Still Scared: Talking Children's Horror

In this episode we talked about The Mouse and his Child by Russell Hoban, published in 1967, and the 1977 animated film of the same name.

Our email address is stillscaredpodcast@gmail.com and we're on instagram @stillscaredpodcast and twitter @stillscaredpod! Intro music is by Maki Yamazaki, and you can find her music on her bandcamp. Outro music is by Jo Kelly, and you can find their music under the name Wendy Miasma on bandcamp. Artwork is by Letty Wilson, find their work at toadlett.com

You can experience some of Stuart's work at: https://www.failbettergames.com/

Transcript

Ren Welcome to Still Scared Talking Children's Horror, a podcast about creepy, spooky and disturbing children's books, films and TV. I'm Ren Wednesday like co-host is Adan Wybray and today we’re joined by special guest Stuart Young to talk about the Mouse and his Child by Russell Hoban and the associated film. Enjoy!

(Intro music plays)

Ren Hi, welcome to Still Scared, I'm Ren Wednesday, my co-host is Adam Whybray and our special guest is Stuart Young, who is a senior producer at Fail Better Games and a friend of Adams from the past! And we've come here today to talk about the Mouse and His Child by Russell Hoban, both in book and film version. This was a suggestion from Stu, who presumably watched it as a kid or encountered it in some way?

Stuart Oh, hi, I’m Stu, by the way! No I've never watched the film, although I'm quite intrigued! I've only read the book, as an older child. My mum only gave it to me when I was about 10 or 11, which I think is probably quite wise.

Adam So is it something that your mum had read when she was young?

Stuart I think she'd read it. I think she read it as an adult because if you think about it, this is published in 1967 so she'd have definitely been a teenager when it came out, at a minimum. So I think she probably read the book as an adult.

Ren And this is Russell Hoban who I only knew for Ridley Walker, which is his kind of post-apocalyptic novel from 1980, which is written in this imagined dialect that's developed in England 2000 years after a nuclear war. So I didn't really know what to expect from a from a children's book by him —

Stuart — Basically the same thing! Yeah, yeah. I would hate to be reductive but yeah, it's quite a similar sort of journey, you know, a kind of picaresque wandering book, isn't it?

Adam There's a fair amount of wandering, but also there's quite a lot where they don't get to wander right, I think. For a book about two clockwork creatures that are set on the journey as tramps and get wound up to go or wandering from one place to another, there's a lot of times where they're stopped in their tracks — because they aren't self winding. And their mission is to try to become self winding.

So there's long sections where they get stuck and they they can't move forward. So it's as much a journey through time and stillness as it is forward movement, which I thought was really interesting. Because normally, whether it's a road trip movie or say, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn or other children's books that take place from one place to another, the character will get to move on on their journey when they want. Whereas with the mouse and his child because they're both clockwork they don't get to move forwards when they they want, they're completely at the whim of nature and beholden to other creatures, which is really interesting.

Stuart Yeah, that's very true. It does sort of compare with Ridley Walker differently there because that takes place in about a couple of weeks, I think. I think there's one major time shift in it. Whereas this, one of the things I did notice, like you, was that there are these sort of like huge time shifts where they just get stuck. And they just have to, you know, live with their sort of locked in syndrome, basically.

Adam Yeah! I think that's what I would have found most disturbing myself as a kid.

Stuart I mean, that’s the real kind of body horror of it and it really is quite like something like The Diving Bell and the Butterfly or something like that, where it gives you an insight into just how terrible it would be, not having any agency.

Ren Yeah, I think if we come back to the horror of it and I'll just give a little introduction to the story to situate people.

So the mouse and his child are a joined pair of wind up toys. The father swings the child in his arms and they dance and they sort of attain consciousness in a toy shop with this ornate dolls house. There's a tin seal with a ball on her nose and and a plush wind up elephant who sings a lullaby to the mouse child when he cries. And they're sold and placed under a Christmas tree and they dance until they're broken by a family cat, then rescued from the dustbin, repaired by a tramp who sets him down on the side of the road and tells them “be tramps.”

They're then intercepted by Manny Rat, who's a dubious fellow who commands an army of windups who he's repaired. He sends them on a mission with one of his rat lackeys to commandeer treacle brittle, but the lackey botches it, gets eaten by a badger, and the mouse and his child escape. And Manny Rat takes this as a personal affront. And from from then on, there's this kind of push and pull where the child's determined to find the seal and the elephant so they can be a family; the mouse father’s determined to become self winding so he's not dependent on being wound up, and the two of them are pursued by Manny Rat, who's determined to smash them to pieces. That’s essentially the setup. And I think we can go back to the to the horror of it because that does come in quite early with the the condition of being a wind up toy and what that means.

Adam I think sometimes this feels very much like a Victorian children's book, and sometimes it feels like it's drawing from much older traditions, like some kind of early modern allegory. And I guess that's just because Victorian kids books drew on older traditions themselves. But it starts out with this very Victorian image of a toy shop, everything brass and gleaming and shining, and then the figure of a homeless man, this tramp outside looking in and the kind of sort of tragical image you'd see on a Victorian biscuit box.

