Walter Moers’ The 13½ Lives of Captain Bluebear was described in a Washington Post review as “equal parts J.K. Rowling, Douglas Adams, and Shel Silverstein,” which isn’t too far off the mark. It’s a flight of fancy, a children’s book written for grown-ups, showcasing an amazingly creative mind, but a little light on storyline.

The book follows Captain Bluebear from his first memories as a tiny cub afloat on the ocean in a nutshell through his first thirteen and a half “lives” – a bluebear has twenty-seven, although these are lives in the sense of chapters of his life, rather than twenty-seven separate mortal coils – each of which is sort of a self-contained story. Most take the form of “Bluebear finds himself in a new environment, gets into trouble (generally not of his own making), and needs to escape.” There are recurring secondary characters through several of the stories, and Moers’ facility with creating both secondary characters and unusual places is incredible – for example, the Earspoonlets:

Even more innocuous and equally beneficial to society were the acoustic vampires popularly known as Earspoonlets, which lived on speech. They were little bigger than dachshunds but had hearing organs of which a young elephant need not have been ashamed. They spent most of their time lying around in public places and pricking up their ears – an extremely amusing sight. Earspoonlets were capable of storing up all they heard for months and regurgitating it before it was fully digested. Thus they were much in demand as itinerant purveyors of information of witnesses of arguments. You could easily annoy them by noiselessly opening and shutting your mouth as if talking. This made them bounce around like mad things, vainly trying to catch the words they thought they were missing.

The whole book is deliberately silly, and there’s little narrative greed to drive you towards the end – no big foozle to kill, no major question to answer, etc. It doesn’t have the relentless plot of the Harry Potter books or the cheerful nihilism of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, but instead floats along on its own absurdity. It’s a bit like empty calories, but speaking as someone who loves a rich dessert, empty calories are a perfectly acceptable part of a balanced literary diet – as long as they’re worth it.

Next up: Ian McEwan’s Atonement.