Radio 4 Open Book

http://www.bbc.co.uk/i/80070/

In this episode of BBC radio 4's Open Book, a new illustrated version of A Life of Pi is discussed.

 Tomislav Torjana

In the radio episode the host asks, iis an illustrated re-publication of the award winning novel "an outrageous dumbing down? New trend? The a vision of what's to come? Or just a ploy by savvy publishers to produce gift books for the Christmas market?
Are words no longer enough?"

Presented bellow are illustrator and author reactions to the illustrated adult book.

Chris Riddell, illustrator:
"Anything that adds to the feel of the book as an object, is an all together good thing and is one way in which one can add value to a book tremendously is by the incorporation of the visual."

He suggests a reason to the lack of in book illustration: "The danger almost is to discount the obvious, that sometimes the most obvious thing is the way to go. That's the danger I think with illustration not being more accepted in books, there's a sense that one has to introduce novelty or take an unusual angle. I think sometimes books should just be illustrated directly."

Good illustration should be interpretive, but they also shouldn't overwhelm a text.
In the event of books being more widely illustrated, I think we will think of books as objects of beauty rather than the disposable things that can be throw away after use."

Kate Mosses, Author:

"These images, these chapter punctuations as I tend to think of them are incredibly enriching  for both the reader and also as the writer to put in."
On her novel, Labyrinth  "The illustrations inform the novel and are the landscape to the novel. The imaginary characters move across a real place very specifically in labyrinth. What we were trying to do...was give almost a tapestry, to give a real richness to the experience that people had already imagined in their heads."


Yann Martel, author of Life of Pi
"Illustrations don't compete they compliment the text. Richer way for getting into the text."
"What an illustrated edition brings to a reader is that the illustrations compliment the text, they don't compete. So you read ten pages of text and in doing that you form certain images and these illustrations either confirm what you've read or on the contrary suggest something else. It is a richer way of getting into the text."

 Tomislav Torjanac's expreiance on illustrating The Life Of Pi.
" Doing things from Pi's perspective seemed like a natural thing for me to do. Every illustration is from the point of view of Pi, So you never see Pi, you see what Pi is doing, the reader become Pi. You never see him you see what he's seeing."