So you immediately have this contrast between the haves and the have-nots and this sort of easeful life inside the doll's house, with these proper little gentlemen and gentlewomen who seemed disturbingly mindless because the tin toys can talk, but the little doll inhabitants of the dolls house just talk in newspaper mumbo-jumbo. Which immediately is quite disturbing because there's this real confusion of agency. Like, OK, these clockwork toys can think for themselves, but they possibly don't have free will because they’re wind up and they could go through their rituals and movements over and over again. But then these other toys who are in the dolls house, they don't seem to be able to think at all.

And there's this clockwork elephant and it says on page six of my copy:

“It was the elephant's constant delight to watch that tea party through the window, and as the hostess, she took great pride in the quality of her hospitality. ‘Have another cup of tea,’ she said to one of the ladies. ‘Try a little pastry.’
‘HIGH-SOCIETY SCANDAL, changing to cloudy with a possibility of BARGAINS GALORE!’ Replied the lady. Her Papier-mâché head being made of paste and newsprint, she always spoke in scraps of news and advertising, in whatever order they came to mind.
'Bucket seats,’ remarked the gentleman next to her. Power steering optional, GOVERNMENT FALLS’.’”

And yeah, that immediately freaked me out. This idea that these dolls just kind of talk minced-up random nonsense words from newspapers.

Ren Yeah, and it makes it in the film, it's quite nightmarish off the bat with with these dolls spouting nonsense and the clock with a face that tells them it's midnight.

Adam Yeah. OK, so the film is worth watching. It's available on YouTube, albeit in quite diminished quality, but it's directed by Murakami Wolf and Sanrio —

Ren — of Hello Kitty fame.

Adam — of Hello Kitty fame, and the sticker books that I give cutesy stickers to my students when they behave well fame. And yeah, you have a certain cutesy design with the the mouse and his child, but it's also got that, I don’t know, ‘70s kids’ animation has this specific hippie-dippie style that is like really hard to pin down but that you recognise it immediately. It looks really ‘70s anyway, you would be able to immediately tell this is 70s animations. It's from 1977 and the most jarring thing about it — I don't know if you feel the same, Ren — is the sound design and music is batshit.

Ren It is arrestingly interesting.

Adam It is wild. It is one of the weirdest soundtracks to a kids film I've ever heard. Like pretty much all my notes are just about the sound design and soundtracks. It's so strange. It starts off with this really awful tuneless existential theme song sung by a child, quite badly.

(Mouse and his Child theme tune plays)

Ren And then there's this big jazz influence because Roger Callaway the composer, was also a jazz pianist. So we got all this kind of jazz stuff going on. And then there's these songs that kind of narrate what's happening in this operatic style, but it’s also really odd.

(Jazz music playing)

Adam Yeah. I'll put an excerpt in. And then when you get to the kind of sewer, well, the junkyard where the rats live, you've got this, I’ve written “swamp jazz”, basically swamp jazz funk. It's this kind of weird Louisiana jazz.

(Swamp jazz funk playing)

And it's pretty avant-garde and discordant. Yeah, really, wild music in places. So worth watching if only for that. I mean, there's other good aspects to it, but the sound design is is really freaky.

Ren Yeah. So yeah, Stu, when you read it as a kid, were there bits that that gave you the horrors?

Stuart Yeah, I mean, I didn't know if you would particularly want to even cover this because it's not ostensibly a horror book, but I think it's probably one of the most horrifying children's books. So like we were saying earlier, there’s the fact that all of the wind up toys can't move unless somebody winds them up and then they can just become trapped for very long periods of time. They have consciousness and they're unable to move. That's pretty horrifying.

There was a lot of it to me that was almost body horror because there's some really quite grizzly descriptions of these wind up toys being smashed, and parts being put back into them and it's never quite clear as to when consciousness enters and leaves their bodies. So you've got them being smashed and disassembled and then being put back together with, you know, in a kind of crap way and they can't move properly. And some of that imagery is really quite horrific.

Ren Yeah. I mean, particularly there was a bit that I was going to ask you to read Adam, which is the elephant’s encounter with Manny Rat on page 27 in my edition. Because I thought you could do a good Manny Rat.

Adam Yes, I think so. Is this where he meets the elephant? ‘Good evening, Madame?’ Yes, OK.

"'Good evening, Madam,’ said Manny Rat. 'Do we find ourselves quite worn out and thrown away? Do we lie here lonely in the wintery waste, and rot? The pity of it!’ The elephant said nothing.
‘Be of good cheer,’ said Manny Rat. ‘Rejoice. Help is at hand!’
Still, the elephant preserved her silence.
‘Surely you can speak,’ said Manny Rat. 'You have heard the striking of the town hall clock, and the hour is long past midnight.’
‘We have not been introduced,’ murmured the elephant, almost inaudibly, as if she hoped to create the illusion that the words had not actually come from her. ‘Ah, but we shall be!’ said Manny Rat. ‘We shall become moreover, close friends and intimate associates.’ He tried the elephant's key but could not turn it. The spring was tightly wound and thick with rust.
‘What better introduction could there be?,’ he said, ‘than to take you apart and repair you so you can work for me?’ He produced a rusty beer can opener from within his robe and undead the tin clasps that held the elephant together.
‘Nothing more to say, Madame?’ He asked as he pried apart the two halves of her tin body. ‘Not so much as a how-do-you-do?’ But the elephant was silent. She had fainted.”

Ren Oh that really gave me the shivers.

Stuart That was an excellent Manny Rat, I think.

Adam Thank you.

