Cautionary tales

It is bad enough when we learn that Santa Claus doesn’t exist. But later in life there comes another trauma, deeper still: when we discover that the beloved books of our childhood were in fact thinly veiled political theses, laden with economic metaphors and turgid intellectual ideas. My youngest child is not yet two. How long will it be until some clever clogs blunders into the nursery and tells her that The Wonderful Wizard of Oz must be read as an allegorical representation of the debate surrounding late 19th-century US monetary policy — or that The Very Hungry Caterpillar is an ode to Karl Marx?

Fierce Bad Rabbits sells itself as ‘an eye-opening journey through our best-loved picture books’ — a prospect some readers might, like me, resist. ‘Sometimes a tiger is just a tiger,’ as Judith Kerr protested when it was suggested that The Tiger Who Came to Tea was a story about the Gestapo.