Small Town Boy: The Ballad of Barnabas Pierkiel

The Ballad of Barnabas Pierkiel by Magdalena Zyzak 

Henry Holt 

Pp. 269

The narrator of this tale is our guide to the tiny town of Odolechka “located so far from the sea and everything else that nearly no one had known it existed, that is, until everyone knew at once.” In a cross between Borat and Gogol, she mocks the town and all the inhabitants with a gentle satire that points out both their limitations and pomposity. The parishioners and villagers hate each other and are mainly concerned with eating sausages and salted herrings. Our eponymous hero is seventeen and lazy; obsessed with Roosha, the gypsy woman, and his own appearance.

Odolechka does not have much to recommend it. Indeed, when a German spy (with the wonderfully unsubtle name of Boguswav) arrives by parachute and quizzes the mayor and the police chief about their town’s assets, they proudly show him the highlights: an abandoned barracks; haylofts; straw stacks; the windmill; the abandoned string factory; “the scarecrow in the corn field by the wheat field by the edge of town”; “our split oak tree, where Kashak crashed his bicycle” the scorched bootlegging barn; hectares and hectares of cabbage fields; some picket fences; and a well with four bricks missing.

In the true style of a picaresque novel, the town is populated by simultaneously dull and colourful characters, including the police chief who is so fat he can barely squeeze between the church pews, and the mayor who is not much thinner. There is an entrepreneur with a motor vehicle (the only one in the village) a doctor and his phlegmatic wife, and Kumashka, the drunken priest, concerned with minor points of scripture.

Much of the humour comes from the fact that the author claims this is a poor translation, while using specific expressions and complex vocabulary, which has the reader rushing to a dictionary. For example, at one point in church, Barnabas was “leaning on a splintery pilaster in the narthex” and when there is nothing to counter the religious fervour of Kumashka, “The speechlessness of the laity was so entire that borborygmus here and there was heard.” Throughout the narrative, she deliberately deconstructs and draws attention to the artifice of the novel, and frequently loses track of the main narrative, trailing off after other non-entities, only to “return to our hero, whose perspective the negligent author keeps abandoning.”

The quixotic folk tale elements cease abruptly, and a realistic WWII conflict ensues which none predicted. Zyzak’s tale is a blow to complacency. The fictional, bumbling, rural town of Odolechka and inhabitants are mocked, but the town is now destroyed by war. As such it represents a “touchstone for a hundred towns” near the Polish/ German border. We are rocked by sadness for a traditional town we never knew, but also remembrances of real residences that were similarly obliterated. By weaving a tale of froth and humour before ripping it apart with brutal force, Zyzak teaches us a lesson we cannot and should not ignore.

Grimm Stuff

Grimm Stuff is an exhibition on at the National Library Gallery until 8th November, and it’s well worth seeing. Don’t worry; I’m not going to dive off into the realms of poetry this time, although it is tempting. The link between art and poetry is a fascinating one as they are both heightened forms of expression that may clarify or obfuscate depending on the intention of the artists.

Anyway, enough of that. This exhibition is made up of folktales and fairy stories from the Dorothy Neal White and National Children’s collections. Folktales have their origins in oral traditions and they may feature the staples we have come to know – magic; fairies; goblins; witches; ogres. Around the world they are used by authors to preserve the native traditions of their own culture, or of one that is perceived to be threatened.

The tales were gathered by re-tellers such as Madame d’Aulnoy and Charles Perrault (late seventeenth century) and the Grimm Brothers in the late nineteenth century. The Brothers Grimm were supposedly the first to write down the stories without changes, but they actually reshaped the language and the plots. Their work inspired others to collect folk and fairytales, and have since attracted the leading illustrators of each generation.

Hans Christian Andersen created his own stories (The Princess and the Pea; The Tinder Box) and paved the way for the popularity of fairytales in the second half of the nineteenth century through such writers as Charles Kingsley and Lewis Carrol.

The old fairy tales are actually remarkable for their unpleasantness; there are no happy endings and often not even the hero or heroine escapes with their life. The bawdiness seems shocking to modern readers; awaking with a kiss after being asleep for 100 years is far chaster than the story of the rape that woke her in the original version – the quick marriage had nothing to do with love at first sight but was rather about burying the shame of illegitimacy.

In the early versions of Cinderella, her features were also transformed by the fairy godmother along with her gown and accoutrements. She was actually plain and the prince’s task was to recognise her inherent loveliness rather than her physical beauty. This gives the tale an incredibly different aspect from the sanitised Disney version we generally know. Some of these stories are obviously politically incorrect to current audiences and so Little Black Sambo has become The Story of Little Babji.

In the exhibition there are illustrators I recognise and who swoop me back to my childhood, such as Eric Carle (responsible for more than just The Very Hungry Caterpillar); Mervyn Peake (seriously weird); Ernest Shepard (of course more famous for Winnie the Pooh, but he also illustrated Hans Christian Andersen); Quentin Blake (again, more famous for his illustrious – oh, my sides! – partnership with Roald Dahl); and Maurice Sendak – known for Where the Wild Things Are. Parents were afraid those illustrations would frighten children but his view was that ‘through fantasy children receive catharsis for their otherwise ungovernable feelings’. Hmmm.

Jan Pienowski, whom I always thought was a woman, contributes some simply stunning illustrations with trademark bold colours forming the background to stylish, romantic and dramatic silhouettes. There is fairytale menace as well as comedy and beauty here. I love this stuff and remember it well from A Necklace of Raindrops, which was one of my favourite books as a child.

Arthur Rackham is one man who seriously understands the power of myth and fable and the darker side of fantasy. Apparently ‘children relished the thrills engendered by his forests of looming frightening trees with grasping roots and his ogres and trolls that were ugly enough to repulse without being too frightening. And they were drawn to his sensuous but chaste fairy maidens. His backgrounds rewarded close inspection, the observant reader discovering images of animated animals or trees.’ Those trees terrified me – I had nightmares about the ones in Snow White.

More recently we have Anthony Browne with echoes of the great Rackham in his murkily atmospheric backgrounds and animated trees; Michael Foreman with luminous colour washes, and Janet Alberg who claimed her intention was ‘to produce William Morris books at Penguin prices.’

There were other illustrators I’d never such as Lois Elhert who worked with scrap materials from her mother’s material collection and father’s workshop, such as lumber, shavings, and nails. They were brighter than craft paper and easier to reposition – she would only stick them down when she felt happy with them.

Kay Neilsen is a Danish illustrator whose style is influenced by her experience in theatrical design, hence her characters often have impossibly long legs and long flowing dresses. Another, Gavin Bishop, is apparently a noted Kiwi illustrator whose take on The House that Jack Built posits European colonisation as the aggressor; the dog that worried the cat that killed the rat etc.

And so we come to the curious phenomenon that is the Flower Fairies. This sub genre of fairytales portraying fairy children dressed as flowers is different in the Northern and Southern hemispheres. The Northern hemisphere version (as espoused by Cicely Mary Barker) is elegant and romantic; the Southern hemisphere interpretation features cuter, roly-poly fairies who are more scantily clad, as depicted by Trevor Lloyd, Mary Gibbs, and Avis Acres. I have never heard of these, but would like to know if they are responsible for the mawkish abomination that is Anne Geddes.