posted on 12 Dec 2017

Ilias’ Mountain by Lilian Kars & Steffie Padmos

Ilias is a very ordinary boy living in a pretty ordinary town who is getting close to his twelfth birthday. This is a significant date because this is when he’ll have to start carrying his personal selection of stones up his mountain and finding the right place to put them. He’s a bit anxious about this because he’s not really sure what to expect. How difficult will it be? Will he be up to the task? What’s expected of him?

Ilias is also worried because his father also has to take stones up the mountain and it makes him quite unhappy – it’s a burden he doesn’t need on top of his job as a doctor and it has soured his relationships with his wife and his children. Because he’s scared to make things worse, Ilias can’t talk to his father about his fears and so he turns to his best friend in town – the baker.

Ilias does odd jobs for the baker and in exchange he gets the chance to feel wanted and secure and eventually he’s able to confess his fears about the future to his friend. But Ilias is astonished by the response he gets:

“I hate that mountain” he yelled and was shocked by his outburst. The baker did not seem very impressed. He just took another bite from his bread, chewed a while and then calmly said, “No, you don’t.”

He gently put down his coffee and continued: “Sometimes we just have stones to carry. It’s always been like that and that’s how it will always be.”

On his twelfth birthday he gets himself set and resolves to carry his first bag of stones up the mountain. And he hates it; coming back down tired and sore from his efforts.

When the baker finds out about his experience he tells him his own story. What the baker reveals is that, done in the right way, taking your stones up the mountain can be an enjoyable and creative experience. If we just go about the task in the right frame of mind we can make what seems like a duty into something that pleases and benefits us.

This is a revelation to Ilias and totally transforms his attitude to the stones and the mountain:

From that day on the villagers heard whistling or singing on his way to the mountain. It made them wonder, it made them talk. It made them shake their heads and tell each other that they always thought he was a weird kid….

By his thirteenth birthday Ilias is planning something very special – a custom-built watchtower on his mountain so that he can see all around. And he’s got another plan – he’s going to take his dad with him and show him his secret.

This fable or fairy story is about the mysteries (and potential miseries) of growing up and the fear children have about this transition – especially when they see their own parents burdened down with adult cares and concerns. The baker is right of course, we all have our troubles and concerns to carry up our own personal mountain and we all have to find the best way we can of dealing with that reality. You can let all these new responsibilities crowd in on you and make your life a misery or you can embrace the task and turn it into something creative.

There’s more text here than you’d normally see in a picture book and it turns the whole production into something very unusual – a sort of hybrid between a more formal short story and a picture book. The size and shape of the book allows the text to sit easily on the page without crowding out the simple but effective drawings – in many ways each page almost looks like a still from an animation.

I read the book two or three times over the course of a day and I found something new in it each time and, for me, that’s the mark of an interesting and successful book.

 

Terry Potter

December 2017