Review: This beautifully translated book first appeared in French more than twenty years ago, and the fact that it has at last become available in an English translation hopefully says something about the increased interest taken today, by both publishers and readers, in books written in other languages. If this kind of quality is generally replicated in translated books, it is to be hoped that they will rapidly become more popular.

The point of view in this fairly brief book is shared between a wolf in a zoo and the small boy who spends hours watching him. Each of the participants is able to learn the history of the other from entering deeply into the mind through an exposed eye. The boy closes one of his eyes in sympathy with the wolf, who lost an eye ten years earlier in a fight against humans.

Through the wolf’s eye, the boy sees the wolf, his mother Black Flame, and his young siblings as they retreat from men hunting his golden-furred sister. When she is captured, the wolf rescues her and thus becomes a prisoner himself, landing up in the zoo. The boy’s history, as learnt by the wolf, is even more far-ranging, as he wanders through several different African regions, being befriended by animals such as a camel, a cheetah and a gorilla. At last he meets a kindly human couple, whose name ‘Bia’ with its connotations of ‘life’ is surely not chosen accidentally. They contrast with the self-seeking individuals he has previously encountered and take the boy to the zoo where Pa Bia works. There he meets again the animals from his travels, as well as, through his empathy, encouraging the wolf to open again his erstwhile blind eye and see with it again.

The apparently idyllic ending, when all the characters are drawn together again, should satisfy the young reader or listener, but is unlikely to deceive the older reader into the conviction that everything will be happy ever after. The pathos of the book involves scenes such as the one where the boy loses his family and village because of war, and details like the wolf’s sister never laughing again after his capture. The underlying ecological message is emphasised when Pa Bia points out:

Not so long ago, the forest stretched all the way to the horizon. Today, all the trees have been cut down. And when there are no more trees, it stops raining. Can’t you see there’s nothing growing…(p.98).

But the tone thoughout the book is one of hope rather than despair – we are left with the conviction that values matter and that there is the potential for a deep relationship between nature, animals and humans. The translator, Sarah Adams, has just been given the prestigious Marsh award for her work on this book. In her acceptance speech, she quoted Pennac as saying that this book was his own favourite of his stories, but that it was easier to sell a French car to the Japanese than a French novel to an English publisher. I hope that translations of this quality will mean that books from other nations will continue to increase in their availability to English speaking readers.

 Winner of the Marsh Award for Children's Books in Translation

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  QCA teaching sequence for Eye of the Wolf

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