IN the simplest definition, a picture book is, obviously, a book with pictures. It is, however, often much more than this, a fact which arises from its comprising two elements - text and illustration - which can combine to create a complexity well beyond what either can offer independently. That complexity is likely to be increased when the words and pictures come from the one consciousness, resulting in a book governed by a single, central perception.
Babette Cole's Drop Dead (Cape, £9.99 in UK) demonstrates how such a central perception can result in the creation of a wickedly humorous treatment (verbally and pictorially) of a subject - ageing - not necessarily associated with laughter. Gran and Granddad, asked to explain why they are "such bald old wrinklies", take us on an auto-biographical tour, from dribbling and burping via school and university to love, marriage, parenthood and imminent death, cheerfully enough anticipated. Every episode is accompanied by zany illustrations which, while a source of entertainment in themselves, play both with and against the text: the baldness, false teeth and forgetfulness of old age are seen as inevitable, but not as inevitably depressing.
The text of Shirley Hughes's Enchantment in the Garden (Bodley Head. £9.99 in UK), is sufficiently long to be considered a novella, one which possesses a great deal of charm and wistfulness even if we close our eyes to the accompanying art work. But how much more enriching the experience when the eyes are open! A touching story of childhood loneliness and loss has its whole emotional range extended as we witness it unfold in Hughes's meticulously observed and recorded Italian setting. Beautiful houses, gardens and statuary provide the landscape in which the individual and united destinies of young Valerie and Cherubino are played out in terms reminiscent of operatic tragedy.
The tragic note in Brian Wildsmith's Carousel (Oxford, £3.99 in UK) is averted when its very ill little girl heroine eventually recovers her health, aided by the generosity of spirit shown by her brother and her friends. That recovery is signalled when, in the text, prose gives way to rhyming couplets and, in the art, when realism gives way to a sequence of dream landscapes, largely populated by the creatures she has encountered in her reading. The carousel of time propels her towards these fantasy domains, where she recuperates before returning to more familiar surroundings. Wildsmith's versatility is such that the everyday and the imaginary are tellingly juxtaposed, the constrictions of the former set against the exuberance of the latter.
Where the word and picture in Cole, Hughes and Wildsmith work so triumphantly together, they fail to match in Sandy Nightingale's Cider Apples (Anderson Press, £8.99 in UK). The trouble here is with a text which never quite escapes, literally or figuratively, from the series of unyieldingly rectangular boxes in which it is firmly set; there is little here to engage anyone other than the most passive of readers. The full page paintings, however, are vivid and striking and tell better that the prose this story of young Holly's success - helped by a fairy band - in preventing the death of her grandparents' orchard.
With Mark Haddon and Christian Birmingham's The Sea of Tranquility (Collins, £9.99 in UK) we move to that type of picture book where text and illustration proceed from different imaginations. Here, however, they are a perfect combination, in a story where a young boy's poetic dream of visiting the moon (realised to a point when Armstrong and Aldrin eventually land there) is exquisitely captured in a sequence of dream-like images, not least of the lunar landscape. But the real achievement of the book is in its closing pages, where we discover that the boy is now a man, still preoccupied by his sense of wonder at "that tiny, distant world": emotion recollected in tranquility indeed.
The words of Martin Waddell and the paintings by Jennifer Eachus for The Big Big Sea (Walker, £4.99 in UK) touch also on the theme of awe in the face of nature. The source of wonder here is the sea, as visited on one particular night by mother and daughter This is the picture book as visual poetry, with text and illustration which simultaneously capture young innocence and adult experience.