When I was at primary school, the day would end with 30 children sitting cross-legged on a piece of thin polyester matting and listening, for half an hour until home time at 3.30pm, to a few chapters of a book read to us by the teacher. When I was nine, Miss Dobbs read us The Phantom Tollbooth, Norton Juster’s story of Milo and his adventures with friends Tock the watchdog and the Humbug. They journey through Dictionopolis (with a grand marketplace where letters are bought by the handful) and Digitopolis (where the land is mined for numbers, while rubies, emeralds and diamonds are thrown away with the earth). The two capital cities of the Kingdom of Wisdom are ruled by two warring brothers – King Azaz the Unabridged and the Mathemagician – who have exiled their two sisters, Rhyme and Reason, for refusing to say whether words or numbers were the most important. Since then, the kingdom has descended into chaos.
I used to love the stillness that settled over us at storytime as the usually solitary pleasure of reading was transmuted into a modest kind of communal rapture while we followed Milo through the Doldrums, up and down the Foothills of Confusion and Mountains of Ignorance, and jumped with him and his companions to the Island of Conclusions. On the way, they – and we – met, among many manic others, Faintly Macabre (the Not-So-Wicked Which), the tallest dwarf in the world (who looked remarkably like the shortest giant in the world), the Awful Dynne (who collects sounds for Dr Kakofonous A Dischord) and the .58 boy, who is the fifth member of the average American family (at least in 1961, the year of the book’s publication) with its two parents and 2.58 children.
The pace, the wit, the invention were dizzying – even if we did only fully understand about .58 of it at the time. There was action aplenty, and if you didn’t get one joke or pun or piece of wordplay, another would be along in a minute. They fell from the pages like sweets tumbling from a bottomless bag. But it was a book that, aside from the obvious pleasures of the story, also introduced me – via its Lewis Carroll-like love of wordplay, literalism and logic to the point of madness – to the notion that words themselves could be tools, treasures and toys all in one. They weren’t just markings on a page to be passively absorbed and enjoyed.
In a 2011 essay to mark the book’s half-century, Adam Gopnik described it as celebrating a love of learning generally, and of an education in the liberal arts especially. Milo becomes immersed in a world that does not love facts or narrow specialisation, but has a broad appreciation for all the marvels waiting to be unveiled. When he returns, he realises that although the tollbooth that first took him there has vanished, his books will function as portals just as well. This was a message I loved to hear.
The Phantom Tollbooth was the first book I read that wasn’t grounded in reality. Narnia was as far as I had travelled into fantasyland at that point (I wouldn’t meet Alice having her adventures in Wonderland for some years yet), but it was still recognisably Earthlike, despite a sprinkling of talking animals and ambulant vegetation. The purple tollbooth heralded uncharted imaginative territory. Just as Milo watched each of the instruments in the kingdom’s orchestra fill the land with light and colour (the piccolo produced lemon-yellow shafts of sunlight), so I felt my brain light up with possibilities I hadn’t known existed.
Juster was a synaesthete and felt intimate connections between words, colours and numbers, and it is perhaps because of this that his associations resonate so well with readers, even though we are more loosely wired. He was a young architect living in a Brooklyn basement flat who received a Ford foundation grant of $5,000 to write a book for children about cities. Instead, he began scribbling down sections of what would become a book that would endure for decades. Above his apartment lived an equally young artist called Jules Feiffer. He became interested in Juster’s writing and started to illustrate it with the drawings that are now as inseparable from The Phantom Tollbooth as John Tenniel’s are from Alice.
Juster took Feiffer’s illustrations with him when he went to show the first 50 pages of his book to an editor. Flying in the face of the received wisdom of the time, which said that children’s books should not contain anything that children did not already know, Random House wanted to publish it. By 2011 it was estimated to have sold about 40m copies.
In 1983, however, none of these were being sold in the UK. As soon as Miss Dobbs had closed the covers on the final instalment, I begged my father to buy me my own copy (I had long ago discovered there were none in the school or local library). We went to the Greenwich Book Boat – nothing there. We went to Dillons in Bromley – which had a COMPUTER that told us it was out of print. It is easy to forget how many gatekeepers there are between us and the books we want – or do not yet know we want – and this is even more so for children than for adults. If Miss Dobbs hadn’t lifted the barrier, when would I have come across this lovely book? Almost certainly after the perfect age to meet it, and maybe never.
For some reason we didn’t then start scouring secondhand bookshops – maybe Dad didn’t think they dealt in children’s books. But I have acquired several copies since as a hedge against further deprivation. It remains a masterfully wrought, glorious, hilarious, life-affirming read – a celebration of words, ideas, sense, nonsense, cleverness and silliness. The piccolo plays and lemon-yellow shafts of light dance everywhere.
