the fragile young lady tired the sun with reading. Curiosity caught me up, and I stole a glance at the book she held, but could only make out The Little Me-------.”

Sound familiar? She should. You may well not have come across every character (some are fictional, some real) in The Last Resort, but a few should certainly sound like old friends. Roberto’s wonderful figurative journey takes him past the favourite haunt of imagination as it gallivants around, picking up threads… the memory of beloved characters and stories. Anyone who has ever written anything creatively will know that reading well helps in writing well, and Innocenti has explored in this book the very heart of the creative process. He has reached into his mind to discover how it is that he is inspired and produced this gem of a metaphorical tale for what is happening in that elusive “inner eye”.

At every turn, Roberto meets new and interesting people, and at the end of the book, these are listed in a mini character-glossary. We are invited to think of other people these descriptions might fit. We do not have to accept that they are the person Innocenti was thinking of when he told the story; in one case he concedes that a character is a mixture of a Zane Grey cowboy and The Count Of Monte Cristo’s Edmond Dantes.

The list of characters is illustrious indeed. Not wishing to give away all of them, I shall say that the ones I recognised, apart from the two mentioned above, were the fisherboy, the white whale, the black-clad poet and the peg-legged pirate. I was rather excited to find Antoine de Saint-Exupery and Peter Lorre nestled in the throng… and there are still more to discover and decipher, from Cervantes to Calvino... and that's not even the half of it.

Leaving aside the excitement of familiarity and such a deliciously appealing concept, the book is itself a pleasure to read because of the sumptuousness of its prose and its appearance. This is not a book young children could read by themselves, and I wondered to myself whether it was quite deliberately intended to be the kind of book children got to know as a friend before they understood it. There is complex vocabulary and a not particularly coherent structure or content, with no discernable (or at least straightforward) plot and random verse thrown in for good measure. The section quoted above is probably one of the more naturally readable, but I would urge you not to be put off by the poetic meanderings of the text. This is quite a long picture book, almost 50 pages in all, but there are not vast reams of text on each page, and perseverance is rewarded generously.

In fact, probably the best introduction to this book would be to ask a child to tell the story from the illustrations, and in many ways I think that would be true to the spirit of the book; allow inspiration and imagination to free flow and then link it to the imagination and inspiration of others: the two will then feed off one another. Lingering over the illustrations isn’t just recommended, it’s impossible to resist.

The front cover drags you in first, it’s toppling Last Resort shown in strips between the writing at various stages of Roberto’s journey. The images within are only more fabulous developments of the same. The illustrations reminded me of a number of things… Trestle Theatre Company’s bulbous masks were evoked by the simple appealing roundness of Roberto and Mr Grey Greyish, the waves on the beach looked to me like Japanese seasonal prints (the little mermaid seems to have an expression that is reminiscent of anime, too), there are hints sometimes of Toulouse-Lautrec and the kind of wonderful detail we expect to see in picture books from Michael Foreman and Maurice Sendak (Where The Wild Things Are). Innocenti is quite incredible, and his deftly comic touch (a slight daftness about the wide-eyed Robert, the dashboard display that is pasted across the image of the “spider-lightning night”) is wonderfully appealing.

The gorgeous presentation doesn’t hurt either: various sizes of the elegant green-grey font, different size and layout of images from cartoon strip boxes to a full two-pager, all within the confines of an elegantly tall, thin A4 volume.

Lewis has matched Innocenti’s efforts so perfectly that within a few seconds of idly browsing this book in Blackwells I was standing at the counter, paying the extraordinary sum of £12.99 for this hardback rendering.

When it comes to exciting children with a book, it’s all in the presentation. I certainly wouldn’t give this to a young child and expect them to know what to do with it, but it would be a stunning stimulus for drawing out interesting ideas: Who is this? Why? What will they do next? In my teaching days, I wouldn't have read this to my Year 3 class en masse, but a few of them could have done fascinating character work based on the images. For older children, it could promote excellent development of vocabulary, and introduce them to a range of writing styles. I found myself having to teach the “beginning-middle-end” style of story writing, and this book will help blur that boundary so that writing is less formulaic and more flowing. Most importantly this book is eminently suitable and, I would argue, necessary for adults, especially anyone who believes that they have any sort of creative streak…

This is a children’s book, and yet it isn’t. It’s very simple, and yet alarmingly complex. It’s a mystery and a work of art and I absolutely fell head over heels in love with it.