Ben Rice: Pobby and Dingan

Knopf

$24.95

Review: Cheryl Pearl Sucher*

Don't let the precious packaging of Ben Rice's Pobby and Dingan put you off. Pobby and Dingan is not a children's book, though everything about it smacks cute - from the flap copy that tells you the eponymous characters are the imaginary friends of 8-year-old Kellyanne Williamson and live in Lightening Ridge, the opal capital of Australia; to the front cover's sun-bleached photograph of a faceless blond girl in a flowered sun-dress holding three lollipops; to the closing shot of the same girl, now clutching the hands of her imaginary friends. It took willpower for me to open the book and read it.

Once I did, I was captivated. Pobby and Dingan is a quirky, spirited and moving tale about the power of hope and the gifts of the imagination.

Kellyanne and her 11-year-old brother, Ashmol, who narrates the tale, have been brought to Lightening Ridge by their prospecting father, who has staked an as-yet-unyielding claim dubbed Wyoming. Their English-born mother supports the family by working as a supermarket cashier, but the town's backwardness has broken her spirit. This languor has greatly affected her daughter who is too ethereal for her rough-and tumble compatriots.

To fill the void, Kellyanne has conjured up her two imaginary friends, who accompany her everywhere.

This childish masquerade becomes serious when Kellyanne's father decides that he will loosen the stranglehold Pobby and Dingan have on his daughter by telling her that he is taking them to his claim for exercise while she is in school. That evening, Kellyanne becomes hysterical. She can't find her friends and berates her father for leaving them behind to die. Then she takes to bed, refusing food and drink until her imaginary companions are found. Gradually, she starts to fade away.

Soon her father is wrongly imprisoned and it is up to Ashmol to rescue his family and sister from oblivion.

Ashmol is this unlikely fable's most likely hero and it is his wise yet naive vernacular which gives this parable its strength and character. He knows that his father "drank too much ... and spent too much time underground in the dark," just as he understands that his frail sister is "a real fruit-loop" and "mad as a cut snake." But that does not prevent him from loving them with abandon. While searching for Pobby and Dingan, he says, "When I was half the way out to Wyoming I stopped and asked myself what the hell I was doing, going looking in the middle of the night for two people who didn't exist."

Still, he continues, realising that the risk of not believing in the imagination is much greater than that of retreating to hopeless pragmatism.

"I'd come a long way since the days when I used to punch the air where Pobby & Dingan were supposed to be. And I didn't want Kellyanne to die thinking I was the kind of Ashmol who didn't believe in anything."

Believing in the impossible is the moral of this little book with its occasional pretensions towards adorable epiphany and its operatic characters who waste on the vine but revive long enough to give orders and carry on intelligent conversations.

The fate of Pobby and Dingan is the parable of dreamers. To negate the imagination is to die. The innocence of this fable brings tears to the eyes of even the hardest-hearted miners.

And if Ashmol can be persuaded, so will you.

* Cheryl Pearl Sucher is a Dunedin writer.