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THE ICKABOG
By JK Rowling
With illustrations from the winners of the Ickabog Artwork Competition
It’s been 13 years since JK Rowling published his latest book ‘Harry Potter’, ending a series that turned a generation of children into readers and reminded a generation of parents how exciting it was to be. a kid. I read the books aloud to my children, but I also went through them alone in big, greedy sips until late at night, desperate to know what happened next.
What an excitement, then, to learn that Rowling used her pandemic time to produce a new non-Potter children’s book. (She’s been busy along the way with other projects, of course, and recently got into a messy public argument over transgender rights.)
At first, “The Ickabog” seems like a conventional fairy tale, charming but light. It takes place in Cornucopia, a pleasant kingdom ruled by the vain but harmless King Fred the Fearless. (He nicknamed himself Fearless “because it sounded good with ‘Fred’, but also because he had already managed to catch and kill a wasp on his own, if you weren’t counting five footmen and the boot boy. ”)
Rowling loves words and revel in the atronyms of places and people. She named the Cornucopia regions after their culinary specialties: Chouxville for pastry, Kurdsburg for cheese, Baronstown for meat, Jeroboam for wine. To the north are the bushy, rather nasty swamps, home to sick sheep and a fearsome creature known as Ickabog. No one seems to have seen him – his appearance and monstrous powers vary according to the whims of the storyteller – but he’s the scarecrow that keeps kids in line and haunts their dreams at night.
The peaceful balance of the kingdom is shattered when Fred’s chief seamstress dies of overwork, an unfortunate event with snowballing consequences that “Cornucopia’s history books will later record as the beginning of all unrest.” And they are problems. Power falls into the hands of two evil courtiers, Lord Spittleworth (the skinny and cunning) and Lord Flapoon (the slobber, sycophantic), who sows discord by perpetuating the lie that the Ickabog is real and that the only way to protecting the population is by imposing martial law. In no time, Cornucopia becomes a place of violence and fear in which dissidents are imprisoned, children are separated from their families, and citizens are forced to participate in a mass delusion to support a corrupt regime.
If something sounds familiar to you, it’s a coincidence, Rowling explains in her preface; she started the book years ago as a bedtime story for her children. It wasn’t until the pandemic hit that she took the half-written manuscript out of the attic and started working on it again, trying new material on her teens now and releasing it (free, initially) in serialized form. on its website. . The chapters are short; the story lends itself to be read aloud; and the experience is greatly enriched by attractive illustrations provided by children aged 7 to 12 who won a competition this summer.
Rowling has retained her excellent sense of humor and prodigious imagination, but over the years she has become a clearer, more disciplined writer, less inclined to lard her narrative with foreign exposure. The story is scary at times, but it brings it out with a light touch and a sense of moral rectitude that leads us to suspect (correctly, as it turns out) that everything will be fine in the end.
What elevates “The Ickabog” beyond a famous writer’s whimsical tale is the wonderful plot twist that comes towards the end, and the sheer fun that follows. I read this book at home in November, with the cold sirens and ambulance sirens in the distance, harbinger of a difficult winter to come. It made me cry for joy.
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