The Eyes & the Impossible

One of the winners of last year’s Newbery Medal awards, this unusual story may not garner quite the same amount of praise over here.  Set on a holiday island that also doubles as an animal sanctuary, its canine hero Johannes runs so fast he regularly escapes human detection. He is on easy conversational terms with the other animals that live there including an occasionally smiling seagull and three majestic bisons. Johannes’ role is to keep an eye on everything, a task he likens to Maintaining the Equilibrium. His first person narration sometimes turns into a form of poetry, as in ‘I ran like the birth of the universe.’

There are some good moments, with Johannes escaping capture at one stage and rescuing a drowning child on another. But his scheme to get the otherwise perfectly contented old bison off the island and onto the main shore under some vague notion of freedom is never in the least realistic, which is puzzling in an animal otherwise so well endowed with human understanding. Elsewhere there are nine full pages of landscape illustrations in full colour, each with the addition of Johannes, painted in by Shawn Harris, running through them. A tenth landscape appears on the front cover, and if Eggers’ prose sometimes gets too gushing the accompanying pictures mostly taken from the golden age of nineteenth century illustration cannot be faulted.

Jessica Mitford describes in her memoir Hons and Rebels how her father, the second Baron Redesdale, had only ever read one novel, finding it so good he couldn’t be bothered to try any other. This was Jack London’s searing classic Whitefang. I doubt he would have enjoyed this current novel, though readers in America who have reacted differently suggest it might still be just the thing for another audience.