"Results are not Guaranteed, but if not perfectly satisfied, your wasted time will be refunded."
– Norton Juster, The Phantom Tollbooth
This is a perfect book. Sorry, but that's that and we're all going to have to live with it. This book has Rhyme and Reason, princesses and demons, sounds and silences, and words and numbers. It has soups which make you hungrier and half-baked cakes which disagree with you later. It has the Sea of Knowledge, in which some people can swim all day and without ever getting wet, and the Mountains of Ignorance, which take no time at all to reach. Here, amidst it's mere 256 pages, the Awful DYNNE plays with that utterly average child. And of course you have cars, which go without saying, and words capable of being snuck away with, safely hidden on the tip of your tongue. You even meet, all too briefly, the Everpresent Wordsnatcher, who refuses to return his homeland of Context.
And that's not all.
As if word play were not enough – as if Norton Juster's puns and twisted idioms were not perfectly entertaining by themselves – he has given this book purpose. I'm not sure if it could be termed a plot. I hesitate to use that word to describe the sequence of events which transpire to run into each other here, even if they never do really crash and the whole thing turns out to have been beautifully orchestrated. It is closer to a moral, but that has all kinds of historical baggage - poor thing. The best I can do is pull out a quote and call it the running theme.*
"It's not just learning things that's important. It's learning what to do with what you learn and learning why you learn things at all that matters."
What Norton Juster has done is pick and poke fun at different aspects of knowledge and different faults of the human persona while still, ultimately, preserving a sense of respect for both. He could make chores seem more fun than eating ice cream, without ever denying that ice cream wasn't all that bad to begin with. He laughs at a world where information is shoveled into minds as a dead thing, knowing that dead things usually stay dead unless they fall into the hands of someone who can make them grow and bear fruit. He's . . . He's . . . He's Douglas Adams' Evil Twin.
Well, Priggish Twin.**
And after saying that, really, what more do I have to say to make you go and read it? If it helps you can replace all instances of the word "tollbooth" with "phone booth."
Also, while we're headed toward Delusions, I want a 1940s-style poster of the Terrible Trivium to hang on my wall.
__________________________________ Socks Off:
* Exactly like a running stitch, used to bind together events in a piece of literature. A running theme may be the basis of your point, which directly effects the shape and tone of your plot. These themes can be subtle or, like The Phantom Tollbooth, they can be artistically blatant. Themes that are too obvious and large are likely to come undone, leaving your work little more than random, unjoined rags.
** Now that we've mentioned Douglas Adams, doesn't this quote – pulled completely out of context from chapter 14 – sound like it was written just for him?
"'That's absurd,' objected Milo . . . .
'That may be true,' [the Dodecahedron] acknowledged, 'but it's completely accurate, and as long as the answer is right, who cares if the question is wrong? If you want sense, you'll have to make it yourself.'"