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“When you find a dead mouse you can bury it.”
Alternatively, you can take a really close look at it to find out exactly what happens to it. This bold picture book for children aged four and above is impressive for the way it offers down-to-earth answers to tricky questions about the nature of death.
The cycle of life as depicted here runs as follows: as soon as the mouse is dead, “green-coloured flies” turn up and lay their eggs on the rodent’s body; maggots soon hatch out of the eggs, feast on the corpse until they are gorged and fat, then crawl off in order to pupate and morph into fully grown flies. Thus a dead creature gives rise to new life.
Authors, including children’s authors, can approach the topic of death in a variety of different ways. Mostly they do so in a spiritual sort of way by invoking questions concerning God or life after death. Mark Benecke and the illustrator Lisa Fuss take a completely different line. Benecke is a forensic biologist who solves crimes involving murder or manslaughter by analysing the insect life that has developed on the corpse. In this, his first children’s book, he treats the dead mouse with the same clinical detachment: as a scientist for whom death is first and foremost a biological process, he shows in suitably child-friendly terms exactly what happens to the rodent after it has died.
Using the example of the life-cycle of blowflies, he demonstrates in crisp, clear language the cycle of nature as a whole. The plentiful illustrations complement the text wonderfully. For as soon as you look closely at the drawings you realise that they invariably foster continuity: most are truncated and thus point beyond the edge of the page; often, too, the drawings depict individual creatures that are in the process of crawling or flying away and thus encourage the reader to turn over to the next page. Everything comes full circle in the end, for “there are always plenty of mice” — but the frisky little mouse that illustrates this fact then hops off the page leaving nothing visible but its tail, and then it, too, is dead, lying there on its back with its legs in the air.
Thanks to the illustrations, younger children, too, will be able to grasp the biological processes described here. To avoid frightening them, Lisa Fuss has been very careful not to depict the decomposition process itself in any detail. The mouse, the flies, the maggots are not shown as gut-wrenchingly revolting, but they are not prettified or humanised either. As a result, younger readers are not likely to feel so sad at the fate of the mouse or to regard the scavenging insects as cruel.
The narrative’s relentless focus on essentials and the large scale of the illustrations both contribute to the minimalist character of the book, which is further reinforced by the stark choice of colours. The predominant earthy shades of brown, beige and grey stand out markedly from their white background and ensure that the images are both clear and easy to take in. What this book aims to do, after all, is to make a scientific perspective thoroughly comprehensible to young readers.
But is this difficult topic — so often regarded as taboo — at all suited to such readers in the first place? This is a question that many parents will surely ask themselves. But they need not worry: Wo bleibt die Maus? acquaints children with the cycle of life in the most circumspect way. With its cautious approach and its careful avoidance of grisly details it is eminently suitable for children, who of course mostly respond to the processes of nature with curiosity, open-mindedness and a thirst for knowledge. After all, judicious explanations may well dissipate children’s fear of things they don’t understand, such as the reason why living things die. And by reading the book together with their children parents can readily make themselves available to answer any questions that may arise.
Children, too, do find themselves confronted with mortality, and so the sight of a dead animal or the loss of someone close to them inevitably causes them to ask the question ‘Why?’ Adults often find it difficult to talk about such matters, especially when it comes to discussing the natural but unprepossessing process of decomposition. But that is precisely what death entails: it completes the cycle of life and ensures that dead creatures provide sustenance for others and hence enable them to survive. Every single organism contributes to this cycle. This book is thus beneficial for adults, too — and may help them to overcome any contact phobias they might happen to suffer from. But it raises a deeper question, too: don’t we humans sometimes take ourselves and our existence too seriously? We too, after all, are part of nature and form part of the cycle of life, just as the mouse and the fly do.
Benecke and Fuss have succeeded in producing an extremely informative, humorous and profound picture book that explains the meaning of death in a vivid and immediate way. For children encountering this book, two things will loom large: they will discover at long last why there aren’t dead mice all over the place even though lots keep dying off, and they will discover, too, that no matter what, there will always be plenty of new ones!
Catarina Afonso
October 2008
[Translated by Helena Ragg-Kirkby]
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