The Daydreamer

What if our worst fears (or, perhaps, our dearest wishes) actually happened? Right here in the backyard. There's a nightmarish sense of the domestic transformed in these interconnected stories about a 10-year-old loner. When Peter is quiet, it's because he's having "the weirdest" adventures in his head. They're experiences that grow out of the clutter of the kitchen drawer or the bombardment at the breakfast table. He loves his parents, but they crowd him. What would happen if he used vanishing cream? How would it feel to swap bodies with a cat, with a baby, with a grown-up? To actually, viscerally, be those creatures and still have your 10-year-old consciousness? The episode about the defeat of a bully is unconvincing, and at the end, Peter is too articulate about being on the edge of adulthood. But British author McEwan (whose prizewinning adult novels have been filmed) writes simple, visual prose—comic, deadpan, and lyrical—that captures the physicalness of the wild fantasy. The uneasiness remains. Things are put back together, but the world is not exactly right. The illustrations were not seen in galley, but there could be no better expression of Peter's vision than the kind of surreal artwork Browne has used in such books as Changes (1990), where the mundane is suddenly mad. What if . . . ?