Whadayamean

One day God wakes up and decides to visit earth, the planet he made as ‘a paradise where animals and people could live with air to breathe and water to drink’. Accompanied by two children on his journey, God is horrified by the pollution, starvation, killing and discord he encounters. He entrusts the children with the task of telling the grown-ups ‘to change the way they are living’. As this is a story, the adults listen to the children and ‘the world became a better world’.

A fable for our times, this handsomely produced landscape picture book is illustrated in the style that Burningham developed for Cloudland (discussed BfK 105 ). Cut out figures of rather vulnerable looking children are placed against sombre landscapes of industrial waste and destruction depicted by photographic collage and sombre oils. The impact is wrenching as the small figures are dwarfed by the scale of our planet’s destruction. The cadences of Burningham’s rather stark text have something of the feel of a bible story: ‘And so it came to pass that the men with the money stopped cutting up the trees, dirtying the waters and fouling the air.’ Perhaps miracles will happen.