Way back in January I expressed great excitement at the arrival of a brand new, officially authorized Winnie the Pooh installment, and promised to gush and/or rant about it here on Vernacular as soon as I was able.

Well, since Return to the Hundred Acre Wood (by David Benidictus “in the tradition of A. A. Milne”) was officially released on Monday, now seems like as good a time as any:

It ain’t great.

Now, I should point out at this point that my acquaintance with the original Pooh books was largely via the medium of mildly abridged audio tapes produced by the BBC, so it’s possible that the numerous quibbles I have with Benedictus’s text are in fact fond and intentional homages to Milne’s own, imperfect prose — prose that the BBC judiciously edited in abridging it.

On the other hand, I have also read the unabridged Milne a couple of times, and never remember being as jarred by it as I frequently found myself while reading through Benedictus. Because the stories in the new Pooh are, well… bad stories. They have odd, malformed arcs, and subplots that go nowhere, and unsatisfying deus ex machina resolutions, a lot of the time, that I just don’t think Milne could ever have abided. There was a beautiful simplicity to, say, Pooh falling victim to his own Heffalump trap, or Eeyore losing and then eventually recovering his tail. The story in which Pooh and Piglet throw together a last-minute birthday present for the dour donkey remains one of the most touching things I’ve ever read. There was a confidence to the way they unfolded, a calm faith that one, simple idea could sustain an entire chapter of Pooh.

And that, I think, is what makes Benedictus shoot himself in the foot; precisely because he wants so earnestly to make his addition to the canon a good one, he sets about his task with a Piglet-like anxiousness and a Tigger-like energy, and so ultimately, each story ends up going all over the place to try and tick off all the boxes of what a Pooh story “should” contain. There’s probably enough material in here for three new Pooh books, really — and good ones, too, because whatever Benedictus’s other problems are, he sure does nail the tone and spirit of the original books — but it’s all crammed together into manic, schizophrenic stories that just don’t work as stories.

But still, as I said, the superficial aspects of the writing leave little to complain about: all those playful, superfluous caps are in exactly the right place, and Piglet says Piglet-like things, and Owl does Owl-like things, and so forth. In that respect, it’s honest-to-God fantastic, and I think Benedictus deserves praise for modulating his voice to that of another author with such precision.

So: if, like me, long for your lost days in the Hundred Acre Wood, I say go out, buy yourself a copy of Return, and enjoy the many, nostalgic smiles that it will doubtless bring; as long as you don’t expect great literature (children’s or otherwise), you won’t be disappointed.

Tags:   Andrew · Book Reviews · fiction · literary tasteNo Comments