Barry And The Fairies of Miller Street by Barry Dickins & Jenny Lee, Hardie Grant, $24.95
“Where’s Pop?” asks Barry, six and three quarters, of no-nonsense Nan, missing sharing a room with his grandpa who listens to the dog races and fills out the form guides at night.
“Your grandfather’s gone,” replies Nan, who cuts the thickest bread for toast and boils the tastiest ever eggs in the world. “I know, but when’s he coming back?” persists the wee lad.
Set in an idyllic 1957 Melbourne of fruiterers where babies are weighed on the grocery scales and magpies land “black and whitely” on the sill at 22 Miller Street, Dickins delights with games of marbles and honorary swearing in to the diminutive Fairyland in this fun adult novel which has more than a hint of the inner child about it.
Similarities to Lewis Carroll’s whimsical Alice’s Adventures In Wonderland begin with the Diminishing Pole and end with the Expansion Fork but author, artist, poet and playwright Dickins adds a gritty dollop of pathos, as frogmarching developers, with dastardly plans for a shopping mall and one thousand parking spaces advance on the world’s flattest city.
Watch out also for the author’s spidery illustrations, which take on an extraordinary life all of their own.
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