When Laurie Lee was asked at what point his most famous book, Cider With Rosie, began to be seen as a modern classic, he replied that it was after he'd been asked to write a piece for the back cover and had begun it with the words, "This modern classic".
But can merely saying something really make it so?
When Paul, the hero of The Boy Who Climbed Into the Moon, decides he wants to touch the sky, he takes a lift to the 29th floor of his tower block. Here he meets Mabel, who says that she has changed her name to Molly.
"I will tell people that I am Mabel's identical twin sister. I will say that Mabel is on holiday in Barbados."
When she later claims that Mabel is in Moscow, Paul's dad, Alfred, pulls her up on the point. "Moscow is now a part of Barbados," Molly explains. "It is to do with environmental changes and tectonic plates . . ."
A visit to Molly's brother's garden after a back-where-they-started-from ride in Paul's dad's taxi reveals brother Benjamin to wear an up-turned hessian sack (stencilled "Best Jerusalem artichokes") over his head. The text doesn't tell us that the sack is hessian Polly Dunbar's illustration does that, using a photographed hessian texture along with the pencil line and colour. Her wonderfully evocative drawings add yet another dimension to the already wondrous words.
When asked how he's feeling on a scale of one to 10 10 being happiest Molly's brother rates himself a sad, sad, one.
"Hang on!" says Molly. "Silly me! I was wrong, Benjamin. Forgive me! Happy is number one!"
"Really?" asks Benjamin, and he dances a jig, having never felt happier.
The Boy Who Climbed Into the Moon is charming without being twee; quirky without being whimsical; and genuinely thought-provoking without being clever-clever. It celebrates words and ideas and makes one look anew at the world from an ever-so-slightly-different perspective. It's a novel of small ideas which are, of course, so often the biggest ideas of all. "Sausages are better than war". (Who can argue with that, so long as there's a vegetarian option?). Being shot during war is contagious, an epidemic of dying and death will follow. And then there's Paul's theory the most central theory of all: that the moon is a hole in the sky. It's a hole to be reached with a ladder ("£54.99 from B&Q").
And amid all this richness are the characters: endearing, funny and engaging. Don't get me started on the lift inspector! I laughed out loud. Was there anything about the book I didn't like? Well, once Paul reaches his destination, the story briefly veers off in a direction which is, for me, a little out of kilter with the tone of the rest of the novel, but perhaps that's more a matter of personal taste than anything.
The Boy Who Climbed Into the Moon is the third novel for younger children by David Almond Dunbar and Almond previously collaborated on My Dad's a Birdman though a fable such as this one is really for all ages. (The action will simply be studied from different viewpoints, that's all.)
This is the kind of book I've always wished The Little Prince had been. It combines a depth of understanding and vision with a consummate lightness of touch. The Boy Who Climbed Into the Moon is, quite simply, a modern classic. And those are my words, not Almond's.
Philip Ardagh's latest Grubtown Tale, Trick Eggs and Rubber Chickens, is published by Faber.
