The Benefit of Smudging

BALÁZS CZIFRIK

Few books have for a long time been awaited by readers and reviewers with more excitement than the latest verse narrative for children by Dániel Varró, Beyond Smudge Hill. Yes, the author has, with all his 26 years, a visible and palpable audience around him. And anyone who looks up the book will be captivated by it, and will be reassured that it's no hullabaloo of the media that has set the young poet in the limelight.
The story is about the adventures of Andris Muhi and his friend Janka, alias Joanne Smudge, kids that left nursery not long ago. Their ways are to diverge as they will continue in different schools. Andris gets a letter from Janka and decides to pay her a visit beyond the Blotch Ditch, where she lives.
This is the start of the adventure. Andris crosses first Drivelland and meets a great number of queer figures, including Tzar Blotch. This Blotch is the main source of troubles. The ruler of the Ink Sea, he has recently seized also the royal throne of Smudge Hill. To spread his evil might further, his ambition is to inkblotch everything, Drivelland included.
In the meanwhile Andris learns that Janka fell into captivity, so he has got enough challenge to meet. His task is rendered more difficult by the fact that most of the characters prove to be other than they seem, so he has to solve more and more mysteries.
The tale has of course a happy ending: Andris returns victorious, and after some amorous meandering - the rival She is called Demon Babyface - he finds his way back to Janka.
As we can see, the story is not basically new, we find some points of contact with famous tales of the past and the present (we think of tales by Csukás and Ervin Lázár, furtherly of Harry Potter, The Lord of the Rings, or The Never Ending Story).
It is no more than certain turns of the plot, some situations or reminiscences that remind us of the books mentioned above, but even those are reborn and refreshed in the bath of Varró's verses and rhymes. A special virtue of the book is the inclusion of modern notions and devices (e-mail, internet, cellular phone) into the story in a way that makes the young readers understand, for instance, why grandma is sad to get an sms from her grandson instead of a letter.
The adventures of Smudge Hill appeal to children as much as to adults. It was a splendid idea of Dániel Varró, a virtuoso of versification, to permeate his story with fine hints to world literature. The verse tale as a whole is written in the strophic form of Pushkin's Onegin, and its twelve chapters correspond to the twelve cantos of Aeneid. As we probably remember, it happens in the sixth canto of Aeneid that Aeneas descends into the underworld to meet his father's spirit, and to get information concerning the fate that awaits him. And see, it is in the sixth chapter that Andris Muhi crosses Drivelland and visits the pits there. In that perilous region he has two guides - again a meaningful motive! -: Straight and Crooked. In this chapter meter is changed into terza rima, that of Divina Commedia, which is also held to symbolize infinity, while the description of the figures found in the pits is rendered in limericks.
Varró's tale, so to say, transcends the world of "simple illusion", and embeds the world of tales into the universe of literature. This partly gives an additional pleasure to educated parents when they read or explain the book to their kids, partly it prepares the kids in a playful way for a later meeting with the masterpieces in question. The book will be probably appreciated mostly by children between nine and twelve years of age. So we must not expect that young readers will immediately turn to Virgil or Dante, still the book can shape their outlook on classic literature; it can shift "great authors" from a place of venerated and intangible idols to another, where they are accessible even for children. At last - and this is probably the greatest praise - Beyond Smudge Hill is likely to provoke conversations between parents and children, between elder and younger brothers or sisters, between teachers and pupils. I mean the kind of conversation which is dying off these days, which can be simply called human, in which children gain the due attention.