The Garden Behind The Moon by Howard Pyle
My rating: 5 of 5 stars A Beautiful, Sweet, and Strange Fairy Tale Howard Pyle's The Garden Behind the Moon: A Real Story of the Moon-Angel (1895) is an allegorical fairy tale about death, life, love, imagination, and growing up. The narrator tells the "true" story of a boy called David who is mocked and ostracized by the other children in his village for being a "moon-calf" simpleton. With help from the village idiot, the cobbler Hans Krout, David walks the moon-path over the sea, "stretching from the moon to the earth, and from the earth to the moon, as bright as silver and gold, and as straight and smooth as a turnpike road." Then he encounters the House-in-the-moon (wherein much polishing of stars goes on), the Man-in-the-moon (a wise, pipe-smoking, silvery-wrinkle faced old man), the Moon-Angel (a sublime and scary being who likes to make old things new), and the Garden Behind the Moon (wherein happy—dead—children play free from care). The story also involves a princess (whose birth was a gift from the Moon-Angel with a cost), a little old lady with a red petticoat (who washes people's dirty souls and hangs them out to dry like snow white sheets on a line), a Black Horse with white wings (from "those lofty altitudes of the still blue heavens where he forever circles, dips, hovers in airy and ambient brightness"), and an impossible quest to attempt to steal the Wonder-box and Know-All Book from the Iron Man in his Iron Castle and to bring them back to "the brown earth" where they belong. The story features much wisdom, often of a paradoxical nature: it's better to see things from the inside than from the outside; it's necessary to feel the greatest sorrow to be able to experience the greatest joy; "sometimes there is more solid truth in a little nonsense than in a whole peck of potatoes"; and in matters of the fantastic, the harder you try to achieve something the more you fail, the more you try to remember something the more you forget it, and the more you try to tell something the more your speech disintegrates. Pyle reveals an appealing humility, valuing the manual and humble labor of shoe making more than his own writing and illustrating: "to this day I believe it takes more wits to cobble a pair of shoes than to write a big book, and more cleverness to make a good wax-end than to draw a picture with a lead-pencil." Furthermore, despite glorifying the white male hero, Pyle's book has interesting things to say about gender (e.g., Eve and Adam are very different than Adam and Eve) and race (e.g., "For there is as much joy and gladness over one poor black woman who enters into that place as there is over the whitest empress who ever walked the earth of Christendom"). Pyle writes much sublime description, like this: "The Black Horse gave a great neigh like the peal of a trumpet. Clashing his hoofs upon the rocks, he spread his wonderful white wings, and, leaping into the air, flew clapping and thundering away—away—away—now circling and soaring in upward spiral flight, until he became a spot upon the sky—twinkled—was lost—was there was gone." He also writes some scary description, like this: "Then he [the Iron Man] sat down to the table and began to eat and drink, carving the meat with the iron knife as long as a scythe, and thrusting it into his mouth with the fork as large as a pitch fork, and drinking great draughts of ale out of the huge goblet. The ale hissed and sputtered as it went down his iron throat, and a white cloud of steam came out of his nostrils. " Although the story looks forward to adult love ("When we grow up we shall be married"), Pyle wrote it after the death of his young son, and it is quite moving to imagine him trying to come to terms with his loss by writing this fantasy ("the more sad the outside, the more beautiful almost always is the inside") and to get the reader to begin imagining his or her own death: "You yourself will see how it is some day, for everybody looks out of a moon window sooner or later, and this is not all nonsense either." Anyone who likes Pyle's more famous and accessible books should give this one a try to round out their understanding of the great author and illustrator. As Perry Nodelman said about The Garden Behind the Moon, it "seems to be as dreamy, as vague, and as mystical as Men of Iron and The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood are plain and practical—as 'sweet and thin and clear' as the other books are loud and boisterous." And anyone who likes allegorical fairy tales like At the Back of the North Wind or Water-Babies should try this one. Although there is a version sold on audible.com, I found the reader's voice in the sample too syrupy, and preferred the more straightforward reading available on LibriVox.com. (But if you listen rather than read, you should seek out Pyle's amazing illustrations online.) However you may read or listen to The Garden Behind the Moon, I recommend Pyle's ethereal and sensual, sad and joyful, sentimental and severe story. View all my reviews
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