Books We Can't Quit: The Phantom Tollbooth by Norton Juster

Chosen By: Ally Nicholl

Bullseye Books, 1988

272 pgs/$6.99

I discovered The Phantom Tollbooth at the appropriate age and in the usual way. I was about nine, and it was a battered old copy I came across in the schoolroom shelves during a period of silent reading (a part of the curriculum unofficially known as ‘teacher needs to get the marking done or she’ll be taking it home’).

Choosing a book for silent reading was a serious business. Once I made my selection I was stuck with it until the book review at the end, and the week before I’d suffered through a dismal tale about a young girl’s friendship with a seal so I was desperately in need of something fun. I’d never heard of The Phantom Tollbooth, but it promised fantastical adventures and had a funny dog on the cover.

My subsequent review, which was meant to be a paragraph saying ‘I liked/didn’t like this book because’, ended up more like a dissertation. I clearly felt I couldn’t convey just how awesome the book was without retelling the whole story in a garbled gush. It had everything – a daring quest, a likeable hero I could relate to, endless surprises, quirky humour and edible words. I wanted to be Milo, to find a mysterious tollbooth in my bedroom and go for a drive through a thrilling magical land in my own car. I wanted to conduct Chroma’s orchestra as it played the colours of the sunrise, and wave to the cheering crowds after I helped restore the princesses Rhyme and Reason to the Kingdom of Wisdom. No reading period ever went by so fast.

The book and I kept in regular contact in the months and years that followed. I borrowed it frequently from the school library until I got my own copy, and it became one of those stories I could always turn to if I needed an escape. While most of the books I liked as a kid began to drift towards the basement during my teens, The Phantom Tollbooth stayed put. And now here I am, twenty-one years older and still smitten.

It’s hard not to be won over by a story so full of warmth and wit. I was hooked from the moment Milo and Tock pull up at the gates to the city of Dictionopolis and the gateman finds them a reason for visiting (“WHY NOT?”) as they forgot to bring one with them. The Dictionopolis chapters have always been among my favourites, though I remember they were torture to read in school with an hour till the lunch bell – not just the eat-your-words banquet scene but also the word market, when Milo bites into a letter at the DIY stall and finds it “sweet and delicious – just the way you’d expect an A to taste”. He samples an I which turns out to be “icy and refreshing”, and Tock tries a “crisp, crunchy C”. Even Sesame Street never made letters this appealing.

Juster has often been praised for Tollbooth’s inspired wordplay, and rightly so. I’m as wary of puns as the next guy, but here they sparkle, from the wooden wagon in Dictionopolis (“‘Be very quiet,’ advised the Duke, ‘for it goes without saying’”) to the use of the phrase ‘time flies’ as a literal means of escape. Equally wonderful are all the little details, like the bit in the Digitopolis number mines when Milo drops a freshly-excavated number and the Mathemagician tells him not to worry as “‘we use the broken ones for fractions’”, or in the Soundkeeper’s fortress where handclaps manifest as crisp white sheets of paper, and striking a bass drum with a padded stick produces large fluffy cotton balls.

Whenever I read the book these days, one thing that always strikes me is how relevant it still is to my life. As a boy I found the Terrible Trivium (“demon of petty tasks and worthless jobs, ogre of wasted effort, and monster of habit”) quite scary, with his blank face and deceptive gentlemanly charm as he tempts our heroes into easy but useless work designed to distract them from achieving their real goals. As a grown-up I have to deal with him every day. Even as I write this he’s leaning against a nearby tree, asking if I’d be so kind as to move his sand collection from one pile to another and holding out a pair of tweezers.

Ultimately the story is about the achievement of wisdom and the obstacles that can get in the way of achieving it. We’ve all come across the Horrible Hopping Hindsight, who “invariably leaped before he looked and never cared where he was going as long as he knew why he shouldn’t have gone to where he’d been” and the Triple Demons of Compromise, who “moved in ominous circles … And since they always settled their differences by doing what none of them really wanted, they rarely got anywhere at all – and neither did anyone they met.” The foul, dark things that inhabit the wastelands of Ignorance are creatures we face throughout our lives, and rescuing Rhyme and Reason is a worthwhile quest at any age.

The last time I read The Phantom Tollbooth was a few weeks ago in preparation for this review, and at the time I happened to be in a similar mood to the one Milo’s in at the start of the book – a listless, what’s-the-point-in-anything-anyway sort of mood. By the end I felt like I’d gone through the same transformation Milo does. I love that it still has that uncanny ability to inspire me out of my own doldrums. It’s a call to arms against laziness, procrastination, wilful ignorance and dozens of other things I’m guilty of all the time. It’s also a warm, funny, charming and inventive story that fully deserves its ‘instant classic’ status. I can’t quit it, and I wouldn’t want to.

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Follow Ally Nicholl on Twitter @coulterscandy or visit www.allynicholl.com

Read Juster’s take on creating this “accidental masterpiece” here.

Have a book that you just can’t quit?  Send it to Amye (at) Pank Magazine (dot) com.