The Return of the Little Prince

Patricia Morley is professor emerita of English and Canadian Studies at
Concordia University and an avid outdoor recreationist. She is the
author of several books, including The Mountain Is Moving: Japanese
Women’s Lives, Kurlek and Margaret Laurence: T

This fable for adults and children takes off from the beloved classic,
The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry. The plot outline may be
borrowed but, as one reviewer notes, the style, poetry, and rhythm
belong purely to Davidts. The first-person narrator confesses to being
an armchair traveler who makes it his “duty” to visit a different
spot on earth every day—preferably an exotic one. He travels with his
feet on the ground following “the nuptials of water and earth.”

Obviously the prose is poetic, the imagination unfettered. The young
traveler encountered by the narrator is by turns a Robinson Crusoe, a
little prince, and a lost child. Where did “this strange youngster”
come from, asks the narrator: “Unfortunately my new friend was not in
the least loquacious and he often evaded my questions by asking others
of his own.” The narrator accepts that the little prince comes from
another planet with a population of one.

Marie-Claude Favreau’s black-and-white illustrations are bizarre,
hilarious, and whimsical. Her sketch of an archetypal administrator
hidden behind of piles of papers, his eyes almost closed as he looks
down his long nose at the little prince, is quite perfect. The Return of
the Little Prince is a small gem, a very special book. Highly
recommended.