Stuart I think Manny Rat is genuinely one of the great villains. I think he's up there with like Richard the Third or Fagin. Fagan is the closest sort of famous villain, I think that he resembles, but he's of his own. His own rat. Yeah. And it's very difficult to even figure out what makes him tick.

Adam Yeah, I mean, he often doesn't seem to know himself what makes him tick. As you say, a lot of the book with Manny Rat there are sections when you move away from the mouse and his child and you've just got Manny Rat on his possibly pyrrhic journey to smash the mouse and his child. And at times he starts thinking to himself: what am I doing? You know, I've been trudging across the wintry wastes for months following this clockwork mouse and child, what was happened to me? You get these really interesting moments of self reflection, but yeah he is my texture of the week, so. I heard you've got a marimba.

Ren Oh, OK.

Stuart Yes, I thought this is appropriate.

Ren, Adam Texture, Texture, of the week. (accompanied by Stuart playing on the marimba, and Adam shaking a shaker)

Ren That's lovely. Thank you.

Adam OK, so I've got one from quite early on in the book, which is the first description of of Manny Rat and I have to say I love the drawings, I think they were by Lillian Hoban, so Russell Hoban's wife at the time, who actually illustrated a plethora of children's books, more prolific actually than Russell Hoban. I really love the illustrations. In my edition, they've got a really nice fine kind of skittish line work, like really sort of skitty little lines. And Manny Rat looks really horrible.

“A large rat crept out of the shadows of the girders into the light of the overhead lamps, and stood up suddenly on his hind legs before the mouse and his child. He wore a greasy scrap of silk paisley tied with a dirty string in the manner of a dressing gown, and he smelled of darkness, of stale and mouldy things and garbage. He was there all at once and with a look of tenure, as if he had been waiting, always just beyond their field of vision, and once let in, would never go away. In the eerie blue glare he peered beadily, and father and son and his eyes, as passing headlights came and went, flashed blank and red like two round tiny ruby mirrors. His whiskers quivered as his face came closer; he bared his yellow teeth and smiled, and a paw shot out to strike the mouse and his child, a rattling blow that knocked them flat.”

And one thing I like in the book is that you get these sort of progressive textures of Manny Rat as his dressing gown becomes more tattered as he progresses on his journey, but also the mouse and his child who sound rather handsome at the start of the book and slowly become corroded and eroded away and. All their fur gets —

Ren OK, I can come in there with my texture.

Adam Oh no, I failed to guess your texture!
So, Ren, I was convinced that your texture this week was going to be the frog glove.

Ren Oh well! I did love the frog glove!

Adam I saw the frog like wiggling away and I was like, oh, that's going to be Ren's texture, surely!

Ren I mean, yeah, that's an honourable mention for sure. But the one I've gone with was the description of the mouse and his child after they have been. At the bottom of a pond for quite some time. And have eventually escaped and says:

"The mouse and his child lay in a puddle on the stone as the water drained out of them. They were spotted, streaked and pitted with rust at all their joints, and the arms they stretched out to each other were naked, rusty wires. What fur remained was black with rot and green with moss and algae. Their tattered ears stood bent and crooked on their heads, their whiskers hugged in limp dejection.”

Adam And what child would want that for a Christmas present! So Stu, do you have a texture?

Stuart Weirdly, OK, so so I I actually wrote down as a quote, but not as a texture: “He was there all at once and with a look of tenure, as if he had been waiting. Always just beyond their field of vision and once let in would never go away.” Which was, I think, part of the extract you read out, right? I think that's one of the defining quotes of the book. I think it's so creepy.

And then the the other thing that I've highlighted was going to be my texture was. “They were spotted, streaked and pitted with rust at all their joints, and the arms they stretched out to each other were naked, rusty wires. What fur remained was black with rot and green with moss and algae.”

Adam I'm glad we anticipated you!

Ren Yeah. Well, yeah, I mean strong textures, you've clearly got got an eye for textures.

Stuart But I think the last one really gets to the horror of it for me that, you know, this idea that obviously even though their bodies are these mechanical bodies, it feels to me like body horror. Like it's thinking about how terrible it would be to have something like that happen to you, and how behind their layers of plush and and velveteen they’re just wires, you know, in the same way as if you strip back ones skin, you just bones underneath. It gave me the same kind of feeling.

Ren Yeah. Particularly the naked rusty wires.

Adam I think it's also there's that horror of not knowing where their essence resides, which is a human horror as well. Like when you try to meditate and work out where exactly your consciousness is. Oh, is it between bridge of my nose or is it at the back of my head. And it starts feeling very weird when you try to really delve into where the ‘I’ is coming from.

Like I've mentioned before, something I really like in Henry Sellick’s works, like Coraline but also Nightmare before Christmas is this confusion about where the consciousness is coming from. So like with Oogie Boogie in The Nightmare Before Christmas, is he a singular being with a kind of single consciousness, or is his consciousness like a group consciousness of all the bugs he's made out of? And then when he falls apart at the end, does that mean his consciousness splits apart? Do each of the individual bugs have like a little Oogie Boogie in them?

