The plot is introduced with little buildup, or back story. If the reader responds with impatience at the simplicity, there is still satisfaction in a sound story so simply told. It is like watching well-made marionettes handled by a not entirely expert puppeteer: You see the strings, and the movement, yes, is jerky, but the action still has charm in its complete lack of pretension. To call its action wooden is merely to describe it, and not in a necessarily pejorative way. And yet the shallowness has a kind of handcrafted sweetness.
There may never have been a book more shallowly written, more straightforwardly imagined, with minimal unexpected turns or true surprises. The answer is that the book is a fascinating exercise in exactly the poetic benefits - and limits - of the literalism that its title promises. So the new reader coming to it must ask not if it works but how its mechanism runs - and, perhaps, whether it will run well for a generation of impatient, fantasy-besotted young American readers. Since its publication more than 50 years ago, the book has sold millions of copies in Europe and been adapted as a movie it is being developed as a series by Netflix.
The question is if it can be delivered or not. But Dragt's book promises to be about a letter, for some king, and that is exactly its chief and only matter. We expect the titles of children's classics to be deliberately intriguing, marked by an unexpected metaphysical juxtaposition - a witch meets a wardrobe - or at least to suggest an intriguing concept, time wrinkling or a philosopher's stone sought. De torens van februari ( 1973 trans Maryka Rudnik as The Towers of February: A Diary by an Anonymous (For the Time Being) Author with Added Punctuation and Footnotes 1975) carries its young protagonist through a portal into a Parallel World, where he is afflicted by Amnesia, for a while.Whether or not it is an entirely admirable thing, it is certainly an arresting thing that Tonke Dragt's THE LETTER FOR THE KING (Pushkin Children's Books, 512 pp., paper, $15.95 ages 10 and up), newly republished in English in a translation by Laura Watkinson, has as literal a title as has ever been imagined by an author for an adventure story. Working name of Dutch East Indies-born illustrator and author Antonia Johanna Dragt (1930- ), in The Netherlands after 1945 most of her work, much of it sf or fantasy, is designed for Young Adult readers, including her best known work, the Dragonaut series including De brief voor de koning ( 1962) and Geheimen van het Wilde Woud ( 1965), a fantasy with a notable focus on issues of duty and honour.
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