The Fate of Fausto by Oliver Jeffers
The inestimable Oliver Jeffers is angry. Angry about greed and bossiness, and this is his Aesop’s fable. I like morality tales; I learnt a lot from Aesop and from ‘Aesop in the shadows’, as Beatrix Potter expressed it in her dedication for The Tale of Johnny Town Mouse and as so many others through the centuries could.
Fausto is very bossy and very greedy and stamps his foot quite a lot. Eventually he meets the sea, which is having none of it. Fausto gets his comeuppance – or perhaps we should say his comedownance.
But behind the fable of greed and its perils is something else more subtle. He explores bigness and our relationship to it. Do we try to contain bigness and make it ours, or do we let the Universe be as big and mysterious and as unbiddable as it cares to be?
With his customary playfulness of word and image, Oliver Jeffers again opens up possibilities for the imagination that are vast.
