Freddy and Mr. Camphor by Walter Rollin Brooks
My rating: 3 of 5 stars Freddy the Caretaker, Rat Art Critics, Patriotic Insects, the Man with the Black Mustache and his Dirty Faced Boy, a Rich Man and His Butler, and Proverbs “It’s because you’re too fat,” said Jinx, the cat. “Golly, it makes me hot just to look at you, pig, sitting there grunting and mopping your face.” Freddy the Pig wants to escape a hot spring and his duties as Editor of the Bean Home News and President of the First Animal Bank, so he leaves the Bean farm for a cushy summer job as caretaker of the wealthy Mr. Camphor’s estate: for keeping an eye on the place, Freddy will get fifty dollars, meals, and lodging in a well-appointed houseboat on the lake. Furthermore, as Mr. Camphor and his butler Bannister hope to write a book disproving proverbs like “a rolling stone gathers no moss,” the rich man will pay Freddy $10.00 for every saying he can test by experiment. This leads to humorous moments like when Mr. Camphor complains, “Money is the root of all evil,” only to have Bannister point out, “If you really believed money were the root of all evil, sir, you’d get rid of all your money!” It all goes well for caretaker Freddy, lounging on Mr. Camphor’s houseboat (“I’m a lucky pig!”), until some old antagonists from previous books show up. Simon the rat and his clan have moved into Mr. Camphor’s mansion and don’t take kindly to his attic-stored “family” portraits (“Why, it’s our artistic duty to chew ’em up”), while the Man with the Black Mustache and the Dirty Faced Boy drive noisily in and try to muscle (and frame) Freddy out of his job (“It needs a man around the place”). A WWII subplot runs through this eleventh of Walter R. Brooks’ Freddy the Pig books, Freddy and Mr. Camphor (1944). As the patrons of the First Animal Bank are withdrawing all their money to invest in government war savings stamps, the spider Mr. Webb is holding patriotic mass meetings to persuade insects to refrain from eating farm vegetables for the duration of the war: “we are still all good Americans… Are we not?” Threatening the spider’s campaign is an obnoxious horsefly called Zero who points out that spiders don’t eat vegetables and scoffs at the patriotic agenda. A few other Freddy books also reveal their WWII era provenance, but less earnestly and intrusively than this one. The fate of Zero after losing a political debate (in which “calling names is entirely permissible”) is disturbing because the novel approves of it. Most villains in Freddy books, from needlessly destructive rats to animal-hating robbers, are defeated, humiliated, exiled, arrested, and/or reformed. But because Zero (a reference to the Japanese fighter aircraft?) is “unpatriotic,” his epitaph is “So perish all traitors!” And maybe because I dislike patriotism, the busybody Mr. Webb, who spreads his patriotic no-vegetable eating movement from farm to farm, and calls his wife “Mother” (even though they apparently have no children), is irritating, and I found myself unusually not wholly enjoying the novel. The story also has some loose ends. Brooks never explains how Zero became able to spin webs and leaves the proverbs sub-plot unfinished. Luckily, there are plenty of the usual virtues of the Freddy books here: humorous scenes and conversations, concise and vivid descriptions, quirky wisdom, nonsensical animal “facts,” formidable foes, savory friends, and, of course, the protean pig Freddy, who, while serving as Mr. Camphor’s estate caretaker, finds time to don a smock and beret and do a little painting restoration on the side. I love Brooks’ quirky nuggets of wisdom, like “For pigs understand boys pretty well, perhaps because they are so much alike. If fathers and mothers who have trouble with bad boys would consult pigs oftener, they would profit by it.” And his straight-faced animal facts, like “Even a cat cannot see anything in complete darkness, although all cats pretend that they can,” and “Fleas are so nearly invisible that they find it easy to get away with things that wouldn’t be tolerated for a moment in larger creatures.” And his wide range of registers, including Jinx the cat’s demotic English (“Hi, old pig! … We thought the old sausage grinder had got you at last”), Simon the rat’s unctuous English (“Well, well . . . fancy meeting you here, pig! What a small place the world is, to be sure. Well, don’t you recognize me? Haven’t you a warm handshake for your old friend, Simon?”), and Breckenridge the eagle’s “high-flown” English: “Your young friends, with a fortitude out of all proportion to their size, descended by way of the chimney. They found much to criticize in the housekeeping, I am given to understand. But after a prolonged search they discovered large quantities of plunder—much of it merely heaped up in the bathtub. Which indicates quite sufficiently, I feel, the character of this Mr. Winch and his offspring.” By the way, as I’m reading my way through all twenty-six of Brooks’ great, too much forgotten Freddy the Pig books, I realize how much adult targeted verbal humor they have and recall that when I read several of them as a boy, I thought they were serious talking animal adventures and never dreamed they were funny. But now! Brooks was writing children’s novels for adults. Another interesting point in this novel is a minor touch that, I believe, E. B. White took and flew with in Charlotte’s Web: a spider writing English messages in its web! Here it’s Mr. and Mrs. Webb writing signs in their webs announcing the patriotic rallies. Both E. B. White and Brooks worked at The New Yorker, and I’ve been noticing other things from the Freddy books that may have inspired White with his classic children’s novel. The illustrations by Kurt Weise are top notch: monochrome; more realistic than Disney; showing choice moments from the text (like when a troop of fleas attack some pesky rats or like when Freddy dresses in some of Mr. Camphor’s clothes to pass for a burglar). I did notice a few typos in the Kindle version. Anyway, if you can stand the patriotic subplot, this novel should be amusing for you, but Freddy the Detective, Freddy the Politician, and Freddy and the Poppinjay are much better. View all my reviews
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