The Mysteries of Harris Burdick Ignites the Imagination

I vividly remember the first time I was introduced to an unreliable narrator. I had bought The Princess Bride, the novel, figuring that as much as I loved the movie, I might like the book even better. I read with interest William Goldman's introduction about how he had loved the book as a child but never realized until his adulthood that his father had been reading him the "good parts" version, cutting out gobs of superfluous writing by the flowery S. Morgenstern. Throughout the book, Goldman's asides indicating where he had cut something out strengthened the ruse, and it took a lot of persuading to convince me that he'd made all that stuff up, that he was the actual author and S. Morgenstern never existed.

I felt a flare-up of that sense of betrayal when I read The Mysteries of Harris Burdick by Chris Van Allsburg. If I weren't so familiar with Allsburg's artistic style, I might still be sitting here thinking that Van Allsburg's note, which claimed that a mysterious man named Harris Burdick had left this stack of drawings with an editor by the name of Peter Wenders, was true.

According to the note, each of the 14 drawings went with a story that Burdick planned to bring in if Wender liked his work, but Burdick never showed up again, despite Wender's enthusiasm. His pictures remained in his office, and friends and relatives delighted in using them as springboards for stories; Van Allsburg writes that he hopes others will be inspired as well.

But Harry Burdick never existed. These are Van Allsburg's drawings, each with a title and an intriguing caption. It's true enough, though, that these black and white, highly detailed drawings are meant to spawn stories; there's a place on his website where readers can submit tales of their own, with prizes going to the best stories. The deceptive introduction is much more alluring than a simple "Hi, I'm Chris Van Allsburg, and here are some pictures I drew. I hope they inspire you to write a story or two." So it's okay to get caught up in the fictional mystery, especially if that makes you more likely to pull out a pencil and start writing.

The drawings have a sense of the fantastical about them, encouraged by the scant writing on the opposite page. A boy sleeps under the watch of two balls of light. I would take them to be fairies, but that's only one possibility - and it's anyone's guess as to what they mean by "Is he the one?" I love the gentle wistfulness of Oscar and Alphonse, in which a girl holds a pair of caterpillars in her hand, presumably preparing to let them go, and the idyllic sylvan scenery of The Harp. Then there's the sense of impending doom in Missing in Venice, in which a massive ship comes crashing into a narrow canal, and the unabashed wonder of The House on Maple Street, which is caught in a moment of "perfect lift-off".

These are marvelous works of art, well worth perusing whether you think or yourself as a storyteller or not. Even if you tend toward the latter, you may find that, as Van Allsburg says, it's difficult "to look at the drawings and their captions without imagining a story." Imagine away!