The Miraculous Journey of Edward Tulane

Edward Tulane is a china rabbit with ears and tail made of real rabbit fur (he does not wish to know whence his whiskers have come). He is inordinately vain and scornful and has no love in his china rabbit heart. Abilene, his ten-year-old mistress, loves him however and it is she who is desolated when he is hurled from the deck of the Queen Mary and sinks to the bottom of the sea.

That is the start of his involuntary journeyings over many years which take him through little scenes of woe and pettiness, comradeship and tragedy. And what is miraculous about them is first that, in his china way, he does come to learn how to love and second that his historian, Di Camillo, brings him to a desired ending without recourse to the soggy (and untruthful) gloop that mars a famous earlier story of this kind: The Velveteen Rabbit. Both tales conform to the necessity of doll stories: that the subjects of the tale be allowed human thoughts and an internal language to express them; but where Edward is then locked within his inanimate state, Margery Williams’s creature has to be serviced by the ministrations of a fairy ex machina.

Clocking in at over 200 pages and in the substantial format of a square octavo, Edward Tulane may appear to be a long book, but its designer has been most liberal in the allocation of space. The letterpress is double-spaced within generous margins and each of the 27 short chapters is given its own separate title-page with a formal illustration printed, like the rest of the book, in sepia. Such refinements may be thought precious, but they are, after all, entirely fitting for a rabbit of taste and discernment, and they are a proper place for the breathtaking illustrations of Mr Ibatoulline. (Readers should be aware that my own forthcoming version of Thumbelina is to be illustrated by Mr Ibatoulline.) Although his full-page colour plates within chapters are triumphs of imaginative reconstruction, almost like stills from a sensitively shot movie, these little interval-pieces are magic, isolating in a perfectly drawn image a significant moment in the chapter to come: a straw hat flying through the air, Edward sitting on a kitchen shelf in a girl’s dress with ruffles. In one instance an open trunk is given the same patterned lining as the book’s endpapers. Such focused commitment on the part of illustrator, designer, and editors cannot help but make this tiny picaresque romance entirely persuasive.