And the same as in Coraline, there's the other Mr Bobinski who's made-up of rats, and again, it's like, OK, where is he? Where's this selfhood coming from? And you get the sense with the characters in this, their sense of self being quite at odds often with their external appearance. There's a lovely and strange bit which is I think a character that's completely cut out of the film called Miss Mudd. The mouse and his child are at the bottom of the pond and Miss Mudd at first just seems to be a little kind of squiggly organism, basically. It says:

“‘Maybe I could help you look”, said a small and gentle voice, and maybe you’d talk to me and and not eat me up. Would you, do you think, not eat me?’
'We don't eat anybody,’ said the mouse child. ‘Where are you?’
'Here,’ said the voice, ‘by your feet. I don't have anyone to talk to. It's depressing.’
'Who are you?’ said the father.
'I don't know,’ said the voice. ‘I don't even know what I am. When I talk to myself I call myself Mudd. That’s silly, I know, but you have to call yourself something if you've got no one else to talk to.’ There was a stirring in the ooze at the mouse child's feet, and an ugly little creature rose up and leaned lightly against his leg. ‘What are you?’ it said.
'We're toy mice,’ said the child. ‘Is it Miss or Mr Mudd? Please excuse my asking, but I can't tell by looking at you.’
'Miss,’ said the little creature. She was something like a misshapen grasshopper and was as drab and muddy as her name. ‘I’ll be your friend if you'll be mine,’ she said. ‘Will you, do you think? I'm so unsure of everything.’ ‘We'll be your friends,’ said the child. ‘We're unsure too, especially about the little dogs.’
'I know,’ said Miss Mudd. ‘It's all so difficult, and of course everyone bigger than I tries to eat me, and I'm always busy eating everyone smaller. So there isn't much time to think things out. As she spoke she flung out what looked like an arm from her face, caught a water flea and ate it up. ‘It's distasteful,’ she said. ‘I know it's distasteful. I've got this nasty sort of huge lip with a joint in it like an elbow, and I catch my food with it. And the odd thing, you see, is that I don't think that's how I really am. I just can't believe I’m this muddy thing you see crawling about in the muck, I don't feel as if I am.’”

And it turns out that - is she a Dragonfly? Yeah, in chrysalis or pupae.

Stuart But again, when she hatches, even that moment is quite horrific. But then, you know, she does have this happy ending where she flies off as as this dragonfly.

Adam Yeah. I mean, quite a lot of the characters actually do end up, delightfully, with fairly happy endings. But some of the minor characters definitely don't. I don't know if that's something that disturbed you as a kid, Stu. There's very much this depiction of nature ‘red in tooth and claw’.

Ren The weasels, for example.

**Adam ** You'll find that minor characters are often dispatched, like Animals of Farthing Wood style.

Stuart Yeah, it's very unafraid, particularly for a children's book, to just outright kill characters a lot. And what's interesting is that you know, you were talking a little bit before about the sentience of the clockwork and where that sentience originates, but the animals in the story actually think of themselves as above the clockwork — they don't think the clockworks are even really alive. They regard them as sort of robots or something like that. But the animals are also very mortal in a way that the clockworks have some kind of level of robustness or, semi immortality if you fix them. So the animals, the flesh and blood animals are constantly eating each other and killing each other. So I actually wrote down a list of them — I’m not going to read them all — but I've written a list of all the terrible violence.

Adam Oh, please do.

Stuart But it's really quite shocking. So on page 31, we have an explicit use of the word ‘slaves’, which isn't, I suppose, violence, well — it is in a way but nobody dies. Then on page 34, this is our first real death where Ralphie, who's Manny Rat’s useless sidekick is killed unceremoniously by being eaten by a badger. On Page 51 a very sympathetic child shrew character is killed by a spear through the throat. Which Russell Hoban explicitly details, that it’s through his throat. And that is very similar to Ridley Walker and this kind of sudden and shocking violence. There are other shrews killed during the shrew war as well. Oh, here are some lovely, haunting descriptions of the dead. “Their open eyes, fast glazing in the moonlight. The mouse child stared beyond his father's shoulder at the astonishing stillness of the dead.” This is after the aftermath of the shrew war. Then all of the shrews, even the victors, are suddenly killed by weasels. And then the weasels are both killed by an owl.

Ren And the way the description of the weasels being killed, is “They nuzzled each other affectionately as they ran, and their heads were so close together that when the horned owl swooped down out of the moonlight, his talons pierced both brains at once.”

Stuart Yeah, because these weasels, you know, again, the weasels are weirdly depicted in this quite sympathetic way where they're like a married couple and they're like, oh, this is a good place for hunting these delicious shrews. And so the perspective zooms up to the weasels who've just eaten all of these shrews, the shrews who are very violent and warlike themselves and are killing each other. But then your sympathy turns for a moment to these weasels who've just committed this shrew genocide. And then suddenly they get destroyed by this owl. And the perspective shifts to the owl. And then later on — I mean, I really can't go on because there's just so much of it. But it's it's as brutal as Watership Down, but explicitly a children's book.

I thought particularly reading this is a child, some of the humour I got — like, you know, the dolls speaking in newspapers or the elephant being pretentious and house proud are things that did register with me as a child. But on page 62 there's a bit where a theatrical troop appear called the ‘Caws of Art’, caws spelt like —

Adam (Richard Herring voice) — CAWS like a bird! Like a bird!

Stuart Like a bird! Would you like to to explain that niche reference?

Adam No, no, I have to make a reference to This Morning of Richard Not Judy every episode. So it's fine. Listeners should be on board with it by now.

