Russell Hoban - The Mouse and His Child
published 1967 - read 2005

Largely charming and original late-60s chapter book dealing with the adventures of a wind-up mouse-and-child toy.  Hoban milks a lot of memorable sequences out of his protagonists' central predicament: they're wind-up toys, and unlike the animal characters who become their friends and enemies, they cannot control their own own movements, let alone their own destinies.  This could easily lead to an aimless story, and there are certainly a couple of deus ex machina resolutions, but thankfully the worldly, pessimistic father mouse and the bright-eyed child mouse are clever and resourceful, and so manage to get themselves out of predicaments on their own efforts from time to time.  The overall structure of the book is similar to I Had Trouble In Getting To Solla Sollew as it takes its naifs through a series of situations modeling the travails of Life in The Real World - forced labor, war, the counterculture (!), etc.  Their obstacles range from the one-minded destructiveness of junkyard slavedriver Manny Rat to the long-winded pontificating of a philosopher muskrat.  The best sequence (shamelessly cribbed by Spielburg for A.I.) features the wind-ups trapped for months at the bottom of a pond; prompted by various misinterpreted scraps of advice, the child ends up spending his days trying to find the meaning of life in a pop-art dog food can.  Finally:

The water was especially clear that day, and the BONZO label sharp and well defined.  To the mouse child the endless dogs no longer seemed to be printed on the paper label of a tin can.  He felt them to be real and alive - a pack of ancient brothers through which his spirit, projected from his seeking eyes, ranged forward on its journey.  As in a dream he felt himself move on from one dog to the next until he saw, with sudden and shocking clarity, the last and smallest little dog still recognizable as a dog.  Beyond that were only tiny dots of color.  Still the child stared, and saw between the dots of color blank white space, emptiness that seemed to flow back toward him from the smallest dog out through the largest.

"Nothing," said the mouse child.  "I can see the nothing between the dots.  Nothing at all, coming and going.  Nothing is what is beyond the last visible dog."

If the idea of a kid's talking animal book full of weighty-sounding observations like the above sounds appealing, you'll probably enjoy this.  I certainly did - although the concluding chapters feel like something of a mis-fit, with the characters of the bittern and the kingfisher never established thoroughly enough.  The transformations of Manny Rat are also a bit abrupt - but hey, it's a kid's book.  Overall, thumbs up, and a very interesting piece from Hoban, who I know principally for the beginner-book level Frances the Badger series (also fabulous).

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