Post #5: The Wonderful O
Post number five is for James Thurber's The Wonderful O, which, when I first saw it in the library at school, I thought was some sort of Oz book. Oops!
Anyway, I needed a book to help pass the time today (lots of downtime for some reason; I thought for sure we'd be flooded with kids wanting/needing to check out new books since we had two days off from school due to snow), so picked this up. I finished it in about an hour, and although I don't have much to say, what I do have to say will contain spoilers, so please avoid if you feel it necessary.
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This story is kind of nonsensical, I think. It starts off with two pirates - Black and Littlejack - who set out for an island where they'll supposedly find lots of treasure in the form of gemstones. Black has an aversion to the letter "O" due to the fact that "his mother got stuck in a porthole and, as she couldn't be pulled back in, had to be pushed out."
When they land on the island they tell the people living there that they're searching for gems. The people of the island try to explain that they don't have any gemstones except for moonstones and opals and other regular stones. The pirates soon demolish everything in sight - they drain the water, they tear up the ground - but still can't find what they're looking for. So Black decides to take away the letter "O" from the island's vocabulary. House becomes huse, it becomes impossible to say "hello", hero becomes her, etc. (My favorite bit was how Otto Ott, when asked his name, could only stutter. :D) Also made illegal are games like tic-tac-toe and croquet, and instruments like pianos and violins, oboes and cellos.
The people are obviously outraged by this (or should I say utraged?) and start having secret meetings in the forest to try to figure out what to do. Andrea, a girl from the village, stumbles upon a book (or bk) that tells a story about an enchanted castle that appears every 100 years. This castle holds the map to the treasure that Black and Littlejack are searching for. It's said, however, that only evil men can enter the castle. The villagers all continue to use "o" in private, but are forbidden from speaking it in public. Exchanges like this make the book fun to read, and pretty funny:
"It's schl," his son replied.
"Never hiss at me," his father cried. "When I want aloes, I don't want ales, I hate such names. And cameos are cameos, not cames. Yesterday I met a man who wanted four canoes--"
"Fur canes," his son put in.
"Silence!" his father shouted. "What did you learn today in school?"
"That mist is always mist, but what is mist isn't always mist," his son recited.
At this his father rose up like a storm, put on his hat and cat, and stalked to where the door had been, and reached for where the knob once was.
"Where are yu ging?" whispered his anxious wife.
"Ut!" the boatwright cried, and ut he went.
:))
Anyway, the villagers (led by Andrea and Andreus) decide that there are four words with o's that can't be lost: hope, love, valor, and one that they can't remember. The castle appears like Andrea said and Black, Littlejack and their sailors go inside and literally tear it apart. Black finally notices the map on the wall, so they set out into the forest in search of the treasure. The forest, however, is magical, and in it appears all sorts of things with o's in their name that Black had outlawed - things like mosquitoes and Spanish moss, hornets and dragonflies. The forest also separates them all from each other, subjecting them to these terrors on their own. They finally find the tree they were looking for and manage to gather together in front of it.
Black gives the order to dig, and just as they're about to start, all these characters from books of the past show up - Lancelot and Romeo, Athos and Porthos, Robin Hood and Sherlock Holmes. It delays their digging until the clock - which is actually the clock "of their conscience", as all other clocks had been destroyed by Black due to their containing an "o" - strikes noon, at which point the ground hardens so much that they're unable to dig. Just then a whole bunch of containers (one of the words that was spared, due to the fact that it was collective noun) appear, so Black and co. start searching through them (it's worth noting that all of the containers are all o-less ones: a sack, a bucket, a basket, an urn, and even a casket). What they find is a single piece of paper in each with a single word on it: Freedom, which happens to be the fourth word that the villagers couldn't remember.
In the end, the pirates are chased away back to their ship, which appears to shipwreck due to the o-containing storms that crop up: hurricanes named Connie and Dorothy, typhoons and monsoons, etc. The only member of the pirate crew who is spared is Littlejack's parrot, who ends up living with Andrea and Andreus, who were married shortly after they set their village back to rights. They also erect a monument to "O", and the story ends with children asking an old man about the reason for the monument:
The old man shook his head and sighed. "I'm not as young as I used to be, and the years gone by are a mystery, but 'twas a famous victory."
So all in all, a cute book, and a nice way to spend my downtime. :)