Stuart OK, but yeah, the Caws of Art, as in crows’ caws of art, are a theatrical troop who perform what appears to be a parody of Samuel Beckett.

Adam What, you didn't get the extended parody of Endgame as a child Stu? Come on.

Stuart No, I didn't at all. Obviously! Which turns out to have been written by another character in the book, which I think is the turtle at the bottom of the pond.

Adam Yes, snapping turtle.

Stuart There's a riot, there's more violence there. One of their performers, the rabbit, is killed. I'm pretty sure that quite a few of the rest of them are killed. The rest of the audience abandon themselves to the general riot and thereby purge themselves of all remaining pity and terror. A reference to Aristotelian catharsis. And of course, none of this you get as a child, obviously.

Ren And this comes across completely inexplicable in the film. I think the film is quite faithful to the book, but in a way that makes it just quite bewildering on a number of levels because you don't get any of the context. And it's just a big platter of oddness. So I watched the film first and it was like: ‘Well that was very strange.’ Then I read the book and I was like: ‘OK, now I'm starting to understand what's happening’ and then watched the film again and it made a lot more sense. But just the film on its own is a very strange experience I found.

Adam Yeah, I mean, one of the comments on YouTube referred to the play and the tin of dog food that inspires the play, so the play is called The Last Visible Dog. Um, and Ren, do you want to sort of explain what the last visible dog is?

Ren Yes, so. So there's a can of Bonzo dog food, and it has, oh, I'm sure I wrote down a page number for the description of the Bonzo dog food. Oh, page 92 OK. I'll read the description of the dog food.

“Bonzo Dog food, said the white letters on the orange label and below the name was a picture of a little black- and-white spotted dog wearing a chef's cap and apron. The dog was walking on his hind legs and carrying a tray on which there was another can of Bonzo Dog food. And the label of which another little black-and-white spotted dog, exactly the same but much smaller, was walking on his hind legs and carrying a tray on which was another can of Bonzo Dog food. And so on until the dogs became too small for the eye to follow.”

Very much like the the Slush Puppy logo, actually. In the 90's the Slush Puppy cups had had another Slush Puppy cup on them and I remember sitting in a cafe and looking at the Slush Puppies on the Slush Puppy cup and trying to see the last the last visible Slush Puppy. So it's very relatable to me, but.

Adam But you didn't write an existential Samuel Beckett like play called ‘The Last Visible Slush Puppy’.

Ren No, no, I didn't.

Stuart But obviously that's sort of philosophical exploration as a child was effective and it did strike me as being, you know, a thought provoking meditation on infinity and recursion and stuff. But obviously the things like the Caws of Art scene is supposed to be humorous, right? There's lots of bits of it that are humorous. I think they are quite funny. But the things with the cause of the Caws of Art scene in particular, the idea is that they're performing this philosophical play based on the last visible dog that is a sort of Beckett parody. And the idea is that they're performing it in front of these ingrate, rough and ready groundling animals who just turn it into a literal riot, which is quite a funny idea, but to me as a child, it just horrific and motiveless, very sudden violence. I didn’t get any of these jokes.

Adam I think there's an autobiographical element to it as well, because reading Russell Hoban's Wikipedia entry it said his father was the director of the Drama Guild of the Labour Institute of the Workmen's Circle of Philadelphia.

Stuart I'm sure they were a rough crowd, but I don't know if they ever actually murdered the performers!

Adam Yeah, I mean, I don't know how how the Labour Institute of the Workmen Circle of Philadelphia responded to Samuel Beckett, but I did wonder if this was, you know, the young Russell Hoban seeing his dad put on Endgame in Philadelphia. And maybe that's how the crowd responded.

Stuart I did find his background quite interesting because another thing I assumed as a child was that this was British. Like, it's got a very British sensibility to it.

Adam Because it has, it does. That's why I said it remind me almost of Victorian literature. Obviously there's Alice in Wonderland aspects, like the sense of whimsy and dread, but also these little philosophical thought experiments that are peppered throughout it, which is very much like Alice in Wonderland, but also even Water Babies weirdly. And Water Babies obviously has this finger-wagging Christianity to it, whereas this is much more existentialist, but again, has these characters who are quite vulnerable and lost at sea. And pathetical, you know, pathetic in a kind of pitiful heart-string tugging way, being put out into the world and having to encounter these different strange characters. That just seems like a really English Victorian kids literature thing.

Stuart And he did emigrate to England. So Ridley Walker is set in Kent, I believe, post apocalyptic Kent, but I think it is somewhere halfway between an American and a British sensibility. Although it is actually set in America, which I didn't realise as a child. But when you actually like look at things like the fauna, chipmunks and things like that, it's clear it must be America.

Adam Yeah, yeah. It's interesting because I, I took George to see a film called Hundreds of Beavers a few weeks ago. Have you seen it, Stu?

Stuart No!

Adam It's thoroughly recommended. It's— OK. So it's done in the style of — You're not going to believe this film exists — it’s done in the style of the 1910s photoplay. OK, like an early silent film. It's set in Canada. And it's about it's about an apple jack salesman who gets drunk on his own cider and ends up lost in the woods. And to marry the love of his life, this woman, her father will only let him marry her if he brings him hundreds of beaver pelts. And from there on in, in the style of a 1910s photo play silent film, it goes into an adventure game/platformer style thing where you've got a kill count for the Beavers in the top right corner of the screen. And he's got to create Wiley Coyote-style traps from the objects around him to kill the beavers who are just people walking around in beaver costumes.

