Owning the Jlly Rger

THE WONDERFUL O (72 pp.)--James Thurber--Simon & Schusfer ($3.50).

Captain Black, a monomaniacal pirate, abhors the letter 0. "I've had a hatred of that letter ever since the night my mother became wedged in a porthole.'' he explains. "We couldn't pull her in so we had to push her out."

With this darkling confidence, readers are off on a voyage into the vast punumbra inside Humorist Thurber's head. Nothing is credible, yet all might have happened at any moment between waking and sleeping. Black and his beastly pirate crew land on the island of Ooroo ("It sounds like the eyes of a couple of ghosts leaning against an R," shudders Black) and proceed to knock the 0 out of everything. They smash in doors and cupboards, rip roofs off houses, dismantle towers, drain pools and ponds. But all they find are opals and moonstones, not the valuable, 0-less gems they seek, such as sapphires or emeralds or rubies.

Black issues an edict: the illegal O, whether upper or lower case, must vanish from the language. Doctor becomes dctr, books are bks, clockshop, clckshp; saying cockadoodledoo aloud would be tantamount to fomenting rebellion. The docile natives of Ooroo, now renamed "R," try hard to talk the new gibberish. A by tells a girl she sings like a chir of riles, and gets slapped. Lads studying Igic at schl recite: "Mist is always mist, but what is mist isn't always mist.'' Peple can n Inger tell rot from root. Babies make as much sense as their fathers.

But there are four 0-words the people refuse to give up: hope. love, valor, and one other that remains not too mysteriously hidden until the final pages. The islanders rebel and, with the aid of beneficent magic, rout the pirates. Like his charming 1950 fable, The Thirteen Clocks, Thurber's new fairy story is written for a special breed of children and adults--those who like their anagrams and riddles sprinkled with poetic dust. Curiously, the author deprives Pirate Black of an argument that might have won the Ooroovians to his cause: even with the abolition of all 0-words, they would still retain life, liberty, and the ability to pursue happiness.

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