posted on 17 Apr 2016

Pinocchio by Carlo Collodi illustrated by Grahame Baker-Smith

The story of Pinocchio, the wooden puppet with a desire to become a truly human little boy, feels like a story that is a timeless, universal myth. In reality however, it is a tale that only first appeared in 1881, being released in a children's magazine in weekly instalments and was simply called 'The Story of a Puppet'.

For very many of us the image we have of Pinocchio has been thoroughly Disneyfied and, as a result sentimentalised with aspects of the original story emphasised and other, less comfortable parts, dropped. Far from the wide-eyed innocent that we see in Disney, Collodi's Pinocchio is untrustworthy and more than a bit naughty but this is offset by his fundamentally kind nature - even if he has a bit of the devil in him, he is basically good hearted. This, of course, makes him much easier for children to identify with and his constant plea to God to help him be better or to learn the lessons of his transgressions must ring true to many youngsters coming to terms with issues of morality.

Originally, Collodi killed off Pinocchio in quite a brutal way at the hands of thieves and robbers after just eight episodes but this didn't go down at all well with the readers who felt the story had further to travel and weren't afraid to let the author know. So, just as Conan Doyle had to resurrect Sherlock Holmes after his Reichenbach Falls plunge, so Collodi had to conjure up a blue-haired Fairy to save Pinocchio from his hanging.

The episodic nature of the story requires the prose to be fast, slick and tumbling with inventive ideas - hence Pinocchio's growing nose, donkey ears, brush with a giant dogfish and even having his feet burned off. Ultimately, as David Almond points out in the preface to this edition, Pinocchio is a contemporary of Huck Finn and, as such, is dealing with very similar themes and the forces that shape modern childhood.

In this beautiful Folio edition that was published in 2011, Grahame Baker-Smith has produced illustrations that owe nothing to the Disney version and are so much stronger because of that. The drawings have both a very modern and strangely antique feel about them - the potential harshness of Pinocchio's life and the relative poverty of Gepeto's profession as a wood carver are all there in the drawings but don't overpower the essential fairy story quality of the tale.

This is a truly magnificent production but not the cheapest. Sadly, it seems this edition is no longer on the Folio Society list of books in print but copies can be found on the second-hand market but you'll be lucky to pay less than £30 - which sounds a lot but it really isn't given just how fine this edition is.

Terry Potter

April 2016