Stuart OK, I think this sounds brilliant.

Adam — Until he's killed hundreds of Beavers. It's very good. But having watched that, during the whole scene with the beavers and the beaver dam, I kept picturing it as this damn film. Basically. It's just quite distracting. But basically they come across this muskrat. They're told by the frog — we’ve mentioned the frog, he starts off as a kind of con-frog who pretends to be a fortune teller but seemingly has some kind of revelation —

Stuart — Professor Trelawney thing where this person is a total fraud most of the time but has this one true prophecy. Which seems to concern the mouse and his child. Sorry, don’t want to interrupt your getting to the muskrat bit, but I am very interested in in what you thought of the philosophy or the theology of the film and the book, because I think that's very unclear as well or at least thought provoking. At least you know, maybe a bit in the eye of the beholder.

Adam Oh, gosh, yeah. I mean, that's why it sort of reminded me of like some kind of mediaeval allegory or morality play, but with a sort of strange existentialist bent.

Stuart It's almost Christian, isn't it? Not in a very explicit way, more: here's the suffering you have to go through on earth in order to get into heaven. That's one reading of it.

Adam The characters they meet, obviously, and the different sort of scenes or tableau they pass through. I guess I'm reminded of a mediaeval allegory, right, because of the way that they seem to stand in for the vagaries of human experience, right? All the different kind of modalities of human experience. So you've got the War with a capital W with the the shrews fighting, and then you have the Caws of Art, so you have art as well. And then you have philosophy. So they seem to move through these different, increasingly rarefied modes of experience and being in the world before they could reach the happy ending.

But so on some level, it feels like some kind of Christian allegory. But it also does feel quite absurdist and almost like Samuel Beckett, just one damn thing after another. Like there's that line in one of Beckett's later works, “I can't go on. I'll go on”, it’s like that. So the impossibility of moving forwards, but then they still move forwards.

Ren Yeah. I thought there was like an almost like a Buddhist resonance with contemplating infinity through the medium of the last visible dog and then the mouse child eventually realising there's nothing on the other side of nothing but us, there's nothing beyond the last visible dog but us.

Stuart Almost on a literal level, they go through multiple lives, right? Because they keep on getting destroyed and put back together again. They go through these stages illustrating different parts of the experience that Adam was alluding to. So yeah, you could also read it as a Buddhist allegory, really.

Adam But yeah, I could see as a child it must have felt really kind of weird and profound without always being able to make any sense of it.

Stuart I still don't think I could really make any sense that it's an adult!I think it is almost nihilistic, you know, but then it has a happy ending and it seems to have like, true prophecy in it in a way that seems almost religious or spiritual in some way. It's very hard to pin down or put into a box what its grand philosophy of the world is, or what Russell Hogan's views on the world are.

Ren I think the thing that I came away with from the book in particular is this quiet sort of dignity and perseverance of the wind-ups in their suffering and you know, eventually reaching this happy ending which is quite a thorough happy ending.

Adam Unlike in the film, right, even Manny Rat is redeemed.

Stuart Yeah, sort of. Is he though?

Ren Oh, well. He was redeemed, then he lapses and then he's sort of redeemed again.

Stuart For the benefit of the listeners, just to summarise, but they eventually find their way back to the doll's house, which has been abandoned. They manage to use their allies, their friends they've met along the way in order to fight a war against the rats who've taken it over and are using it as some kind of bawdy house or something. It's a bit of like the end of the Wind in the Willows where they take back Toad Hall. But they use all their allies to take this back and repair the house and everything like that. And all of the clock works get to live there happily. And Manny Rat gets to live there happily, even though he's the antagonist and he's a person they were fighting against.

He gets all of his teeth knocked out. Again, in another sort quite horrific little incident, but he's this sort of broken rat who appears to be completely harmless, so they allow him in. And the mouse child with his infinite trust and goodness even refers to him as ‘Uncle Manny’ because he refers to all of these male friends as uncles.

And Manny appears to be redeemed for a little while, but then he starts getting his old thirst for vengeance against these clockworks who've bettered him back and he comes up with this horrible plot to blow them all up — because he's a talented fixer and electrician. So he rigs the whole house to blow when they connect the fairy lights. But due to complete random chance, this plan is foiled. Something moves the gunpowder out of the way or something like that and the plan doesn't come to fruition. It only electrocutes him. He thinks this live wire is going to destroy the whole house by blowing the gunpowder, but it actually electrocutes him.

And then he comes to consciousness. And at that point, he appears to be eventually redeemed and gives up this vengeance. He sort of takes it as a sign that he was not meant to get the vengeance and that he's meant to be living in harmony with them. But because it's Manny Rat you're never quite sure. Russell Hoban had an unfinished sequel called The Return of Manny Rat so maybe he's back up to his old tricks, who knows?

Adam No, no, I don't think so. I think it's return of the good and kind-hearted Manny Rat. And Manny rat returns to spread joy and benevolence. OK, I won't ruin it for you. I'll let you believe that. But yeah, you can get hold of it though. There's a publication that collected some of Russell Hoban's novels, like some of his novels for adults, I think. And along with this collection is The Return of Manny Rat in its unfinished state. So I am quite intrigued.

