SALLY JONES by Patricia Cleveland-Peck

     When I am abroad I often try to find a children's bookshop and look at the picture books. It doesn't matter if I don't understand a word of the text; sometimes, as when reading a poem, it may be something  quite unintended which speaks to me.

     It was on the Åland archipelago in Finland when visiting the wonderful Maritime Museum in Marienhamn that I happened upon something even better than a bookshop - an exhibition devoted to a children's book. It was called  Voyages of the Chief and Sally Jones and was based on a graphic novel by Jacob Wegelius.

   

 At the exhibition, laid out for children like scenes from a play, we saw a very big ship, a bar, a jungle and all sorts of things which seemed to be telling the story of a sailor and a gorilla called Sally Jones. Although it was in Swedish (most Ålanders are Swedish speaking Finns) I bought the book for the sake of its wonderful illustrations. It was in fact the most intriguing graphic novel I had ever seen. It contained hundreds of really striking full-page colour images, which of course helped me to get the gist of the story.

     It was later when the book came out in English as The Legend of Sally Jones that I found it was in fact a prequel to Wegelius' first book about Sally Jones, The Murder's Ape, a whopping 588-page adventure story.

   

 So who is Sally Jones? She is a gorilla who was captured as an infant and grew up amongst humans, most of them maltreating her or thinking of her as a object to be possessed rather than a living creature. Eventually she is rescued by a Finnish sea captain, Koskela.  They soon become firm friends and she works as first engineer on his little steam ship The Hudson Queen. Although she cannot speak she can understand and read human language and indeed later, equipped with an old Underwood typewriter, it is she who writes the novels.  

     

In The Murderer's Ape Koskela is framed for a murder he did not do and the police want to get rid of Sally Jones to prevent her giving evidence in his favour. When he is imprisoned she finds shelter in Lisbon with the kind Ana Molina and, as she is very dextrous, a job repairing musical instruments with Signor Luigi Fidardo. Her aim however is to get Koskela, The Chief, out of prison.  After a while she discovers that the man The Chief is supposed to have murdered is still alive, not in Lisbon but in far-away India. So begins a dangerous and daring quest which takes Sally Jones half way round the world in order to prove her friend's innocence so that they can repair The Hudson Queen and resume their companionable life.

   

 This book is illustrated with detailed full-page black and white drawings which skilfully convey the character of the participants; each chapter header is a smaller drawing and there are intricate coloured maps as end papers.  In none of the books is the setting contemporary for Wegelius has chosen a time, around the 1920s, when  'the world was bigger, things took longer and places looked more mysterious... and more fun.' as he put it in a blog. He loves both writing and illustrating but he finds that writing, which takes him much longer, ' is the broccoli and drawing, the ice cream.'

     

Kind loyal, long  suffering Sally Jones is an unforgettable character and one wonders how Wegelius found her. He recounts how, at a zoo maybe, he looked deeply into a gorilla's eyes as she looked into his. and found what he saw was, 'so near and yet so far...'  In an earlier book a gorilla has played a minor part but, as characters do, this one simply refused to go away until given a leading role. 

 

  The most recent book The False Rose follows the same pattern as The Murderer's Ape and  is another hefty 518 page tome. Sally Jones and The Chief discover a curious rose-shaped necklace hidden on board The  Hudson Queen and in order to find the true owner they set sail for Glasgow where they encounter a dangerous gang headed by a cruel smuggler queen who wants the necklace for herself. Sally Jones is captured and has to suffer a lot before the mystery is solved and she can return to Lisbon and her dearest friends.

   

It is not surprising that these books are popular over a wide age range and I am pretty sure that, packed as they are with adventure, ships, travel, villains, plots and suspense,  they would have the added bonus of appealing to boys as well as to girls.

The Sally Jones books by Jacob Wegelius translated by Peter Graves are published by Pushkin Children's Books