The Zankiwank and The Bletherwitch opens with a Ruskin epigraph championing imagination, then immediately plunges into a chaotic railway journey to Fable Land. The narrator's voice is arch and playful, addressing readers directly and piling up absurd details: a Jackarandajam, a Mr. Swinglebinks, and a demon on a bicycle. The prose is dense with alliteration, nonsense words, and sudden shifts from prose to song—a pattern that persists throughout.

The excerpts show a work that is less a coherent narrative than a series of fantastical set-pieces, each with its own logic. The children Maude and Willie serve as straight men to a parade of eccentric beings, from the Winny Weg to the Clerk of the Weather. The tone is consistently light, even when characters are glued to the earth or tumbled into Shadow Land.

Verse as Narrative Engine

Nearly every scene in the excerpts culminates in a song or poem, often several stanzas long. The lullaby “O We are so Sleepy” and the fountain song “In a garden stood a fountain” are not decorative—they advance the mood and sometimes the plot. The Winny Weg’s lullaby actually puts characters to sleep, while the fountain song traces love from youth to old age. This structural reliance on verse gives the book a hybrid quality, part story, part songbook.

The lyrics themselves are metrically regular and rhyme heavily, with refrains that invite chanting. They often comment on the action: “Love is born of the Lily and Rose” appears twice, reinforcing the garden’s symbolic role. The effect is cumulative; the reader is lulled into a dreamlike state, much like the children in Shadow Land.

The Logic of Nonsense

The book’s world operates on a whimsical, internally consistent nonsense logic. In Shadow Land, “there were no shadows now”—a paradox that the text does not explain. The Winny Weg dances a gavotte with cupids; the Zankiwank argues with the Clerk of the Weather. Objects and beings appear and disappear without warning: a fountain “unexpectedly sprang up through the ground.”

This is not the chaotic nonsense of Lewis Carroll, but a more orderly absurdity. The narrator maintains a matter-of-fact tone even when describing the impossible. The effect is that the reader accepts each new marvel as natural. The book’s subtitle calls itself an “extravaganza,” and the excerpts bear this out: it is a performance of fantasy, not a simulation of it.

Illustration and Text: A Symbiotic Pair

Arthur Rackham’s illustrations are integral to the book’s identity. The frontispiece shows “Everybody made a rush for the train,” and the title page features the Zankiwank and Bletherwitch. The list of illustrations reveals a visual narrative that runs parallel to the text: the Jackarandajam, the demon on a bicycle, the Winny Weg dancing alone.

The excerpts do not describe the pictures, but the text often seems designed to inspire them. Scenes like “the frogs playing ‘Kiss in the Ring’” or “children with the oddest heads and faces ever seen” are inherently visual. The book was clearly conceived as a joint project, with Rackham’s images providing the concrete forms for Fitzgerald’s verbal inventions.

Readers should approach this book as a period piece of Victorian fantasy, not a modern children’s story. The humor is gentle, the verse plentiful, and the plot minimal. Pay attention to the songs—they carry the emotional weight. The illustrations by Arthur Rackham are a major draw; seek out an edition that reproduces them clearly. The book rewards dipping in and out, savoring individual scenes rather than following a linear narrative.