Guardian book club

John Mullan on The Snowman and Father Christmas, by Raymond Briggs.
Week one: wordless narrative

Raymond Briggs's The Snowman is such a memorable story in large measure because it uses no words. Even in the first frames, where a boy awakes on a winter morning to find the ground covered with snow and thick flakes falling, the silence is part of the effect. He wakes, looks out of the window, hurriedly dresses, and rushes into the garden. He is absorbed in his own world, cut off by his excitement from any conversation with his mother. Only in one frame might he speak, when he shows her what he is doing by pointing outside, and even here he hardly needs to say anything. In the last frame of the page, she watches from a window as he runs across the snow, his woollen hat falling off disregarded behind him.

The story's silence is enclosing. The sky is dark with snow and light is dimmed to greys and greens. Everything is muffled. The story brilliantly recalls how, with heavy snow, the world is made quiet. Slowly the boy builds the snowman, the process pausing in one frame where he silently eats his breakfast, watched by his mother. All his thoughts are bent on this. Human exchange is at a minimum: on the third page, where he attaches clothes and facial features to the fully formed snowman, he comes back into the house for one frame to ask for a hat and scarf, but this is reduced to the single gesture of pointing outside again. By the last frame of the page the snowman is completed, his benign smile the boy's last thought.

Back indoors, afternoon has darkened into evening, and in every frame, as his parents make toast or watch TV, or later as he prepares for bed, he looks out of the window. It is important that he is an only child, and that his parents, while affectionate, seem elderly, distant. This is the background to the tale's odd melancholy. The wordlessness of the narrative focuses his rapt attention on the snowman he has made. So on the page where he wakes in the night, hurries downstairs, and opens the back door, the final frame - where the snowman cheerfully doffs his hat - is almost not surprising. He and we were prepared for this.

Of course, Briggs is not wedded to wordless stories. Another of his classics, Fungus the Bogeyman, is almost overwhelmed with words. We see the Bogeymen's modus vivendi, and the pictures are encrusted with detailed labels and explanatory panels charting Fungus and Mildew's slimey but affectionate life together. The story is a veritable encyclopedia of Bogey-dom. In Father Christmas, in contrast, the words are important but minimal, and nearly all spoken by the eponymous protagonist. Father Christmas leads a solitary life, up north somewhere with his cat and his dog and his stabled reindeer. He has no one to speak to, so the only words are (mostly exasperated) exclamations. Waking in his striped pyjamas under his thick eiderdown (home comforts tend to have a 1950s quality in Briggs's stories), he looks at the calendar ("Dec 24") and announces, "Blooming Christmas here again!" Words are forced out of him ("I hate winter!" he exclaims as he sits on the chilly outdoor lavatory) or are a self-reassuring solace in the face of discomfort ("Good pot of tea," he says as he pours the boiling water into the pot). The only other voice is the radio, which drives him to even greater grumpiness.

In The Snowman, the absence of any words suits the magical communication between snowman and boy. Does the Snowman understand English? He does not need to, because he has found a companion who immediately understands his wonder at the human world. In the still hours, the boy and the snowman, communicating by smiles and gestures, explore the house. Its mysteries - light switches, hot water, the freezer - can only be understood by demonstration. In their bedroom, the parents sleep as their son's new companion silently dons an assortment of their clothes. Then, in the sequence that the animated film was to make famous, the snowman takes the boy into the air. He does not need to ask him if this is what he wants. It is simply where the story must lead. Soon the two of them are over some exotic Russian clime - but dawn approaches and they evidently have to hurry back.

The Snowman takes up his silent station in the garden, and the boy watches him again from his window. In the final pages, the boy gets up in the morning and rushes without speaking past his parents at breakfast, only to find, inevitably, that the Snowman is but a pile of melted snow. It is a famous ending, the moment at which the boy must abandon his own special world. But before this there is a more remarkable passage of illustrations: a whole page of 12 individual frames is given over to the boy in bed. Frame by frame the restiveness of his sleep is captured, as the light slowly changes to morning. Watching a character sleep is a strange experience. Here it simply lets us see that this solitary child is possessed by unspoken dreams.

John Mullan is professor of English at University College London. Next week Raymond Briggs writes about the gestation of The Snowman and Father Christmas.