12-03-2025
Think you're an expert on gnomes? This book will change everything
The sartorial image of the garden gnome – once so maligned that the RHS banned it from the Chelsea Flower Show – has greatly improved since it emerged that the King has one at Highgrove. At the same time, the gnome in literature has been undergoing its own reinvention. The first references date to the Renaissance, when the Swiss physician Paracelsus described them as 'diminutive figures two spans in height who do not like to mix with humans' – a premise developed in different ways by 20th-century writers such as CS Lewis and JRR Tolkien. But today's gnome has suddenly become cuddly, as proved by a wave of picture books such as The Gnomes and Their Hats (by Prima Jenkins), in which a group of warm-hearted gnomes teach us lessons about diversity and acceptance.
The Gnome Book, by the Dutch illustrator Loes Riphagen, marks another step in the gnome's rebranding. The book is narrated by Kick, who is 'as tall as six sweets piled on top of each other'. 'As you can see, I'm a gnome,' he explains. 'A real one. I'm guessing you think you know a lot about me? Well, actually, you don't!' You can say that again. For, as Kick goes on to tell readers of five-plus, the life of a modern gnome is very different from the fairy-tale image of toadstools and forest glades to which we may still naïvely adhere.
For a start, most of them live in towns: 'There's a lot of space between the walls and under the floors of houses. That's where we make our homes.' And while they don't have jobs, they're ingenious inventors, making motor cars out of matchboxes and aeroplanes out of plastic bottles. At the local gnome school, meanwhile, Kick learns everything from music and art, to more nuanced skills such as communicating with snails by sign language. He's also given lessons in basic survival: the first line of defence, if spotted by a human, is to pretend to be a garden gnome. ('Whenever anyone sees you, you have to freeze and stare into space with a dumb expression.')
But while Riphagen makes play out of demystifying the gnome, the charm of her book (translated by Michele Hutchison) lies in the carefully thought-out details that distinguish gnomes from human beings, which she captures in expressive illustrations. As Kick explains, gnomes have only four fingers on each hand – 'I don't have a little finger like you do' – and their heads 'slowly get pointy as we grow old'. Still, when it comes to affairs of the heart, they're softer than ET. '[They] can't help feeling each other's feelings. So when Mud lost his lucky stone, all the other gnomes in the country started crying.'
Any child who thinks they know all about gnomes will find plenty to challenge their assumptions. And yet at the heart of The Gnome Book lies one of the oldest morals of children's fiction: however great our differences, we're more alike than we think.
