Don't Ask the Dragon

The focus of this rhyming story is Alem, a small boy all alone. It is his birthday but he doesn’t know where he can call home. Greg Stobbs pictures him carrying a small town like a rucksack on his back. One after another, Alem meets a number of animals – a bear, a fox, a meerkat, a treefrog, a fruitbat and a bulldog – and asks them ‘where shall I go?’ They all reply ‘I don’t know’ and warn him, ‘Just don’t ask the dragon. He will eat you.’ Of course, he meets the dragon, a vegetarian from the sea, who doesn’t eat him but invites him in for tea. The dragon introduces himself as ‘the dragon of words’ and says Alem means ‘The World’. He also tells him ‘There is a town/ where the bravest go/and I have named it I DON’T KNOW’. Alem then celebrates his birthday with all the animals, now his friends, having learnt that ‘Home was always inside him.’ This is a picture book that already has some heavyweight endorsements, from Jacqueline Wilson, Michael Rosen, Michael Morpurgo and Cerrie Burnell, all of which you can find on the Waterstones website. For myself, much as I admire the author and illustrator (and this is a really attractive, boldly composed book), I find the story somewhat baffling. At the beginning Alem is lonely, so when and how do the animals become his friends? Why do they mislead him about the dragon? When they answer ‘I don’t know’ to his request for a place to go are they merely teasing him and the reader? After all, it turns out to be the place where the bravest go. This is clearly a story with a message but what is the message? It seems to me less about friendship and kindness (see the Waterstone reviews) than the reality of living with doubt and uncertainty – ‘I don’t know’ – and being brave and self-reliant. Not a bad message in the world as it is and one that may well be drawn from the author’s own experience (see the short interview with Lemn Sissay on the Big Issue website).