In July 2005 Chris Riddell won the 2004 CILIP Kate Greenaway Medal for the second time in only three years. Here the children’s author, illustrator and political cartoonist talks to Elspeth Hyams about interpreting Gulliver’s Travels, and other tall tales.
When he read about one of Gulliver’s voyages, to the kingdom of Balnibarbi, Chris Riddell had a eureka moment. A doctor at the Academy there had noticed that ‘important ministers seem to forget very quickly things they have promised. He proposed that anyone who had business with such a minister should finish the meeting by tweaking the minister’s nose, or kicking him in the stomach, or pulling his ears, or treading on his toes, or sticking a pin in his bottom, or pinching him black and blue, to make sure he remembered what had been discussed.’
‘That little episode was an absolute invitation,’ says Chris. And so Tony Blair finds his way into Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver (retold by Martin Jenkins), the only contemporary figure in the book. Chris in his other persona – political cartoonist – has been drawing him for more than a decade, most recently for the Observer and for the New Statesman.
‘It seemed good to use a contemporary figure to emphasise how relevant the story is. It was a thrill to bring this text to an eight-year-old today and have them smile and get the connection.’
Tony Blair, he thinks, is the most recognisable politician of his era. In future, child readers of this Gulliver might not even have heard of him, but Chris wanted to portray a particular person, not any politician. That one picture will fix this re-interpretation of Swift’s classic firmly in his and Chris Riddell’s time. Meanwhile, turning to that page brings a broad smile of recognition to the lips of any adult who reads Gulliver with their children now.
From political satire to children’s books
As Victoria Glendinning remarked in her eponymous biography of Jonathan Swift, it is ironic that many of the early classics of English literature – including Gulliver’s Travels and its near contemporary, Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe – have ended up as books for children. But the fact that Gulliver was written as a satire on Whig and Tory politics in the early 18th century does not detract from its appeal today.
From a child’s point of view, part of the fun is undoubtedly that Swift played games with perspective, making Gulliver gigantic in Lilliput, toy-like in Brobdingnag. In that respect, this new version of Gulliver for children is a visual tour de force. As with any commission undertaken by Chris Riddell, its hugely assured imaginative illustrations are, by turn, comic, surreal or satirical, executed with remarkable attention to detail and complete control of scale. There are some 70 plates in bright colour, with supplementary black and white line drawings.
The opportunity to work with lavish colour may not have been available to many earlier artists, but Chris is one in a line of famous illustrators who have produced work for both children and adults. He is equally at home with political cartoons and children’s books, but unlike, say, Sir John Tenniel, the Punch cartoonist who illustrated Alice in Wonderland, he began his career as a children’s book illustrator and was later spotted by someone at the Economist.
Illustrating for children
Chris has been prolific in his work for children, producing titles for all ages, from the Platypus series for the very young to his collaborations with other authors, of whom Martin Jenkins is only the latest. One relationship, with Paul Stewart, has continued for more than a decade, producing several individual titles, as well as the extraordinarily detailed fantasy world of the Edge Chronicles.
In that partnership, as Chris remarked to illustrator Joanna Carey,1 the two resolved an interpretive tension and conceptual gap between fairy tale and fantasy. For Gulliver, however, there was no conflict – Martin Jenkins gave Chris carte blanche. There was no authorial brief: ‘I am reacting to Martin’s text.’
Being left to respond in his own way gave Chris great freedom. The result was a big picture book, rather than a (possibly intimidating) ‘great big book’. He did not want to approach the project like, say, some versions of Hans Christian Andersen, ‘principally text and then a colour plate’. Nor did he want ‘a reverential retelling, or a grand coffee-table book’. He wanted ‘something very accessible, which invites you to be amused and endlessly entertained’. He was aiming at what he describes as ‘that picture-book sensibility, so kids pick it up and look at the pictures’.
So, each spread is an invitation to enter and experience. ‘I kept the colours very bright, and the pace friendly, so you aren’t overwhelmed by detail.’ Chris followed the narrative flow, but did not want reading the book to be hard work. ‘I was thinking of a child of six or seven picking it up and flicking through.’ It isn’t a book that has to be read sequentially. ‘Each spread is a little episode that can be read almost on its own. It doesn’t need to match the order of the book, you can dip in.’ It’s surprising, he says, ‘how good a picture is for bedtime reading.’
