Review: Mary Poppins by P.L. Travers
As a kid one of my favorite movies was Mary Poppins, and when Disney began to push it a few years back, I watched it again to prepare for the two movies coming out and discovered that it was still mostly enjoyable. The sequel wasn’t as good, but I enjoyed Saving Mr. Banks. That said, I also knew that P. L. Travers hated the movie Mary Poppins, and so I picked up the book to see if I could understand better what had happened.
I’ll start by saying that I can understand why she disliked the movie. It takes many of the things in Mary Poppins and uses them, but it has a different tone than the book. Many authors are very protective of their characters and their vision, and P.L. Travers was one of them. That said, perhaps it is because of how I was introduced to them, but I think the movie is better and that is something I rarely say when comparing a movie and a book.
Let’s begin with Mary Poppins. Many of the superficial elements of Mary Poppins character are the same, but at its core they are not. In the movie Mary Poppins has arrived at the Banks house for a purpose and while she teaches the children some, the focal point is to help the parents become better parents. This makes her eccentricities charming. In the book it is made clear that the children love her, but it is hard to see why. She is manipulative, cold, vain and often unpleasant. That said, she allows the children a view into a magical world and their imagination. But it’s more like one of the more neutral characters from Alice in Wonderland than the Mary Poppins from the movie.
More problematic is the plot, or lack thereof, in the book. The movie gives many of the actions a purpose, while the book seems almost entirely focused on random whimsy. It feels more like a collection of short stories about a nanny and the children than an actual book which would be fine as a chapter book designed for young children except that it wasn’t all that interesting most of the time and I think most kids would get bored along with getting strange messages from the stories in which Mary Poppins does not handle children well.
If you’re looking for a classic book to read a child or as I am is interested in the history of fantasy in a wide variety of books, then I’d have to say you can pretty safely skip this. Fans of the movie will be disappointed and I think it will bore children. All that said, her comparison to Yondu makes more sense. They are both terrible with children, though I don’t think Mary Poppins threatened to eat any children in this book. That’s probably in the sequels.
