Mary Poppins.

Mary Poppins is one of my daughter’s favorite movies, and I’ve seen it probably 30 or 40 times in the last few months. (“Watcha Poppins?” could get annoying after the hundredth time, except that she’s so excited about it that I could never hold it against her.) So I decided to take a crack at the book on which the movie is loosely based. Mind you, I was unaware that there was a book until a few months ago, and it turns out that there are eight in the series, although reportedly P.L. Travers, the Australian critic who wrote the books, hated the Disney film so much that she refused to allow them to make a sequel.

Even for an adult, the book is fun, although it’s a lot less whimsical than I would have expected from the movie. Poppins herself is not Julie Andrews’ version: She’s quite severe with the children, who are naughtier than their film counterparts, and she’s nowhere near as pretty as Julie Andrews was. Most of the anecdotes in the film come from the book, but with changes:

• Mary and Bert (who barely appears in the book) do enter into a painting and go to a country fair, but without the children.
• Admiral Boom, who appears a few times in the film as comic relief, appears just once in passing in the book.
• The tea party on the ceiling comes doesn’t include the jokes that are central to the film scene. The talking dog that alerts Mary to the problem in the movie is actually part of a different story altogether in the book.
• Katie Nanna has already quit at the start of the book.
• Jane and Michael have twin, infant siblings who get their own story in the book.
• The entire sequence on the rooftops appears to be original – Bert, also called the “Match Man” in the book, is clearly a longtime friend of Mary Poppins’ but only makes his appearance as a street artist, not a chimney sweep.
• The run on Mr. Banks’ bank and Mrs. Banks’ suffragette efforts are original to the film, and in the book, Mary Poppins stays a year or so, rather than the week of the movie.

Yet at the same time, two of the best stories in the book – which is more a collection of stories than a single narrative – is omitted from the film entirely. In one, Mary takes the children to Mrs. Corry’s for gingerbread cookies, only to learn how the stars ended up in the sky. In another, the twins earn top billing, and the reader sees how infants see the world and that we lose something when we grow out of that stage of life.

The difference in Mary Poppins’ character between the book and the film is enormous. In the film, she’s there for the purpose of bringing the slightly neglectful father who is married to his work and has some rather definite ideas about family life back into the loving-father role. In the book, she’s there to trigger Jane and Michael’s imaginations and improve their behavior; Michael in particular has one story where he’s a real brat, and Mary whisks him and Jane around the world visiting “friends” of hers (they’re animals now, but in the original version were apparently people based on unflattering stereotypes).

Unlike the movie, which has a single narrative and draws you into the story and the two main characters (Mary and Bert), the book is just a collection of fun and imaginative stories that doesn’t create the same connection between the reader and the main character. So while I recommend the book because it’s fun and the magical twist in each story is usually very clever, I wasn’t sucked in the way I have been to other great children’s novels like The Phantom Tollbooth.