Books - reviews and literary news from The Times and The Sunday Times
David Baddiel on Where The Wild Things Are
ALL GREAT CHILDREN’S STORIES begin with a portal: a wardrobe, a rabbit hole, King’s Cross platform 93/4. This is because children want a mixture of the magic and the mundane — they want Harry to live in Privet Drive but to go to Hogwarts — and they need to know how to pass between the two. They want to be able to go, but they also want to be able to come back. The most obvious portal, however — a child’s bedroom, the place where they go to dream — has been used significantly only once in my memory — in Maurice Sendak’s picturebook Where The Wild Things Are, which has been commissioned as a movie this week, to be directed by Spike Jonze with a script by Dave Eggers... ...
