Tiger, Tiger

It appears I'm not the only person who's puzzled by the undercurrents of Judith Kerr's The Tiger Who Came To Tea.

But how polysemous is The Tiger Who Came to Tea, a picture book about a tiger that turns up one afternoon on a little girl called Sophie’s doorstep and consumes all the food and drink in the house? Maybe not enough to justify the theory that the mother is an alcoholic who dreams up the tiger’s visit in order to explain the vanishing of ‘all Daddy’s beer’.

If anyone’s an alcoholic or problem drinker in The Tiger Who Came to Tea, it’s the father.

I've read the book to my daughter numerous times, and I always find it to be somewhat unnerving. (Admittedly, though, not as all-out creepy as Love You Forever. Yikes.) The mother's strangely impassive docility as a large carnivorous animal eats every speck of food in the house. The daughter's cloying affection for the ravenous beast. The impossibility of the tiger drinking every last drop of water out of the tap, which implies that it completely drained the well or the municipal water supply. The implausibility of the tiger, having scoured the larder bare, refraining from then turning his gastronomic sights on the mother and daughter. And perhaps most troubling, the father's flippant and unconcerned response, which falls somewhere along the lines of "Eh, no big deal. Let's go out for dinner instead."

It's by no means a stretch for readers to find an alternate, psychological interpretation to this one.