(courtesy Harper Collins Publishers Australia)
Ever since I discovered my mother’s much-loved 1940s paperbacks of Winnie-the-Pooh and The House on Pooh Corner when I was a kid, I have been enchanted by the wonder and whimsical naïveté od A. A. Milne’s marvellous creations.
Winnie, along with Eeyore, Piglet, Tigger, Rabbit and the rest were as much a part of my childhood as far more modern characters, and while I would have loved more written stories about them than the ones I have, I accepted than I had the two volumes and that was that.
And then one day I was browsing in Kinokuniya in Sydney and discovered a beautiful hardcover edition, in a slipcase no less, of Winnie-the-Pooh: Tales From the Forest which were officially sanctioned stories from the Hundred Acre Woods than read as wonderfully and heartwarmingly as anything Milne himself might have penned.
I was enchanted; for here was a wholly new author, Jane Riordan, who had managed to evoke the tone and feel of Milne without feeling like some cheap, knockoff copy that had all the right words but none of the sweetly idiosyncratic soul.
It was a joy and a miracle, and I felt like someone had taken me back to childhood, declared that were Pooh stories I had somehow strangely missed and taken me back to a world where being strangely and weirdly yourself in all your charming glory is not only okay but embraced and adored.
(courtesy The Darley Anderson Children’s Book Agency)
I think that’s why I have always love Winnie the Pooh.
Christopher Robin loves him and his friends, all of whom are based on the real toys the real Christopher Robin himself played with, without condition and without any expectation that they act like “normal” people.
They frequently get things wrong, misunderstand things and get five when adding up two and two but Christopher Robin affectionately laughs, gently corrects them and their inclusive bubble of friendship and family continues on unabated.
Winnie-the-Pooh: Winter in the Wood, which comes with illustrations like all the books, by Mark Burgess, serves another 90 pages or so of more stories where Pooh thinks winter is a real person coming to visit, where a snowman is assumed to be a very quiet visitor and where everyone has a fine old time celebrating Christmas, even if Tigger is wondering where isn’t more cheese on the crackers (aka bonbons).
The book which takes us from autumn through winter, and thus Christmas into the New Year, is a sheer and unadultered delight with every character feeling very much like themselves, the cadence and rhythm of the conversations feeling just right, and the love sense of belonging and being loved for exactly who you are, carrying each and every page.
Burgess’s illustrations match Shephard’s original artwork to a tee and yet still feel wonderfully their own, and part of the joy of Winnie-the-Pooh: Winter in the Wood is seeing the story weave in and around some beautiful tableaus which a whole story in and of themselves.
Such as the one on 78-79 where Christopher Robin looks lovingly on as as Winnie the Pooh stands a little down the path, looking at the Christmas present he’s been given with wonder and delight, happy to open it, or not, on his own when he’s home because “Having a Secret Surprise to open is my best thing in the world”.
Winnie-the-Pooh: Winter in the Wood is the perfect marriage of words and art, a sublimely lovely evocation of Milne at his best by an author who subtlely injects her own flavour to the story while making it wondrously clear that here we are, quite marvellously, with Pooh again and that we’re lucky enough to celebrate Christmas with him and his wonderful, very special found family.