Peter writes his review of The Phantom Tollbooth by Norton Juster.
The Phantom Tollbooth is an amusingly clever and highly engaging children’s story written in 1961 by the American architect Norton Juster about a cure for boredom. Like all children’s fiction of value, however, it is about much more than this, and its appeal is universal, as its attractiveness is not limited by the ages of its readers. Its central character is a lad called Milo.
The world, Milo initially thinks, is “small” and “empty.” His “hundreds of toys” are no longer of interest to him, his numerous books are “too much trouble to read,” his tools are objects “he’d never learned to use” and his dissatisfaction with life is a source of gloom and misery, until his curiosity is piqued by the appearance of a mysterious package in his room. This turns out to be a “phantom tollbooth” which, like Dr. Who’s Tardis, itself similarly disguised as a police box, will take him on a life-changing voyage of discovery once he pays a nominal toll for the privilege of imaginative travel. Milo is soon no longer weary of life, and neither are his readers, who escape with him. J.R.R Tolkien reminds us it is only “jailers” who don’t approve of escape…
What kind of an Ironist are You?
It is tempting for adults to dismiss such stories as mere ‘juvenilia,’ which we all grow ‘out of ‘as we grow ‘up’. Yet the escapism provided by stories that take readers out of their familiar surroundings and plunge them into an enthralling imagined world of adventure, suspense, heroic conflict and romance is the result of a human impulse as old as Homer’s Odyssey, the story of an adventurer’s return home to Ithaca after twenty years’ absence from his wife and son waiting patiently for the head of their family, Odysseus, to come home at the end of the Trojan War in which he had been fighting. The adventures of this warrior-king continue to enchant children and adult readers alike hundreds of years after the blind Greek poet composed it. Another such story is the perennial adult favourite Don Quixote, written in Spanish in 1605 by Miguel de Cervantes. This is the epic tongue-in-cheek saga of an idealistic older man’s hilarious but deluded search for heroic romance in the company of his servant Sancho Panza, who is mercifully more realistic than his employer: Don Quixote, the ‘Man of La Mancha,’ famously ‘tilts at windmills,’ mistaking them for demonic giants, each with four or more arms. In his classic poem On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer, the Romantic poet John Keats wrote a tribute in praise of such imaginative ‘armchair travel,’ and more recently, readers today can find similar trips to exotic imaginary places in such classics as John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress, L. Frank Baum’s The Wizard of Oz, C.S. Lewis’ The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe, and Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland, influences of all four of which can be found in The Phantom Tollbooth.
Milo does not know it, but he is really not so much looking for a cure for boredom as he is on
a mission to make his life fulfilling and meaningful. He needs to be taken out of himself by the wisdom of experience, exposed to other worlds beyond his own, and he finds redemption at the end of his adventures in The Lands Beyond the ‘Sea of Knowledge.’ A helpful map is included in the Scholastic edition I have been reading. This is supplemented by numerous humorous drawings by Jules Feiffer, all helpful in conveying a picture of the lands Milo will explore and the diverse creatures of all shapes and sizes he will encounter. C.S.Lewis similarly provides a map of Narnia in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, and J.R.R.Tolkien also does so, memorably, and in great detail, in his own magnificent map of Middle Earth accompanying his epic The Lord of the Rings, arguably the most influential of all imaginative travel stories ever written. All of these maps, and many more used by writers of such fantasies over the centuries can be found in the magnificent authoritative guide The Writer’s Map: An Atlas of Imaginary Lands, edited by Huw Lewis-Jones and published by The University of Chicago Press. It contains the Marauder’s Map, (of Harry Potter fame) and even makes reference to Pooh Bear’s Hundred Acre Wood, among hundreds of other “fabled lands,” evidence of their universal appeal.
In the course of his travels, Milo comes to understand the great affliction in ‘The Lands Beyond,’ a conflict caused by unnecessary rivalry between the inhabitants of Dictionopolis (the city of words) and Digitopolis (the city of numbers), a conflict caused by the disappearance of
two kidnapped sisters, Rhyme and Reason, held in the Castle in the Air, where Milo is later to find and rescue them with the help of a ‘watchdog’, appropriately called ‘Tock,’ who ticks. He has to battle such grotesquely Bunyanesque allegorical demons as Ignorance, Hate, Malice, Gross Exaggeration, Compromise, Hindsight, Threadbare Excuses, and Dilemma, and in a memorably climactic final chapter full of sound and fury culminating in the ultimate defeat of Unreason, we see the victory of Wisdom, the restoration of order and common sense in the rescue of Rhyme and Reason, and the headlong flight of “the monsters of Ignorance.” We are told “shutters closed for many years were thrown open to let the brilliant sunshine where it hadn’t shone in so long.” (Truly, this is the ‘dawning of the Age of Aquarius’– a pop-culture allusion probably lost to younger readers). Milo has come to realize that “so many things are possible just as long as you don’t know they’re impossible.” At the end, he reflects: “I would like to take another trip… but I really don’t know when I’ll have the time. There’s just so much to do right here.” Clearly his travels have made him a better person. He has been freed from the prison of Self, where too many people, young and old alike, languish, unaware of their chains.
I must not leave readers with the impression that this is an overly serious tale, as there is considerable humour throughout, in slapstick comedy, and in the author’s love of wordplay. The intolerant leader of Digitopolis, Mathemagician, has his minions create “subtraction stew” which “makes you hungrier the more you eat,” and we are told at one point that “Infinity is a dreadfully poor place. They can never manage to make ends meet.” There are several convoluted arithmetical jokes. Travellers to the Castle in the Air, a place of utopian fantasy far from reality must first meet the “Senses Taker,” who wants to know every conceivable iota of information about each visitor, “in triplicate”: his identity, hobbies, genealogy, weight, height, and evidently more importantly, “how many ice cream cones [he] eats in a week.” This is gentle fun, and it raises the interesting question about the target audience the author was aiming for.
I have seen the book recommended for “ages 8 and above,” which is commendably comprehensive, but the level of language alone suggests it would be ideal for keen readers of time travel stories aged 10 and older. Better still, the story could and should be read aloud, preferably by a wise parent of younger children who can explain the jokes and unfamiliar words, and put on funny voices. I had heard of this unusual book, but had not read it until recently in my mid-seventies, so you are unlikely to be too old for it.
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Contributed by
Peter Scotchmer