Ren And they decide to to make the house a hotel at the end and call it The Last Visible Dog. And they have a sign that has the the picture of the dog and then underneath it says “Migrants Yes” Which is just really lovely. I thought that was great. And so they welcome in all the migrating birds and it becomes a music venue and a theatre where the play The Last Visible Dog is finally performed in full and the snapping turtle comes out of the pond to see it performed and it's it's quite a lovely ending!

Stuart And I believe the Caws of Art get through it in full without any members of their company being eaten or being brutally murdered. Yeah.

Ren But all of that's quite truncated in the film, you don't get any of the Manny rat redemption stuff —

Stuart — which kind of makes more sense as a narrative arc, right? It's a bit unwieldy, it's not a classic structure, right. But I also like that it leaves that ambiguity of not knowing if Manny's been fully redeemed.

Ren I think we would be remiss to talk about the film without talking about the donkey. I just feel like it's important we get the donkey in there.

Adam OK, so this is quite an early scene. Of proper children's horror, actually. So you were already talking about the horror of the clockwork animals being disassembled while still conscious and this is done to a pretty upsetting end early on in the film, where Manny Rat has a band of enslaved clockwork toys who he forces to scavenge for him.

Ren And so we mentioned Coraline earlier, but there's this very Coraline echo where the mouse child sees this band of windups and says: ‘Papa are they wind ups like us?’ And the father says: ‘Not anymore.’ Which is also what's said about the Other Father in Coraline the film when he's turning back into a gourd.

But yeah, the donkey, this is in the book as well, but it's more memorable in the film. The donkey says: ‘I just can't do it anymore’, you know, it's falling to bits and Manny Rat says ‘Ralphie, my boy, he’s spare parts unhinge him.’ And then we see shadows on the wall of the donkey being taken apart and the mouse child says: ‘That was horrible.’ Which yeah, yeah it was! I feel like I've seen that clip before in some kind of compilation of children's horror.

Adam Yeah, yeah. The only other thing I wanted to mention from the film is we have mentioned briefly the muskrat, who was this working-class muskrat who become elevated or possibly has just become quite pretentious and irritating and has become this philosopher, who used to repair clockwork toys but says he's above this now and works in the pure realm of abstraction and ideas. But he resents the beavers who he sees as beneath him but who are able to do rather more and get stuff done.

So the muskrat basically says that he'll help out the mouse and his child and help them become self winding, but only if they help him on this problem he's got, which turns out to be the problem of cutting down trees in order to beat the Beavers at their own game. And there's a song that the muskrat sings, I guess, or is sung about the muskrat, which is like baroque harpsichord music with this operatic voice singing bizarre logic philosophy nonsense.

Ren Yup!

Stuart I should watch the film.

Ren Yeah. Yeah. It's only 84 minutes, it's pretty condensed.

Adam As Ren said, it doesn't make much sense. It's pretty incoherent, but I can definitely see if you caught it on TV as a kid it would be one of those things where you would think for years later: ‘That can't have been real. I must have dreamt that. I must be misremembering that.’ Because the experience of watching it especially — I watched it after reading a fair bit of the book, but definitely like you said when trying to watch it without having read it, I don't think it makes much sense.

Ren Because there's a lot of parody and play with words in the book and the film is also quite wordy, just, devoid of context. It's quite bizarre.

Adam Well, yeah. There's a lot of puns, right. And these quite schizophrenic word associations at times, and playing on words. And in context you can make some sense of it and it's funny, but out of context when this is just dialogue characters are saying it's really confusing.

Stuart You mentioned muskrat, in the book, I don’t know if this makes it into the film, where he has this cod philosophy thing where he will phrase things as equations, things like: dog minus how equals why. And things like that, right? As if this is some sort of formal logic, which is a funny joke and kind of makes more sense in the book. Although again, I guess it's something that probably confused me a lot as a child. But if the character in an animated film is just spouting that, I don't know if he just spouts that —

Adam— he doesn't just spout it, he sings it! This is the stuff that becomes a song. So it's like: (Adam sings operatically) Dog times Why equals Howwww!

Stuart Just to emphasise, this was marketed as a children's book. It's not a case like Watership Down or something where it's like often mistaken for a children's book, but I don't think it was published as one. It was marketed as a children's book.

I've written down a little list of words: Chafing dishes, velveteen, cornices, guidons, catatonic, accretion, demiurge, warp and woof. I think this is one of those things where thank God for the ‘60s because I don't think that you would get away with publishing this as a children’s book now, an editor would make you take all of these words out and probably try and make you simplify the philosophy. And it's a weird one to categorise —

Ren — Do we need the Beckett parody? In this children’s story?

Stuart Can we cut the full twenty pages of Beckett parody from this? No, we cannot! What about this bit where they're stuck motionless at the bottom of the pond for six months just contemplating infinity. Nope, that’s staying in!

Adam Yeah and it really slows down at that point. You really have to sit with them stuck at the bottom of the pond. It made me think a bit of Pinocchio at times and the Disney version.

Stuart It fits in that place of stories about created people, you know? So there's Pinocchio, and it reminded me a lot of AI, the Spielberg film. And this is almost like a retelling of Pinocchio, it very much fits into that tradition. And you see it in earlier fairy tales and Pinocchio and things like that, you know, this homunculi, this created thing coming to life and this horror of well, we've said it before, you know, where is the consciousness? What's the moment of consciousness? It's very interesting at the start because it's very unclear as to when the moment of consciousness is. Whether it's the toy being taken out of the box or being wound — what's the spark of life? There is something existentially horrific about that.

