This is the year of The Hunchback, and fortunately Tim Wynne-Jones has provided young readers with an astringent version of the Victor Hugo story to contrast the saccharine and confusing mess that the Disney corporation made of it. The thwarted love and bitter ironies at the heart of Hugo’s Notre Dame de Paris are in this version as well, and Wynne-Jones doesn’t hesitate to keep the villainous Frollo in his original position as Archdeacon of the Cathedral, rather than removing him to a less controversial secular post. This Captain Phoebus is clearly just out for a good time with Esmerelda; he has no intention of rescuing her with his heroic and faithful love, and he dies of a stab wound at the hand of Dom Frollo rather than surviving to carry Esmerelda off into the sunset. Esmerelda is eventually rescued, by her long-lost mother, and barely remembers to blow a parting kiss to the hapless Quasimodo, who concludes the story with the despairing wish, “Would to God I were made of stone.”

Although presented in a picture book format, this is obviously a story for older children; Wynne-Jones hasn’t concocted any talking gargoyles or mischievous goat antics to soften the grimly romantic tale, and the book is presented as the premiere title in the publisher’s Classic Horror Series. For a short book, there is a complex cast of characters, and sophisticated play is made with the incongruities of physical and moral beauty and deformity: the apparently kindly Archdeacon is a murderous lecher; the hideous but loving Quasimodo wants to save Esmerelda but ends up pouring molten lead on the crowd of her friends who came to help her. Vivid dialogue and powerful, terse descriptive passages support the inexorable movement of the story. Comparing Wynne-Jones’s rich and active prose with the turgid texts of the books based on the Disney movie could be a striking exercise in how good writing works. Slavin’s illustrations do justice to the text, with imaginative use of high perspectives, many details of medieval dress and architecture, and a fine sense of drama conveyed through a muted colour palette by means of gesture and contrast.