There were days when the Father could see and days when the Father could not see in this tale seen through the eyes of the perennial Son as viewed from the trellis surrounded, as if for protection, by an enormous garden. The tale grows in turns and twists upon allusion and reversals, all crisply dramatic and really not so comical as at first glance. We see the son in his childhood with a friend named Reigate and a teacher named Noah, then as a man who has been told all he is meant to feel sudden freedom growing up, the end of dependence the step into the sunlight when no one is taller than...