Two Short Winters

Recently, I read Brian's Winter and The Magician's Elephant back to back. It was enlightening. Both books are middle-grade novels, and shorter than average reads. One is a fierce recognition of the world's beauty and randomness. The other is about grim endurance during a dark, cold season, in which divine rescue appears to be the only hope. Oddly, the uplifting one is by Paulsen. DiCamillo's story, by contrast, reads rather like a Cliff’s Notes version of Mark Helprin’s winter stories for adults and for children. However, this story lacks the depth and allure—and comic touches—of those books.

Brian’s Winter is the sequel/continuance/what-if to Hatchet, which is probably Paulsen’s best known book. The premise is simple. What if, instead of getting rescued from the wilderness at the end of Hatchet, 13-year-old Brian Robeson was forced to continue his solo experience into a Canadian winter? Such an idea raises the stakes for Brian. It will take all his brains, learning, and ingenuity to keep on living in the face of cold, darkness, and hunger. The book doesn’t even cover the whole winter, largely because once Brian figures out how to defeat his main adversaries, hunger and cold, by learning woodcraft-based skills, there’s little else to do but let him meet humans again. The story also ends rather abruptly; that’s my only real beef with the book on a structural level.

The only kids I can imagine loving The Magician’s Elephant are those who are likely already in therapy. That’s not to say it isn’t beautiful and at times moving. But entertaining? Not so much. Ostensibly, it’s the story of a young boy named Peter in search of his lost sister Adele. He receives a hopeful but cryptic message from a fortune teller, telling him that “the elephant will lead him there.” But lest you think this sign leads him on a bold quest, be aware that he instead just goes home to his cold apartment to await further developments.

Would this have gotten anywhere near a printing press if it didn’t have DiCamillo’s name on it? She’s a darling of kids’ lit. Because of Winn-Dixie was sweet. I didn’t actually care for The Tale of Despereaux, but at least that felt like a children’s tale. The Magician’s Elephant, however, feels like a very long prose poem. The language is carefully chosen, and often lovely. The story is structured tidily. Everything falls into place, and we can see it falling, and like the elephant in the beginning, it seems to take a very long time to fall.

There isn’t a lot of text, but characters repeat, and repeat, and repeat the same lines. (Her: “Perhaps you do not understand...” Him: “I intended only lilies!”) A story as short as this should fly by, but this plods. Perhaps that's because most of the characters don't do much. They are certain things, but most of the story is just waiting for it all to come together, which in this case is the announcement by the elephant's owner/jailer that the public can come see her for a day. That finally gets a ball rolling, since it gets all the characters into one location, and everything that could be said to happen happens very quickly after the initial elephant encounter.

While the Elephant's characters chatter and repeat to little effect, the lone protagonist of Brian's Winter learns far more from the turning of his own brain than any of DiCamillo's characters glean from each other. Brian isn’t a dreamer who wanders into the wilderness to find himself. He’s a practical boy who quite literally lands in a bad situation and makes the best of it. He doesn't wait around passively, he waits actively...making warm clothes, hunting for food and scoping out his environment. He's all eyes and ears, and he knows that his perception is what's keeping him alive. Words do nothing for him.

In Magician's Elephant, the story hinges on how characters treat words. Peter feels guilty for his promise to his dying mother that he’ll take care of his sister (who is shortly separated from him). That guilt is what drives him to the fortune teller and ultimately through the story. Similarly, his guardian’s lie (that his little sister died) propels a lot of Peter’s anger once he hears from the fortune teller that she lives. Other characters are a little more complex; the magician claims to not have intended to conjure the elephant, but in his heart, he really did. Thus he feels guilt over the damage the elephant created, yet he can’t tell the truth or he’ll be punished further. Brian'sWinter is mostly free of larger philosophical musings. Paulsen instead makes Brian into a character who experiences his situation, immersing himself in his new home and learning as much as he can about it, not just for survival, but because he loves it. That choice makes a world of difference.

Both books take place in rather indifferent environments. DiCamillo's story puts the protagonists in a cold, wintery city that largely ignores their various plights, because everyone else is busy with their own plights (a.k.a. real life). In Brian's Winter, the whole point of this story is that the wilderness can and will kill you if you’re not prepared. Brian is not really prepared, but he’s smart enough and lucky enough to learn things quickly. For a while, Brian thinks he has an understanding with the other large animals in his woods, but later events teach him that the woods aren’t “his.” He’s just one living thing among many, no more or less entitled to life than any other thing.

With so much darkness and cold, there's no surprise that both stories touch on melancholy. I was rather troubled by how easily Peter (and most of the other characters of TME) fell into what only be described as deep depression. The story takes place in winter, and DiCamillo captures the hideousness of neverending cold really well.

“It snowed and snowed until everything disappeared. The world itself soon seemed to cease to exist, erased, bit by bit, by the white of falling snow. In the end, there was nothing and no one in the world except Adele, who stood alone at the window of her dream, waiting.”

This passage is beautifully written, but the mood is not meant to be peaceful or comforting. It instead highlights the loneliness and imprisonment of the powerless little girl. And she's not alone in her misery. Here are the elephant’s thoughts while she is being viewed like a circus freak:

“There were too many things she did not understand. Where were her brothers and sisters? Her mother?
Where was the long grass and bright sun...The world had become too cold and chaotic to bear. She stopped reminding herself of her name. She decided that she would like to die.”

Yikes. Does the language resonate? Yes. Is the idea important? Yes. Is the crippling nature of depression actually discussed or made explicit in this book? No. That’s not what the story purports to be about; the story claims to be about chasing your dreams and believing in the future. But the reader’s experience is 175 pages of doubt, darkness, and uncertainty, followed by 25 pages of eucatastrophic endgame, happy wrap-up, and elephantine exit strategies. Does it all end happily? Sure, in the sense that the characters mostly end up in the slots designated for them at the beginning. Siblings are reunited. The childless couple adopts them. The cranky old dude gets to become the eccentric uncle. The elephant returns to her homeland. All’s well that ends well.

The secret of The Magician's Elephant is that everyone secretly wants to be loved and held close and fed delicious soup. In Brian's Winter, the same thing is true, except that Brian cooks his own soup (literally and metaphorically). When he seeks out and finds a human connection at the end of the book, he returns to his family and the civilized world. As with the rest of the book, it is his own actions that drive much of the story. The message couldn't be clearer: you can't always wait for an elephant. Readers of Brian's Winter will know this. I hope readers of The Magician's Elephant will discover it.

Note: I reviewed these two books separately for Reads 4 Tweens. For a more straight-up take on them, click away: Brian's Winter, Hatchet, and The Magician's Elephant.