The Phantom Tollbooth Summary: Milo, Tock and the Kingdom of Wisdom
What it is about
Norton Juster's The Phantom Tollbooth was published in 1961 with illustrations by Jules Feiffer. It is a children's fantasy novel about a boy named Milo who is bored by everything. School bores him. Home bores him. Every activity seems a waste of time.
One afternoon Milo comes home to find a mysterious package waiting for him. Inside is a small tollbooth and a map of the Lands Beyond, showing the Kingdom of Wisdom. The note attached reads: "For Milo, who has plenty of time." A sign warns him to have a destination in mind. He picks Dictionopolis without much thought, assuming the whole thing is a game to be played on his bedroom floor, and drives through in his electric toy car. He comes out on a road that is nowhere near his city apartment.
What follows is a journey through a kingdom built entirely out of wordplay. Milo passes through Expectations, where he meets the endlessly talkative Whether Man. He daydreams and gets stuck in the Doldrums, a colourless place where nothing ever happens, among creatures called the Lethargarians. He reaches Dictionopolis, where words and letters are sold at a market and the king hosts a banquet at which guests literally eat their words. Later he travels to Digitopolis, the rival capital of numbers, and then into the Mountains of Ignorance.
The kingdom is in trouble. Two sisters, the princesses Rhyme and Reason, once settled every dispute fairly. When they ruled that letters and numbers were equally important, the two kings banished them to the Castle in the Air. Since then the land has had neither rhyme nor reason. Milo takes on the quest to bring them back.
The main characters
Milo is the boy at the centre, and the whole book tracks his change from bored to curious. Tock is a watchdog in the most literal sense, an oversized talking dog with an alarm clock on each side. He finds Milo stuck in the Doldrums and tells him that only thinking will get him out. He stays for the rest of the journey.
The Humbug is a blustering insect, flattered into service as a guide by King Azaz the Unabridged, ruler of Dictionopolis. Azaz's brother, the Mathemagician, rules Digitopolis and refuses to approve anything his brother has approved. The supporting cast runs on pure wordplay: the very short Officer Shrift, Faintly Macabre the Not-so-Wicked Which, the Spelling Bee, the twelve-sided Dodecahedron, and Chroma the Great, whose orchestra creates the colours of the world. Alec Bings is a boy suspended in the air who sees through things and who will grow down until he reaches the ground. There is also the world's shortest giant, the world's tallest midget, the world's thinnest fat man and the world's fattest thin man, who all turn out to be one ordinary man.
How it ends
Skip this section if you want the ending fresh. Milo outwits the Mathemagician by proving the brothers have agreed on one thing since the banishment: they have agreed to disagree. With that reluctant blessing, Milo, Tock and the Humbug cross the Mountains of Ignorance and face demons including the Terrible Trivium and the Gelatinous Giant. They reach the Castle in the Air and the princesses agree to return. The demons cut the castle loose, but Milo realises Tock can carry them down, because time flies. The armies of Wisdom drive off the demons. Rhyme and Reason are restored, the brothers reconcile, and there is a three-day celebration.
Milo drives home through the tollbooth and finds he has been gone only an hour, though the journey felt like weeks. The next day the tollbooth is gone, replaced by a note: "For Milo, who now knows the way." It is being passed on to another child who needs help finding direction.
The themes
On the surface this is an adventure story. Underneath it is about the need for a love of learning. Milo applies what he has picked up at school, grows up a little, and learns to love the life that used to bore him. The Doldrums and the Mountains of Ignorance are not just places, they are states of mind. Rhyme and Reason stand for the balance between language and logic, and their exile is what breaks the kingdom.
Maurice Sendak, in an appreciation included in editions since 1996, quotes a critic comparing the book to Pilgrim's Progress: where Bunyan is concerned with the awakening of the sluggardly spirit, Juster is concerned with the awakening of the lazy mind.
Why it still matters
Juster had a Ford Foundation grant in 1958 to write a children's book about cities. He could not make headway, so he wrote this instead. It was his first book. His housemate Jules Feiffer, a cartoonist, took an interest and illustrated it, and Jason Epstein at Random House bought it.
The reviews were strong and the sales far exceeded expectations. By 2021 it had sold almost five million copies. It has been adapted as a film, an opera and a play, and translated into many languages. Critics place it alongside Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. It suits readers who enjoy puns, idioms taken literally and a quest with a point to it, and it works just as well read aloud as read alone.
