Walter Moers is a German author and illustrator with something of a niche appeal in his home country. His style is one of children fantasy gone to pot…of once adorable characters now ensnared amidst horrific adventures, and existential crises. “Captain Bluebear”, the tale of a charming nautical bear (who is also, natch, blue) is his most famous creation, and THAT character’s story starts with his family and friends being genocided. so, yah, wacky. RUMO (and his miraculous adventures) run along a similar vein, and in fact take place in the same geographical location: Zamonia, a continent (long sense vanished under the sea) where all sorts of weird animals and characters live out their days, free of the influence of mankind who is, reputedly, doing increasingly dodgy things on the mainland. Ah, wait, but who is RUMO?
Oh, that’s an easy question…see, RUMO is a Wolperting. What’s that, you have no idea what that is? Pfah! A Wolperting is like a dog that can walk on two legs and talks and has two tiny horns jutting out of his forhead. Simple, yes? Oh, and Wolpertings are known for, like, being really good at beating the tar out of things.
Rumo is a young Wolperting who literally just learns to walk moments before being kidnapped by a tribe of carnivorous cyclopses who live on a floating island. There, Rumo makes the acquaintance of Smyke, who is a Shark Grub (which is like a shark but also like a grub. Follow me?). They join forces to avoid getting eaten alive, and then Rumo encounters a city of his own people, and finds love, and a talking sword, and then evil monsters crawl out of the ground, and there’s an intelligent forest and a gremlin with 5 brains and the non-existent teenies and and and…
So, here’s the thing: this book is HUGE. You could debrain people with books like these. As you’d expect, a LOT happens in this book…and I have to admit that the wandering, anecdotal narrative is not always super gripping. Much time is devoted to rather repetitive beatings up of random monsters, which is sorta funny the first time but gets dull after several dozen repetitions. Boring? Well, yeah, it is for a while…but then Rumo finds a delightfully eccentric hound dog who teaches him fencing (who is so good he idly makes ‘swish swish’ noises with his mouth as he cuts you to ribbons) and Smyke sorta kinda accidentally wanders into an H.P. Lovecraft short story (yeeks) and there’s a horrible robot general who starts doing awful things to good people aaaaaaand the story is fascinating again. And then it’s not. And then it is! Then not.
At well over 800 pages, I do feel this book is a bit too plotless to heartily recommend. Moers himself may have quietly agreed: subsequent novels in the Zamonia series tended to be much shorter. I do have to admit, though, that there’s a lot of sheer creativity on view here, and much of it is incredibly charming. Have I mentioned Moers does his own illustrations? Everything he draws is super cute. Yes, even the murderous robot. So, if you have a patient and persevering attitude, you might want to saddle up and venture into the world of RUMO. There’s islands of marvels to be found after all those tedious sea voyages.
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