The Bears’ Famous Invasion of Sicily

The Bears' Famous Invasion of Sicily by Dino Buzzati is a strange and splendid old fable for 9 year olds about an army of bears coming down off the mountain.

What happens

Leander is King of the Bears. Years ago, while he was hunting for fungi on the high crags, two hunters stole his little son Tony, tied him up like a parcel and lowered him down the cliffs to the valley.

Leander went home and told everyone the cub had fallen. He couldn't bring himself to say he'd let the boy be taken.

Then comes a winter colder than any of them can remember. The snow covers the small plants, there's nothing left to eat, and the smallest cubs cry all night with hunger.

Down in the valley the bears can see chimneys with smoke coming out of them, which means somebody down there is cooking.

So they go down. Partly to eat. Partly because their king has never stopped looking for his son.

What they don't know is what men are actually like, or what men have invented to kill things with.

Waiting below is the Grand Duke, a vain and nasty piece of work who once had his own astrologer flogged for predicting exactly this.

The telling is what makes this book so peculiar and so good. It slips out of prose into rhyme and back again, mid-page, and it stops to point you at the pictures. There's a wizard with only two spells left in his wand who is hoarding them in case he gets ill. There's an army of trained battle-boars.

The battle is the thing to check first. It's told in jaunty rhyme, which somehow makes it worse rather than better. The bears have spears against cannon and rifles. The snow turns red. The Duke watches through a telescope his courtiers have painted with a dying bear, so every time he looks he sees another animal cut to pieces, and he hands out medals.

Earlier, the Duke's soldiers go up the mountain and kill every living thing they find, including old woodcutters, shepherd boys and small birds. A child who can't bear animals being hurt should not be given this one.

For a reader who can take it, it's very funny and very sad in the same breath, and there's nothing else quite like it.

One other thing. It was written in 1945 and translated from Italian, so the sentences are longer and more formal than your reader may be used to. It rewards being read aloud.

What to read next

If the part that grips them is animals having to leave home and trying to get somewhere safe, Watership Down is in the library, with the same mix of adventure and real loss.