Freddy and the Perilous Adventure by Walter R. Brooks
My rating: 4 of 5 stars An Amusing Pro-Animal, Feminist Romp in and below the Blue Empyrean Freddy and the Perilous Adventure (1942), the 9th entry in Walter R. Brooks' 26-book Freddy the Pig series, is a fun book. It begins when Freddy, clever detective, natural poet, and pig of many disguises and interests, is tricked into going up in a hot air balloon by Mr. Golcher, a sour-faced, thin man of business who refers to himself as "Golcher" and cheats people out of money and then dares them to take him to court. Mr. Golcher tricks Freddy by asking him to make a patriotic speech at a 4th of July event to attract a bigger crowd and then revealing that the pig will (of course) also have to go up in the balloon. Not the bravest of pigs, Freddy reluctantly realizes he can't back out: "Oh dear, I wish I wasn't such a fearless character." There's nothing for it but for him to put on his "intrepid-pig-who-scoffs-at-peril" and his "pig-who-is-about-to-go-up-in-a-balloon-and-thinks-nothing-of-it" expressions and get in the balloon, which is, after all only to go straight up and come straight down after a brief ascension. Moreover, Freddy will be accompanied by the white duck sisters Emma and Alice, who'd like a little adventure, as well as by Mr. and Mrs. Webb, the Bean farm's spider couple, who'd like a new point of view. Nothing goes as planned. First, just before the pig is called on to make his speech, he chomps on a large piece of pulled candy made by the prisoners of the Centerboro jail, gluing his upper and lower teeth shut, so all he can say is, "Mmmmmmmmmmm," displeasing the crowd (isn't Freddy one of Mr. Bean's famous talking animals?). Second, a tangled valve cord prevents Freddy from bringing the balloon back to earth as scheduled, and when it's blown out of sight Mr. Gulcher accuses him of stealing the thing! The main plot relates the flight of the balloon and Freddy's attempts to avoid being arrested for theft and to clear his name. In this Freddy is aided by his animal and human friends in Boomschmidt's Colossal and Unparalleled Circus and by Breckenridge, an eagle of high-flown diction ("Welcome, oh pig, to the starry upper spaces of the blue empyrean"), and hindered by the man with the black moustache and his dirty-faced son and by Mr. Gulcher, who wants Freddy's farmer friend and father-figure Mr. Bean to pay for the balloon and assorted "damages" and lost revenue caused by the pig. One of the best parts of this novel is its secondary plot concerning the relationship between Alice and Emma and their Uncle Wesley. The charlatan male chauvinist duck so tyrannized his admiring and retiring nieces that a few years ago some of the Bean animals secretly kidnapped him and got an eagle to dump him in the next county. The obedient sister ducks were so long under the sway of their uncle, who instilled in them the belief that they must be ladylike at all times, never going anywhere or doing anything fun and deferring to his judgment in all things, "that even after his mysterious disappearance and freedom from his tyranny they continued to quack his praises and to do as they thought he would approve." Their gradual growth away from the influence of Uncle Wesley begins when they decide to accompany Freddy in the balloon. At one point Mrs. Webb (the spider) tells her husband, "If you got all swelled up like Wesley, and started telling me everything I did was wrong, I'd just quietly drop you overboard some night when we were sailing along in the balloon." And later Rudy the squirrel gives Emma and Alice a revealing angle on their uncle: "I know his kind. Regular tyrant around the house with his women folks, but as meek as Moses out around town." When considering this novel and Freddy the Politician (1939), in which Mrs. Wiggins runs for president of the First Animal Republic after being told, "a cow's place is in the home," it becomes apparent that Brooks was a proto-feminist. Another thing I like about this book is its anti-cruelty to animals thrust. As in most of the other books in the series I've read, Brooks appropriately punishes or rewards people who abuse animals and people who are kind to them. The animals of Mr. Boomschmidt's circus are uncaged, help him run the circus, and help him teach a good lesson to a boy who's cruel to animals: "You know what it is like now to be helpless. I hope you'll remember it." Like the other Freddy books, this one is full of humor, from witty lines about animal and/or human behavior, like "That's a cat all over. Let him think you don't want him to do something, and he's crazy to do it," to comedic situations, like when Freddy tries to stand motionless in a field with his arms outstretched like a scarecrow to avoid drawing the attention of a couple of policemen, while a fly called Zero tries to make him sneeze. One disappointing thing in the novel is that only about 48 of its 244 pages consist of Freddy flying in the balloon, and apart from chapter 14, when he and Mr. Gulcher and some mice parachutists briefly go up in it, from Chapter 7 through Chapter 17 (the last one), Freddy is firmly on the earth, struggling to prove his innocence. The action in the air is exciting and impressive, as when the eagle Breckenridge joins the ballooning animals for some sandwiches, or as when Mr. Webb tells Freddy to stop worrying about being blown away and enjoy what must be "one of the finest views a pig ever set eyes on." By contrast, the action on the ground is often funny, but somewhat repetitive (Freddy wrestles Mr. Golcher twice and runs into some suspicious policemen twice). Finally, both children and adults should enjoy this book and get much nourishment from it, especially people who like witty and unpredictable talking animal stories with some thematic heft. It was the first Freddy book I read as a boy and holds up well after 45 years. View all my reviews
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
Jefferson Peters
This blog is for book reviews. Please feel free to comment on any of the reviews! Categories
All
Archives
May 2024
Jefferson's books
by Sabaa Tahir
A Young Adult Epic Fantasy with Lots of Violence & Romance
Elias is an elite Martial soldier, Laia a naïve Scholar slave. As they alternate telling their stories (in trendy Young Adult first person, present tense narration), we soon rea...
"It must be due to some fault in ourselves"--
George Orwell's Animal Farm (1945) is an anti-totalitarian-communist allegory in which the exploited animals of the Manor Farm kick Farmer Jones out and set about running the farm. At first...
by Lu Xun
Perfect Stories of Life in Early 20th Century China
Chinese Classic Stories (1998) by Xun Lu is an excellent collection of seven short stories by perhaps the most important 20th century Chinese writer of fiction. Lu Xun (1881-1936) stu...
Fine Writing, Great Characters, Immersive World
The Surgeon's Mate (1980) is the 7th novel in Patrick O'Brian's addicting series of age of sail novels about the lives, loves, and careers of the British navy captain Jack Aubrey and the ...
An Overwritten, Oddly Compelling Gothic Father
Matthew Lewis' notorious and influential Gothic novel The Monk (1796) takes place during the heyday of the Spanish Inquisition. Ambrosio, the monk/friar/abbot/idol of Madrid, is nicknamed ...
|
My Fukuoka University