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Puss in Boots
by Philip Pullman / Ian Beck, illus.

I'm not impressed.

It's been a long time since Philip Pullman made a splash with His Dark Materials and its associated works. It has been nearly as long as Pullman gave his readers other great pieces of work, such as Clockwork and The Scarecrow and His Servant. Given the span of time that has passed since the author last wowed us, maybe it's time to reclassify Pullman, not as a star but as a comet--a body that shone brightly for a while, but eventually disappeared from the literary sky, perhaps never to return again.

It's not that this version of Puss in Boots is bad; Pullman does a serviceable job of presenting the traditional story; there are no passages in his tale that make the reader want to throw the book across the room or anything like that. But Pullman expands upon Charles Perrault's tale, including scenes with a hermit and some ghouls which, frankly, don't particularly add anything special to the story.

Pullman's Puss in Boots

Indeed, one might fairly say that those passages unwittingly detract from the tale, since they make the quest by Puss and his master Jacques into something more helpful and noble than the traditional story ever aspires to tell. Part of the charm of the original fairy tale is that Puss is a scamp, and he uses his wits to perform trickery to get his boy a castle and a princess's hand in marriage. After all, in the "real world" of the fairy tale, a poor common boy like Jacques could never legitimately rise above his station to claim riches and royalty--it would take the almost divine cleverness of his resourceful cat to turn his world upside down. Pullman instead makes Jacques' rise almost a reward for virtue--something that's a little hard to accept from a writer as, shall way say, jaundiced as Pullman often is. Puss and Jacques helping the hermit and ghouls may make for a "nice" story for modern day, wussified child readers, but it hardly fits with the traditional reading of the tale.

A bigger part of the problem may lie not with Pullman's text, but with his illustrator's pictures. Ian Beck's illustrations are fine, as far as your typical children's picture book may go--but they come across as mere doodles when compared with the gorgeous illustrations of a much better telling of this tale: Fred Marcellino's beautiful images in his rendering of Perrault's classic version of Puss. Marcellino's book came out a full decade before the Pullman/Beck pairing, and a side by side comparison does nothing for the reader's appreciation of the latter work. This book may not, in fact, be a collaboration; it's possible that Beck is an illustrator who was brought to the project by the publisher, not by Pullman's choice (though an author of Pullman's stature, by that point, should have had some say over the assignment). Whether or not the author made the decision, the marriage of a lesser version of the tale with somewhat pedestrian illustrations makes the overall book something short of what it could have been.

A lot of this comes back to Pullman, and the fact that, as a long-time fan, this was the only book I could find with his name on it that I had not already read. (Not counting the Sally Lockhart mysteries; I'm not interested in mystery writing as a rule, especially when I know an author do better than such paint-by-numbers literature.) And this book is already 15 years old. It's been a good long while since Pullman produced a new book that was really worth a reader's time and attention--especially coming off the disaster that was The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ--and this Puss in Boots throws another log onto the fire that seems to be consuming the notion of Pullman as an important writer.

Perhaps the film version of The Golden Compass provided Pullman with enough "Fuck you" money that he no longer needs to produce good, original works. If true, fair enough. But there's a corollary that goes along with that notion: at a certain point, Pullman's readers no longer need to pay any attention to see if he ever gets it going again. The evidence seems to be saying we've already past that point.