|
|  | | What defines a cowboy? He wears a big hat, has a lasso, and of course, he is a hero. In her newest book, the experienced illustrator and author Hildegard Müller succeeds in concentrating completely on essentials by means of clear and impressive images, and – with the aid of a language that is as entrancing as it is simple – in telling an exciting and moving story that revolves around these central elements.
The secret of this effect is her unconditional and therefore deeply respectful adoption of the child’s perspective. Once we have been captivated by the pictures, the author permits us, the readers, to directly experience for ourselves that the angle - one’s own position and therefore perspective - is everything and changes everything. The drawings, that are concentrated in powerful colours and thus create images of great intensity adapted to children’s perspective, also demonstrate this. The beach is wide, taking up more than half the page. The sea, from which danger threatens, is even more enormous. The adults are so tall that they sometimes do not entirely fit into the picture. For the most part, we adults have lost this more or less absolutely unconditional gaze, and Hildegard Müller reminds us of it with her lovely book: if a child is wearing a cowboy hat and has a lasso, he is not playing at being a cowboy, he is a cowboy. If a toy dog is washed out to sea by the waves, then what is being swept away is not a toy, but a beloved animal that is drowning.
Precisely this is what happens to the young girl Anna in this story: having just arrived at the beach for the summer holidays, her dog Toto is in danger of a terrible death by drowning. He has just learned to swim when he is seized by a high wave. But a young boy, who previously had been dosing nonchalantly on a deck chair, and who is concealed by his broad-brimmed hat throughout the story, rushes over to help, catches the dog with his lasso and pulls it onto the beach. Toto is saved. Here again, the author presents the significance of perspective: The adults rushing to the water’s edge are talking all at once and are paralysed in eloquent helplessness. A cowboy does not talk, he acts. In just this moment, a young boy disguised in an oversized cowboy hat that a girl could truly only find “stupid,” is turned into a real cowboy, who becomes a hero in the glow of his deed.
Hildegard Müller has us experience a third play of perspective: if at first she makes use of the clichés we are familiar with – the girl with the polka-dot skirt and the pull-toy dog, who ties a bandanna with polka-dots just like those on her skirt around her wheeled companion’s neck, and the boy who coolly tosses his lasso – the experience of the dog’s rescue that unites the children suffices to transcend these very clichés.
At the end, Anna asks the boy with the cowboy hat that in her eyes is now “great”: “Will you teach me to throw a lasso?” Sure, but: “Only if I can play with Toto!” The story-teller releases us from this tale that, for all its concentrated simplicity is genuinely compelling, with a wonderful double-spread panorama that quotes the central Wild West motif, in order to completely transform it at the same time: we see the children before the setting sun, their silhouettes and long shadows showing how Anna swings the lasso above her head and the boy with the big hat pulls Toto along on his leash.
Michael Sellhoff
February 2012
[Translated by Edith C. Watts]
|
to title overview
