It is not an easy matter to cut a tree down

The Mouse That Roared by Leonard Wibberley
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This is a quick book, light and pretty funny. At least on the surface. But it also has some weight hidden below the surface, more than I recall, and I like that.

I first read this when I was a kid, probably 12 or 13, and I wondered as I reread it now what made young me like it so much. No doubt I had seen the screwball movie just a little before and that colored how I read it, but as an older me I found it rather witty and rather funny but unlikely to appeal to a young person. It did, though; I read the sequels, too. Strange to not understand an earlier version of myself...

In places, the book is deceptively simple. The representations of America and the UK and the USSR that appear here are greatly oversimplified, as if this really were a children's book. Government systems are so streamlined that they appear nothing like the real world. The characters think and act and reason and plan in cartoonish ways. (Grand Fenwick declares war on the US so that they can lose and have the US help rebuild their economy. Checks out.)

But in the midst of silly comedic plotting are discussions and debates about the rights of innocents in a world where a few bad actors can kill us all. It makes the case that humans everywhere, even in small countries, deserve as much consideration as those humans who have atomic bombs:

"You do not know because you do not care about the little nations," Pierce said. "You think that the people who live in them are peculiar and quaint and behind the times and not really important. You forget that they are your fellow beings. You think of them as being a kind of substrata of the human race, of no importance because they have no weight to make felt."

All living things, the author suggests, deserve to live, to have their chance to grow:

"All things which have life seek to preserve it and because of this, one is always in doubt whether he has the right to destroy life when he cannot create it. When we fell a tree, my son and I, we know that we destroy not only the tree but also all its associations with the past, all the pleasures which it might give, if allowed to live, in the future. That is a great deal. It is not an easy matter to cut a tree down."

Well said. To me, that quote alone is good enough reason for the novel to continue to attract readers. That it might amuse is another.

Recommended.

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