They that go down to the sea in the ark

Author: By Peter F. Neumeyer

Date: SUNDAY, May 3, 1998

Page: E3

Section: Books

The endlessly fruitful and humorous possibilities of rendering flood, disaster, and the first principles of nautical animal husbandry have captivated writers and painters who, in the guise of children's books, have been able to paint animal twosomes to their hearts' content.

There is much precedent for the season's new crop of Noah books: Right here on my shelf, I see Lucy Cousins's gorgeous ``Noah's Ark'' (Candlewick, 1995), boldly illustrated for ``ages 2 and up.'' Arthur Geisert's ``The Ark'' (Houghton Mifflin, 1988) is on the basic list for my grandchildren's aesthetic education: Geisert's densely linear engravings being revealingly apt both for rendering scrupulous boat design as well as for mammals crowded, insects in jars, and one of the Noahs necessarily shoveling manure. Geisert followed this with a more pastoral -- and thus less dramatic -- sequel, ``After the Flood'' (Houghton Mifflin, 1994).

Hardly in the same league, Laura Fischetto's ``Inside Noah's Ark,'' illustrated by Letitzia Galli (Viking Kestrel, 1989), demonstrates the handicap of a picture-book illustrator deficient in humor, without a sense of anecdote, and with no coherent vision of her story. By contrast, the most deserving Caldecott Award winner in my memory is Peter Spier's ``Noah's Ark'' (Doubleday, 1977) -- a wordless water-colored picture book multiplying its gifts of time and space by the varied size and placement of its panels, establishing narrative tone by color, and astonishing us utterly with its perspectival facility and a quality of virtuoso draftsmanship that runs a historical line from the 18th century and Caldecott himself right into Sendak and Spier.

An unusual achievement is J. Patrick Lewis's ``The Boat of Many Rooms,'' rendering the story of Noah in verse, with exuberant illustrations by the prolific Reg Cartwright, whose monumental figures dance with the light grace that fat folk may display. Cartwright's colors, animals, and settings swell colorfully off the page, achieving the sense of profusion surely characteristic of the Noachian example of what Stephen J. Gould calls punctuated equilibrium. And the entire book -- dust jacket to end papers to illustration -- is given a visual coherence and an almost musical beauty by the modulations of ocher, olive, brown, and russet from Cartwright's palette. As for the illustrative anecdotal wit the absence of which I lamented in Galli's work, here it is exemplified charmingly in touches such as the tiny, ruby-throated hummingbird perched so lightly on forefinger of rotund and Santa-bearded Noah.

Normally, text for Noah picture books is understandably self-effacing. But given that the archetypal Flood story has behind it a weight of myth, music, and literature, J. Patrick Lewis has graced his with poetry -- a form of ceremonial speech. Nor does he structure his loose narrative with obvious Miltonic blank verse, but rather in a light melodic line that changes metrically on each page, while keeping a suggestion of rhyme that should make any reader feel we have entered a world-honored celebration.

Jorge Luis Borges, Argentina's extravagantly inventive surrealist writer, once humorously set forth an imaginary universal catalog in which he divided animals into (a) those that belong to the Emperor, (b) embalmed ones, (c) those that are trained, (d) suckling pigs . . . and so forth. Lizbeth Zwerger, in my choice for book of the year, displays her own almost Mozartian high spirits. In a series of panels visually echoing 18th-century natural-history tomes, she divides Noah's passengers into (a) all spotted animals -- from crabs to Dalmatians, (b) animals whose heads and bodies are of different colors, and (c) animals who have long necks.

It was John Ruskin who exhorted painters to ``treasure your white.'' Lizbeth Zwerger has practiced that counsel for more than 14 years in some of the most gorgeous illustrations ever laid upon the brothers Grimm, O. Henry, Dickens, and, heart-breakingly, Oscar Wilde's ``The Selfish Giant.'' Her watercolors speak sometimes most eloquently in what Zwerger leaves unsaid. In this ``Noah's Ark,'' her pages are fuller than sometimes, and her usual white gives way to subtle tonal gradients evocative of water, sky, and sparse Near Eastern landscapes of dream.

Drawn with emotionally charged expression, Zwerger's human beings bespeak the bone-deep universal humanity we recognize in archetypal figure sculpture of Henry Moore and Leonard Baskin. Her animals exhibit the sharp observation and the watercolor virtuosity of the minute nature studies of Beatrix Potter. Zwerger's humor sheds gentle light into cozy odd corners; she has a sense for animals peeking around corners, and mouse tails poking from boxes. And when the whole ark is full, ready to sail, the animals crane out the windows watching as the two tortoises lumber up the gangplank.

And with disarming and off-handed nonchalance, Zwerger provides solutions for some of our hitherto most nagging evolutionary puzzles. We could kick ourselves for not having realized earlier what became of centaurs, and why it is that unicorns no longer trot among us.

Nor does Zwerger eschew confronting evil such as drew God's wrath in the old story. In the opening spread, on the right-hand page, is a starkly barren, perhaps Near Eastern landscape with three harshly rectilinear stone towers, chimney-like in proportion, and belching a suggestive, malign white-gray smoke into the pallid sky. At towers' base, the earth is strewn with pale tibiae, a crude pickax, and a scimitar that evokes associations with the iconography of Saddam Hussein. The shadow of an unseen black cloud comes from the left, appearing to move over the entire landscape. In a tiny panel on the facing page, a small, pitiable huddle of people is isolated against a sand-colored plain.

To share visions such as Zwerger's white unicorn mirrored in a sheet of gray rain, her people propelled into their fates by wind-blown umbrellas, the red coxcomb of one rooster, and a gazelle, a fox, and a hare leaping joyously into the air -- for such delights I turn to children's books.