THE BAD ISLAND

On Steig's "rotten, horrible, awful, burning hot, freezing-cold and rocky island," the first flower is as potent as Thurber's last flower. Seeing its quiet beauty, the "monstrous creatures of one crazy kind or another" are irritated and frightened. and go berserk, killing instead of clawing at one another, no longer satisfied with mere loathing. Until everyone is dead. . . the rains come. . . flowers blanket the island... and the first birds arrive. As a parable this has the flaw of being overdrawn, allowing for no gradation or gradual change — and therefore no redemption; as a story, too, it is relatively static, the first half being a catalog of the evils of the island — a redundancy of grue, at first funny, then repellent, finally tedious. And when the animals freak out, the text takes over, become talky and tendentious and combining current jargon with kiddie talk ("Their whole style of life was threatened and they were all dreadfully nervous, having conniption fits and the worst kind of nightmares"). Actually this is not so much a parable in pictures as a pictured parable, or a labeled, labored lesson.