Summary of the novel - In detail.

Kensuke’s Kingdom was Winner of the Red House Children’s Book Award 2000.

Kensuke’s Kingdom is the story of an ordinary boy who is taken on an extraordinary adventure as full of ups and downs as the waves on the sea. In being lost, he finds inner strength and learns to balance his desperate hope for change with acceptance of everyday reality. The story is beautifully narrated in the first person by Michael himself, and includes samples of his drawings.

Michael is eleven when his father loses his job at the brickworks and uses the redundancy money to buy the Peggy Sue. After nautical training with Barnacle Bill, mother and father set sail around the world with Michael and his ‘one-ear-up and one-ear-down black and white sheepdog’, curiously named Stella Artois. Mum is the skipper and Michael is responsible for scrupulously maintaining the ship’s log.

At school I had never been much good at writing. I could never think of what to write or how to begin. But on the Peggy Sue I found I could open up my log and just write. There was always so much I wanted to say. And that’s the thing. I found I didn’t really write it down at all. Rather, I said it. I spoke it from my head, down my arm, through my fingers and my pencil, and on to the page. And that’s how it reads to me now, all these years later, like me talking.

Extracts from the ship’s log, spanning ten months from September to July, describe in words and pictures the thrill of sailing past Africa, playing football in Brazil, spotting sharks, elephants in South Africa as well as the boredom of baked beans. Michael and his family are having a wonderful time.

One night, however, when his parents are asleep below deck, Michael and Stella fall overboard in a sudden gust of wind. They are washed up on an island in the Pacific inhabited by orang-utans. They are left fish and fresh water by a benefactor who remains hidden … until Michael lights a fire. ‘He stood up and came towards me, now out of the smoke. He was not an orang-utan at all. He was a man.’

Although Kensuke forbids Michael to light a fire and banishes him to one end of the island, he continues to provide fish, fruit and water. Michael finds joy in throwing sticks for Stella and swimming in the afternoons but for the most part of each lonely day he sits on a hilltop, ‘looking out to sea and hoping, sometimes even praying too, for the sight of a ship.’ His faith keeps him going.

The poignant smell of vinegar reminds Michael of fish and chips, and his father. But Michael is not home but paralysed and dangerously ill from jellyfish sting. Kensuke has rescued Michael and tenderly nurses him back to health. They form a close bond as Kensuke gently passes on his fishing skills and knowledge of how to survive on the island. Eventually, Kensuke shows Michael how to draw and paint on shells. ‘He taught me all this entirely without speaking. He simply showed me.’

At last, Kensuke begins to speak English and tells his story to ‘Mica’ – about his wife and son, the war, the poachers, and about how he rescued Michael and Stella Artois from the sea. ‘You are like son to me now. We happy people. We paint. We fish. We happy. We stay together.’ Michael is very fond of Kensuke but he cannot simply forget his mother and father and becomes troubled by despair at ever leaving the island.

‘It is easier when you are old like me, Micasan,’ he said.

‘What is?’ I asked.

‘Waiting,’ he said. ‘One day a ship will come, Micasan. Maybe soon, maybe not so soon. But it will come. Life must not be spent always hoping, always waiting. Life is for living.’

One day a ship does come, bringing ‘killer men’ hunting for young orang-utans and gibbons. Kensuke and Michael manage to hide the majority of the friendly orang-utans in their cave but are unable to protect the gibbons.

From that time, Kensuke’s priority is the safety of his orang-utan family. So when the Peggy Sue finally returns to rescue Michael, Kensuke chooses to stay: ‘This Kensuke’s Kingdom. Emperor must stay in his Kingdom, look after his people.’ Finally, Kensuke secures Michael’s promise of silence. ‘I stay here. I live life in peace.’ Ironically, Kensuke has the last laugh. In the Postscript, we discover that Kensuke’s wife and son had not been killed when Nagasaki was bombed. Michael goes to Japan to meet Michiya who ‘laughs just like his father did.’

In contrast, Michael’s mother always knew her son was alive, and had never given up searching from island to island until she found him: ‘Not a miracle, just faith.’

The reader is left to ponder the time frame of the story and decide for themselves if Kensuke was right to remain in his Kingdom.