The Foskett Family Circus

It’s lèse majesté to say so, but there’s a bit of book-making going on here. One of Quentin Blake’s most admirable characteristics is the pleasure that he takes in designing murals for those places such as hospitals and maternity homes where they may have a more life-giving effect than the treatment meted out to the patients. But a mural is a mural. It sits on a wall and if it’s by Sir Quentin it brings colour and a sense of movement to all who see it, passing as they may from one dancing image to the next. The wall is the place for it and when, as here, it is shrunk into a book and furnished with rhymes which, I fear, most of the patients could have written themselves (perhaps it would have been an idea to get them to do so?) the general joy becomes a mite jaded. What we get is page after page of the Foskett Family Circus transferred from designs for a hospital ward in Harrow. The family do impossibly larky tricks: plump Auntie May on a tightrope… Bert and Betsy bending iron bars… and so on. The drawing and the sundry ducks, dogs, hens admiring the performance are of course a delight, but they are not much more than page-fillers, going nowhere – although the last spread with the family collapsed across the pages is a proper conclusion. I can’t spot them all there though. Where’s Auntie May?