I bought vast numbers of picturebooks on the hop last year, frantically skim reading them, while trying to stop baby Wolf from clambering onto tables, yanking things off shelves or scampering out into the street.
One such purchase was Chis Hadfield’s The Darkest Dark.
On the front cover was a funny drawing of a boy and his pug both decked out in spacesuits. The back cover announced in capital letters: “THE STORY OF A BOY WHO FACED HIS FEARS… AND WENT ON TO REACH THE STARS.”
Perfect! I needed no more convincing.
A quick flick through and I headed for the cash desk. I knew exactly what I was getting.
Or did I?
Here is the cover so that you can find the important clues I missed!
Have you found them? I’m sure you have.
Check your Answers:
- Both the boy on the cover and the author are called Chris.
- The author is an Astronaut. There is even a photo of him!
The fact is, I missed all of this not simply because Wolf was… selecting his purchases. I had been mercilessly tricked by the Fan Brother’s (mis)use of genre conventions. For no astronaut’s autobiography, not even one written for children, has a fictionalised illustration of a pug and a cardboard spaceship on its cover. But then this is not exactly an autobiography.
Let’s start with the opening. The text declares that, “Chris was an astronaut. An important and very busy astronaut.” However, as I looked up, I found this humorously contradicted by the illustration of a young boy steering a box that says THIS SIDE UP.
What a darling! Oh, the joys of imaginative play!
However, in the background a calendar shows the date to be exactly July 19th, 1969, and as a seasoned opera buff (and singer) I should have known: if the soprano coughs in the first act, she’ll be dead by the last. No detail is superfluous in a picturebook, and the Fan Brothers have dotted The Darkest Dark with a constellation of historical facts which unequivocally ground it in Canada on the weekend everyone gathered to watch the Apollo 11 moon landing on TV.
We see the front page of the Toronto Daily Star announcing the blast-off, Walter Cronkite on his legendary 24-hour anchoring of the event, and NASA footage of Armstrong, Aldrin and Collins stepping onto the Moon. But are these details important to our understanding of the narrative?
As I explained earlier, I missed them all the first time round, and really enjoyed the story of little Chris conquering his fear of the dark anyway. However, when I reached the paratextual notes at the end of the book and realised that it was based on real-life astronaut, Commander Chris Hadfield, who “has orbited the Earth thousands of times on three separate missions” (39), I was able to enjoy a new dimension to the story.
For instance, when little Chris politely explains to his father why he cannot get out of the bath: “Sorry, no can do. I’m on the way to Mars” (6), we can smile at the notion that this fearful but enthusiastic boy actually did grow up into an incredibly brave man who travelled in space (maybe not to Mars in a bathtub, but you get my point). On a more purely semantic level, we also delight in finding that the image-text interplay we enjoyed in our initial reading has acquired a new layer of “delicious ambiguity” (Nodleman 227), and that somehow what he was saying was actually true all along.
The whole book seems to be a ricocheting of ironic contradictions and validations between the fictional and the historical.
So here’s another clue hunt. Look carefully at all the photos (both the originals and the illustrated ones). What do you think of Albert’s sneaky number? Can you find the dog who really lived with the Hadfields when Chris was a boy?
One of the charming things about The Darkest Dark is that Albert can be Chris’s dog both in 2015 and in 1969. This is because this is a playful, somewhat postmodern book, but also because the wealth of historical detail provided, both in the text and paratext, validates the historicity of the narrative not to prove that the author has been accurate or exhaustive in his portrayal, but to lend considerable weight to his message of hope and courage:
“Being in the dark can feel scary… but it’s also an amazing place.The dark is where we see the stars and galaxies of our universe. The dark is where we find the Northern Light shimmering and get to wish on shooting stars. And it was quietly in the dark where I first decided who I was going to be and imagined all the things I could do. The dark is for dreams – and morning is for making them come true.”
Here is a link to the CBS broadcast with Walter Cronkite:
© While all images of the books and all the written content on this blog have been created by me, original copyright of the books belong to the authors and illustrators.
Works Cited
Butler, Catherine and Kimberly Reynolds, editors. Modern Children’s Literature: An Introduction. 2nd ed.,China: Palgrave, Palgrave Macmillan, 2014.
Butler, Catherine and Hallie O’Donovan. Reading history in children’s books. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012.
Guillemette, Lucie and Cynthia Lévesque. “Narratology.” Signo. Université du Québec à Trois-Rivières
www.signosemio.com/genette/narratology.asp
Hadfield, Chris et al. The Darkest Dark. London: Macmillan Children’s Books, Pan Macmillan. 2016, 2017.
Martin, Theodore. “Temporality and Literary Theory.” Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Literature
Online Publication Date: Dec 2016
DOI: 10.1093/acrefore/9780190201098.013.122
Nodleman, Perry. Words about Pictures. Athens, Georgia: University of Georgia Press, 1988.
Norman, Jessie. “Grace Under Fire.” New York Times Magazine, 1996.
https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/specials/magazine4/articles/anderson.html
Puckett, Kent. Narrative theory: a critical introduction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016.
Rosenstock, Barb and Mary Grandpré, The Noisy Paint Box. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, Random House Children’s Books, Random House, Inc., 2014.
Ryan, Pam Muñoz and Brian Selznick. When Marian Sang. Malasya: Scholastic Press, Scholastic Inc., 2002.
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