Kenneth Grahame’s The Reluctant Dragon. By Robert Sans Souci. New York: Orchard Books, 2004.
The Reluctant Dragon is a curious story. It was first published in Kenneth Grahame’s Dream Days (1898), a collection of autobiographical fictions, as a story told to himself and his sister as they were walked home by a man from the circus. Since then it has often been published alone, usually abridged or retold. In some ways this is unfortunate, as it seems to me to be a great loss to be without a dragon who expresses himself so resolutely on the subject of fighting with knights: “But the whole thing’s nonsense, and conventionality, and popular thick-headedness. There’s absolutely nothing to fight about, from beginning to end. And anyhow I’m not going to, so that settles it!” There is an arch tone that creeps into Grahame’s original that can be very condescending. Of the many reworkings of the tale, I prefer San Souci’s, which preserves the central ideas and feelings of the original—that there is a stupidity in violence and a rightness in convention which must be balanced, hopefully in such a way as to benefit all concerned. John Segal’s small color pictures bring the dragon to life without overpowering the text. That said, his illustrations do not accurately reflect the text, depicting the dragon as green rather than the clearly stated blue—so you might prefer the abridgement by Inga Moore (Cambridge, MA: Candlewick Press, 2004).
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