Interpreting this in choice of accent and tone of voice is a joy: my deeply-voiced bear speaks slowly until he breaks down into booming rage, the frog is French (sorry), the moose Scottish, the turtle from deepest Devon, and the conniving rabbit usually a toffee-nosed drinking pal of Bertie Wooster. I wonder how many times he must have practised doing the eyes of each gently painted creature before he got it right, for in their blankness they contain multitudes: sadness, anger, guilt, idiocy, ambivalence, hatred. Klassen’s genius is in not giving everything away as he passes control of his narrative over to parent and child. At just 16 spreads and 253 words, it’s a bleakly hilarious masterpiece of minimalist plot and maximalist tension. Thanks to my 14-month-old son I have read I Want My Hat Back more times than any other book, yet never tire of it. We never see the act, but when a squirrel asks about its rabbit friend’s whereabouts, the bear too is revealed as a hypocrite and liar: “I haven’t seen him. I’ve encountered few works of art – whether aimed at adults or children – that have shocked me as much as this, with its denouement in which (spoiler alert) the bear realises that the bunny is a fibber and the hat-thief – and he eats it. In his best-selling children’s book I Want My Hat Back, a seemingly lugubrious bear wanders a pastel-coloured landscape populated by a fox, a frog, a rabbit, a tortoise, a snake, an armadillo and a moose, politely asking each in turn if they have seen his missing headgear (each animal replies in the negative). In 2011 the Canadian author and illustrator Jon Klassen sacrificed a rabbit in the name of philosophy and art. In his bestselling debut picture book, the multiple award-winning Jon Klassen, illustrator of This Is Not My Hat and Sam and Dave Dig a Hole, tells the story of.
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