by Moe Zilla

Created on: March 07, 2010

Edward Ardizzone was 72 years old when he dedicated this book "to all my grandchildren." It was 36 years earlier that he'd started a series of books about a boy named Tim - shortly before the outbreak of World War II. Ardizzone served as a war artist, then continued his career as a successful author/illustrator for children's books. But in 1972, seven years before his death, Ardizzone finally picked up his pen to write "Tim's Last Voyage."

Like the rest of the Tim series, it's a simple story that gradually finds it way to an ocean-themed adventure. Tim spots heavy waves when he's playing with his two friends, Charlotte and Ginger - but then sees a steamer ship at the dock that's hiring two deck hands. The ship's bosun threatens to beat them with a rope's end if he catches them idling, but it's part of the color of life on a ship. They meet the ship's carpenter, and continue working on the ship's desk.  Until soon, a gale damages the ship's engine.

Even this dramatic turn moves just as simply as the rest of the story. The bosun locks himself in his cabin with a bottle of rum. ("You see he was a coward as well as a bully.") Ginger huddles in the corner of the galley. There's concern from the Captain, the first mate, and the engineer - but soon the ship is taking on water. Tim helps the ship's carpenter sew a sail for the foremast, but it's hard to navigate the ship. In the end it runs aground, and the Captain bravely addresses his crew. "Men, this looks like the end of my dear ship...and it might be the end of us too."

The story is surprisingly detailed, and even the illustrations are sometimes decorated with speech balloons to provide the characters with extra dialogue. But in the end, they're all rescued by another boat, and it turns out they'd run aground near the beach by Tim's house. "Tim's mother made him promise not to go to see again until he was grown up," Adrizzone writes. And he also adds, with an air of decisiveness, that "Tim kept his promise."

"But when he was quite grown up he did go to sea and in time became a very fine sailor..."  

With its dark and vivid imagination, it feels a little like a Sendak story. And in fact, Maurice Sendak himself applauded the author for a "richness and cohesion rarely achieved in picture books of this century," according to the book's jacket. (Writing in Book Week, Sendak argued that Adrizzone "has perpetuated the honorable tradition of English book illustration,  adding sharp strokes of humor and insight that make all his work unusually fresh and immediate..") There's some watercolors in this book, but it's mostly black-and-white illustrations. Sendak ultimately called him an artist "whose work harks back to the great 19th-century watercolorists."
And for "Tim's Last Voyage," Ardizzone contributes one final drawing - of the grown-up Tim. And he tells his readers that Tim went on to be the Captain on a great ship.

"However he always remembered the time when he had been a little boy in a ship, so he was never unkind to his cabin boys and never beat them with a rope's end."

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