Oliver Jeffers, Meanwhile Back On Earth . . . HarperCollins Publishers, October 2022, 64 pp., RRP $27.99 (hbk), ISBN 9780008555450
The books of Oliver Jeffers charm you wonderfully while they inform you of amazing facts and remind you that life is best lived by the values summed up in Oliver’s Dad’s words: respect, consideration and tolerance.
After the warm and wise Here We Are and the more strangely imaginative and poetic What We’ll Build, this new book continues the illustration style of vivid cartoonish characters with characteristic scribbles and arrows, but this time we’re off on a journey whose purpose is to properly understand, perhaps, how vast space is. What would it be like to travel in the family car with the kids in the back out into space? Well, it would take a normal car 78 years to drive from earth to Venus, and to get to Mercury it would be a 150 year drive. But while we are traveling these impossible distances (for a car), what might be happening back on earth 78 years ago, or 150 years ago, or even 283 years ago (the time it would take to drive to the sun)? Mostly we would find humans fighting over earthly space, that is, over the tiny bits of land they claim ownership over on the planet.
There are many illustrations of historical wars and conflicts going back to the Vikings, the Chinese, and on to a time when nations did not exist, but caves did, and sticks and stones were pretty handy weapons. By now the car has been driving for 11,000 years and is approaching Pluto. But what if we were much too busy surviving to bother fighting wars?
Oliver Jeffers knows that he can’t offer real solutions to the big problems, but against this he knows that if the very young among us can carry certain perspectives and values, with a love of fun and wit and storytelling into the future then we might just stand a chance. Highly recommended for astronauts and readers from the age of five upwards.
Reviewed by Kevin Brophy