As for the text, that ‘will come to children on the way’. In fact, he thinks, if this version stays around, children will approach the original when they are older ‘with a sense of recognition, with a sense of bringing back something still hugely full of life, absolutely relevant and fascinating’. He thinks Gulliver is ‘a brilliant thing – a great work of English literature, and this picture version can act as a primer to get kids to think about Gulliver.’
Shaggy dog story
How did he respond to the invitation to illustrate Gulliver’s Travels? He saw it as ‘a fantastical story that unravels … the ultimate shaggy dog story in some ways’. Gulliver goes off for years and years, wanders all over the place and tells you about it, in a deadpan way. He invites you to imagine what it must be like to stand in front of the empress and look right into her cleavage. He plays around with the notion of what it must be like to rather fancy a tiny woman you can hold in the palm of your hand. Also, what it is like to be held in the hand of a huge giant and see her skin, and all the pores.’
These games with perspective, which are experienced to an extent by children as they grow up, give an illustrator a lot of scope. There is humour too. The fun is to show Gulliver’s reactions to being dumped in a bowl of cream, for example, or stood next to a naked Yahoo and realising the creature has all the features of a human.
Sub-texts
And of course, there are sub-texts. ‘When illustrating a book like Gulliver, what you are doing is responding to the text, finding out what Gulliver is up to and then saying: is he telling the truth? It’s a first-person narrative; how reliable is it?’ Chris allowed himself some licence. ‘My thesis is that Gulliver probably had a rather intense affair with a Lilliputian noblewoman. But he tells us there is nothing in it. Similarly, he comes across in the text as likeable in some ways. In other ways, you get the impression he is full of himself. By the time he is stranded with the horses [Houyhnhnms], his crew have got fed up with him. He’s completely insufferable. I dressed him up in finery and lace and a frock-coat to suggest he was pompous.’
If freeing his imagination in this way produces these extraordinarily rich illustrations for children, how does he produce his cartoons for adults? A lot of what he enjoys about illustrating books for children is ‘absolutely relevant to the job of political cartoonist,’ he says.
Inventing and creating
‘In some senses you are inventing while creating characters, dressing things up, using metaphor. You also use this for political cartoons. I am interested in the illustrative qualities of something as polemical as political cartoons. You can say really quite rude things in an elegant way.’
The key thing, he thinks, is that the images must work. ‘There is a danger today that cartoonists become self-referential. Personal technique – whether a reputation for being savage, or a reputation for wonderful puns – can get in the way of saying what you need to say.’
If you’re illustrating for children, he says, they won’t be interested in your approach. They are looking at the picture. The same should be true of a cartoon. It’s not about the cartoonist, but about the image. ‘Readers of a Sunday newspaper shouldn’t be thinking: “What a clever person he is!” They should be thinking: “I agree with the commentator” or, “I thoroughly disagree!” You want to provoke in some way.’
Political cartoonist
Defining yourself as a political cartoonist is dangerous. What he is really doing, he thinks, is using different tools to comment on what he sees. ‘As an illustrator there are lots of things you can show in a visual and more nuanced way.’ The problem is that, when you use metaphor to interpret, you may unintentionally give offence, or be misinterpreted. ‘Irony is dangerous – people might not detect it. It’s the tightrope you walk.’
The Observer gives him a lot of space. ‘I am completely free to interpret the news. I have the freedom of a columnist. It is a privilege which you have to make sure you live up to. At the same time, you have a duty to be relevant in that context. It is important to be very clear about what you want to say and why you want to say it. Only then should you choose the way you want to say it.’
One of his heroes among political cartoonists is one of the all-time greats – Sir David Low. ‘So much of what he did was about the way he depicted people. He could sum up the absurdity of the Nazi-Soviet Pact just by showing Stalin with his big belly and Hitler, with his breeches round his armpits, as a caricaturish little boy. I love that. If I was to define what I try to do in both fields, it is to attempt to get visual subtlety into what we see.’
Is he an illustrator then, or a cartoonist? It is getting more complicated, he says. ‘I tell my editors I am an illustrator who writes. I have written my own picture book text, of course, like many illustrators. With the great growth of longer fiction, and the renaissance in children’s fiction, I have been drawn towards that. Working with Paul Stewart has been a great learning process for me – I have enjoyed it tremendously. I am now writing my own stuff though. I am probably going to be a political cartoonist who illustrates children’s books!’ *
Reference
1 Authorgraph No. 148. Chris Riddell, interviewed by Joanna Carey. Books for Kids, September 2004.
Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver, retold by Martin Jenkins and illustrated by Chris Riddell. Walker Books, 2004. ISBN 0 7445 8642 9.
Updated: 29 November 2005