The Mouse and His Child

by Russell Hoban, pictures by Lillian Hoban

Its publication date of 1967 might explain how I missed this unusual children’s book until now. Or, can it be called a children’s book?

Certainly the characters are the stuff of kid’s entertainment: a windup mechanical mouse and his little mouse son; a toyshop at Christmas with a fancy doll house, a mechanical elephant and performing seal.

Then things get a little darker and more perhaps sophisticated: a rat master who uses discarded mechanical toys to gather spoils from a dump; wars conducted among the hunting birds and the weasels; a fortune telling Frog in a glove; a performance of The Last Visible Dog by The Caws of Art...

Let’s begin at the proper place, shall we? The beginning.

In a toyshop one Christmas, the windup toys are performing for the delight of youngsters visiting the shop. At some point, the son of the clockwork mouse father – who, upon being wound up, walks in a circle raising and lowering his young son on his outstretched arms –breaks the rules of windup toys and begins to cry as he wants the lovely doll house for his home, the elephant for his Mama, and the performing seal as a sister. Crying, he alarms the cat, who jumps, causing everything to fall into a heap and break, and ultimately get thrown away as broken bits of refuse.

In the dump, the evil Manny Rat scavenges the scraps, and restores those mechanical creatures that he can to somewhat working order, and sends them out to gather supplies to keep him and his minions fed and clothed.

Having already taken a slightly dark turn for a child’s book, the tale turns quirkier still, as a frog (“Frog,” and eventually “Uncle Frog”) clothed in a glove rescues the mouse pair, and thus begins a series of strange adventures.

On the snowy slopes of the forest, the shrews and the weasels make a bloody and vicious war, and Frog is carted away (we presume to his death) by an owl. The Mouse and Child are left to the mercies of some creature or another to wind them up so they can continue – eventually their quest becomes to become self-winding, the mechanical toy’s version of a “real boy.”

While winding down to their fate, they encounter some crows busy preparing for their troop, The Caws of Art, the theatrical The Last Visible Dog. This play is built upon the image of a dog on the label of a discarded dog food can which appears holding a tray upon which there is a can of dog food, and on that can is a dog holding a tray with a can of dog food and on the label is... well, on it goes until, yes, the last visible dog.

The play isn’t all that well-received until the Mouse and his Child are sent on stage to save the day, and are eventually rescued and carried off by Euterpe the parrot, who delivers them to the intellectual den of the Muskrat, who begins the scientific exploration of the question of self-winding with formulae such as “Key times Winding equals Go.”

The book is a language-lovers delight, playing as it does with words and phrases, sounds, names and juxtapositions, and as such would make a great one-chapter-anight read-aloud book, where any questions about the “goodies” and the “baddies” can be answered. It isn’t afraid to explore what it unflinchingly calls the hierarchy of nature – in which the smaller and less defendable creatures are gobbled up by the predators, and some characters are downright nasty (while some are delightful and reliably good). And yes, it does end “happily ever after,” though within its own boundaries, and not without one disappointing change of heart at the end.

The volume I read was a paperback edition published by Avon Camelot, with illustrations by Lillian Hoban, but it has been published several times with different illustrators, and even made into an animated film in 1977.

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