Michael Morpurgo - singing for mrs pettigrew

A mark of a great story teller is their ability to take you away into magical worlds. They have an ability to breathe a sense of the extraordinairy in the ordinairy world. To remystify the world that has stripped the world of all that is mysterious. Michael Morpurgo is a master story teller, able to reinvigorate the impoverished world with wonder and awe, and transport the reader into worlds that ache with beauty.

singing for mrs pettigrew, is in essence a reflection on the story-makers journey. Morpurgo wants not only to transport readers into his fictional worlds, but in this book he wants to give us an insight into the way in which he sees the world, and what an experience it is to see the world through his eyes, we are taken through a nostagic vision of the past, where everything in the world has a story, a tale waiting to be told. It is a fantastic journey that both inspires, edifies, and brings a fresh view of the world. This is a deeply personal book, and one can feel Morpurgo’s soul in the pages, as he shares stories drawn from his past, and his explaination of them in terms of his writers craft. Reading it one feels like they are getting to know some fairy tale story-teller who wanders the world sprinkling the magic of his words to inspire others. You get a real sense of the love that he has for words, and for stories, you feel the richness of his imagery that entices with metaphors that are subtle yet potent, you feel a real sense that he has brought everything into the story, the characters, the landscape, the situation, the plot all forming a recipe carefully developed organically. It is as if the story has a life of its own which Morpurgo has carefully caught and transposed onto paper, and still it is kicking and breathing on the pages, trying to escape into fertile minds to invoke a magical sense of awe.

The stories are very well crafted. One feels a deep connection to the story, the characters are those that are meaningful, and the treatment Morpurgo gives them reflects his respect and love for them. This is in part due to the autobiographical basis for many of the stories in the collection. He treats themes such as death, loss and tragedy with a sympathetic manner. The giants necklace the story of a girl who gets caught by the sea as she collects shells for her necklace, is both haunting and beautiful. In the mozart question he delves into the past and how we should be truthful about the past through a jewish violinist. Other themes such as that of alienation and loss are treated, yet to look at the themes is to miss the beauty of the writing, each is a gem that is about the story not about a moral or theme, these come along naturally as the story evolves. I believe in unicorns is a story that reveals the authors love of literature, as the town save the books from a burning library in order to keep a treasury of literature. Half a man treats the story of a man deformed from a war, and his coming to terms with his estranged family, through a child’s wonder and lack of repulsion. War and the effects of war feature a lot in his stories in this volume a token of the things that Morpurgo himself understood. The result of his excellent craftsmanship in his writing, and his wonderful ability to conjur eup vivid worlds, results in a book that is both readable, magical and spellbinding. It inspires wonder, and to want to see the world as Morpurgo describes the world.