Monkey Business

Patricia Morley is professor emerita of English and Canadian Studies at
Concordia University. She is the author of several books, including The
Mountain Is Moving: Japanese Women’s Lives, Kurlek and Margaret
Laurence: The Long Journey Home.

This large-format picture book has minimal text set in very large print
below colourful and riotously comical illustrations.

The characters (or commentators) in the illustrations are birds and
animals, who are sometimes offstage, and offer their reflections as if
from the wings of the theatre. In other scenes they are in the thick of
things, like King Pigglebottom, who, while he is “on the ball,”
juggles a half-dozen bizarre objects while perched on one foot on top of
the handle of a cane. The cane, in turn, stands on a baseball that is on
grass at the top of a hill. The king’s expression is one of mad joy as
his other piggy foot, fully extended, balances a violin. On the adjacent
page a giant cockroach half-covered by a small rug reads a comic book on
the floor. There are large raindrops on the windowpane, but Gavin (all
the bird and animal characters have human names) is “snug as a bug in
a rug.” The illustration for the MacRhino brothers, who “would often
lock horns over who got to play the pipes,” shows two angry
rhinoceroses in red kilts standing head to head in a pond below a ruined
castle—with one set of pipes between them.

Monkey Business should stimulate children’s imaginations and increase
their sensitivity to the peculiarities of language. At the very least,
it will get them laughing. Highly recommended.