a boy and his bear will always be playing

[scarfman]

Return to the Hundred Acre Wood by David Benedictus is an entertaining and competent but uninnovative sequel to A.A. Milne's Winnie-the-Pooh and The House at Pooh Corner.

"'Uninnovative'?" you may ask. "What about the new character, Lottie the Otter?" But that's not innovation, it's a convention of the franchise. Each of Milne's two books bring in a new character or two partway through.

As an example, Pooh's entrance into the first chapter is with him discovered at counting his honeypots (and getting it wrong), same as the opening of the House at Pooh Corner chapter comprising the search for Small. Which leads into the next point: the first chapter of Return name-checks several of Rabbit's friends-and-relations from Milne's books, while in the Milne none of Rabbit's friends-and-relations ever rated being name-checked more than once. Owl's Uncle Robert gets the same treatment (now, had Owl instead had cause to revive the necessary dorsal muscles speech, which came up in the Milne more'n once, it'd be less jarring). And these were just the examples I recalled off the top of my head before proceeding to the second chapter.

Benedictus' fascination with Owl's Uncle Robert continues into the second chapter (and the rest of the book), though otherwise things generally improve now that the author's satisfied we know he read the Milne more than once. Christopher Robin, returned during the first chapter from the boarding school to which he'd presumably disappeared at the end of House, decides that there should be a spelling bee between the animals of the Forest*, with Owl the quizmaster. Pooh sits through the event waiting for a bee to show up before the ceremonies are called on account of rain. Then Benedictus wraps up with an allusion to Christopher Robin's braces from In Which It Is Shown That Tiggers Don't Climb Trees.

There's a chapter in which Rabbit tries to organize something. Then there's a chapter in which the weather goes bad and Piglet must do something brave. Actually, come to think of it, there's at least one of each of these in each book of the Milne, so by my argument above those are conventions and I can't gripe about Benedictus using them.

I once read it observed that the only characters in the Milne that weren't based on Christopher Milne's toys, Rabbit and Owl, bore certain spiritual resemblances to Milne's parents. Lottie the Otter, Benedictus' invention, is an imperious snob, which strikes me as an appropriate addition to the cast at this point in the plot, being the sort of personality a boy just home from his first terms at boarding school will probably have encountered in at least one of his teachers. Benedictus even describes her as having "quizzed" Christopher Robin. Then, after I'd composed all this paragraph except the present sentence, I got to the chapter in which the Christopher Robin forms a school out of the Forest's inhabitants, and Lottie does most of the schooling.

Disclaimer: I happened to have accidentally reserved at the library website an audio Playaway instead of a book. Instead of reading it myself I had it read to me by Jim Dale (who, if memory serves, also introduced Harry Potter to me). Any dissatisfaction I may have with Return may be due in part to that Dale doesn't do the same voices for the characters as did Maurice Evans on the phonograph records I had as a child, and probably still have, somewhere. Dale's Rabbit is a Scot and Tigger sounds like Dale is pretending not to be doing Paul Winchell.

Something I'll definitely give Benedictus credit for is his characterization of Eeyore. There's a publishing house out there somewhere that buys rights to popular entertainment franchises and adapts them into plays for kids to mount at school. I read their Winnie-the-Pooh**. In it, Eeyore complains. In the Milne, Eeyore doesn't complain. He looks on the down side of everything, he speaks with heavy irony which still goes over most of the other characters' heads, and he guilt trips. But he never complains. Benedictus didn't get that wrong, and I appreciate it the more having seen it done wrong.

Generally he gets Milne's voice correctly, in fact. I even chuckled when Pooh wanted to get the bees a gift, and decided they probably would like something beginning with B, but he couldn't think of anything that begins with B except bee, and they've already got many of those.

I don't dislike Star Trek V the way the rest of the world came to do two years before it premiered when you learned who would be directing it, but even I recognize that it's inferior material when stacked up against the rest of the series, perhaps even only fanfiction-grade material. Return to the Hundred Acre Wood is the Star Trek V of Winnie-the-Pooh. Yet I welcome it, because I like fanfiction, and it means the ice is broken for others to do more.

* N.B. In Milne - I'm not sure about Disney - the Hundred Acre Wood is only a portion (a wooded portion) of Christopher Robin's animal kingdom, not the name of the total area where the tales are set, which is called the Forest. See Shepherd's inside cover illustration for Winnie-the-Pooh for clarification of any questions.
** I've read their M*A*S*H too. It lost me with the dialog line that started out with the character tag and stage direction, "TRAPPER JOHN (embarrassed)".