The Leopard & the Lily

William Blackburn is a professor of English at the University of
Calgary.

Picasso once observed that, whenever he painted anything pretty, he immediately painted over it — and, after a time, it came back beautiful. This is good advice for all writers — and especially for those who work in the field of children’s literature — as Joan Clark’s The Leopard and the Lily shows. In outline, the story is promising enough: a leopard, confined in a zoo, escapes in his imagination to a vivid otherworld where an exquisite white lily grows. But the lily rebuffs him, the leopard’s paradise within fails, and he remains a prisoner until a little girl with gossamer wings brings him an actual exquisite white lily. The leopard’s loneliness is well rendered and Velma Foster’s fine illustrations do much to enhance the text; but what could have been a beautiful story about isolation and redemptive love finally achieves only a certain banal prettiness. The story’s optimism is murky; the girl with the lily is a hodge-podge of unassimilated fairy tale elements, most of them as superfluous as her gossamer wings; as a result, the story, however well meaning, is needlessly muddled. Less clutter, and a surer grasp on the author’s part of what her story is trying to do would have made this a better book. C. S. Lewis said that one writes a children’s story only when such a story is “the best art form for what one has to say.” When it is not, as is the case with The Leopard and the Lily, the genre is better left alone.