Adam What was interesting as well is that for all there's toys, we don't get any —

Ren — Children.

Adam Well, yeah, we don't really get any children. We don't get any happy playing with the toys. We get accounts of how the toys are disregarded, bust up, damaged, thrown away. It's almost like the opposite view that Toy Story has. Obviously in Toy Story it's all about, you know, the toys could only be self-actualized when they're somebody's toy, right? And the whole purpose of being a toy is to be loved by children, and that's what imbues them with life. Whereas here it seems like the worst possible fate for a toy is to be sold to a kid because they're probably just going to leave it outside to get rained on or throw it down the stairs or sit on it or something.

Stuart Yeah, they get through the bit where the toys are abandoned really quickly at the start of the book. So they're in the lovely toy shop to begin with, then they get sold. We never hear about any children by name or even whether there are children in the household where they are.

But they're Christmas ornaments, right? They're taken out every Christmas, the children are told not to play with them, they're delicate or whatever. They get put back in the box and this is quite horrific in itself, for six years or something like that. They have a long period which is dealt with in a matter of a few pages where they're only ever getting their moment in the sun for a couple of weeks a year and then they're getting locked away back in the attic. And eventually they get thrown out in the in the garbage by adults. There’s no children's love redeeming them in this, they only have themselves, you know, again, it's kind of humanist. I think that's where I landed with it.

But it's almost like, the love of the child and the father and their love for the elephant who the child wants to be his mother, you know, and their love for all of their uncles who are this sort of motley crew of dodgy frogs and you know, people who wanted to eat them but were persuaded not to and stuff like that. I think that for me, ultimately that message, is kind of a message of self-sufficiency and that this is all there is and we may as well be kind to each other.

Adam Yeah, there's a kind of hard won humanism, although not human, ‘toyism’ or whatever. Yeah. Or stoicism, I suppose. Like you said, Ren, there's a lot about them being dignified in their suffering.

Ren Yeah. And right at the end it says. “The mouse and his child, who had learned so much and had prevailed against such overwhelming odds, never could be persuaded to teach a success course. Popular demand was intense, but they steadfastly refused. The whole secret of the thing, they insisted, was simply and at all costs to move steadily ahead, and that, they said, could not be taught.”

Adam Yeah, so no easy answers, kids. It’s just got to suck!

Stuart Do you think that's what's in The Return of Manny Rat? Do you think he becomes an influencer with a multi-level marketing scheme? Manny's protein shakes or something? He's selling rat milk to people.

Adam Yeah, thank you for suggesting it, Stu, because I I don't know if it's one we would have come across otherwise. And yeah, it's a really interesting, really strange book.

Ren Yeah. I really enjoyed it. And I feel like it should be more well known. I mean, I don't know — I'd never heard of it at least.

Adam Yeah, you have to e-mail us American listeners if you'd heard of this before, because I don't know if this is better known, if this is like a children's classic in America and it's just not one that's as well known in the UK maybe.

Stuart I think it's probably just too dark in the final telling, you know, for it to be mainstream. Basically.

Ren I wonder if Robin Jarvis read this and was like right, hold my beer. Like because The Deptford Mice goes further.

Adam “But what if after they died, the enemies wore their skins? That would be worse!”

Stuart Yeah. I did want to, read one quote which was not from the book, but rather from a Guardian article about it, about somebody saying it's their favourite book they didn't read as a child. But the top comment was “People are always trying to tell me what a great book The Road is. And I always want to tell them that The Road is just a really boring version of The Mouse and his Child.”

Adam Yeah, that's pretty accurate. I did like The Road. Did we see The Road together, Ren?

Ren We did see The Road and we laughed for a full five minutes at the Coca-Cola product placement.

Stuart I forgot that!

Adam Is it as good as the Coca-Cola product placement in The Drifting Classroom? I wonder how many post apocalyptic films did Coca-Cola place products in?

Stuart You know, everybody's got to make their way in the world. And even Russell Hoban’s taking bungs from the Bonzo Dog Food Corporation.

Adam That's true. OK, well, let's wrap it up.

Ren All right, I just wanted to shout out Alex on Twitter. Who said after listening to our recent Goosebumps episode, “Justice for Kruger and the Puppet Carnival.”

Adam Awesome.

Ren Yeah, yeah, I agree.

Adam Hard agree. I'll give updates. You know I'm back to school in in just over a week so if Kruger resurfaces I will let everyone know. I hope Kruger hasn't been thrown out in a skip to go on his own Mouse and his Child-like Odyssey of suffering across Ipswich.

Ren Intro music is by Maki Yawazaki, outro musics by Joe Kelly, artworks by Letty Wilson. I have the details in the show notes along with the transcript. Stu, you want to promote yourself at all to our listeners?

Stuart I don't think I've really got anything to promote. I mean, this is not a work activity, but I probably should give a little bit of a bung to the company I work for: Failbetter games. We make games all set in this dark Victorian gothic fantasy universe called Fallen London. The titular Fallen London is a browser game that you can play for free without installing anything. And we also make sort of console and stand alone games like Sunless Skies, Sunless Sea and our latest Mask of the Rose, which is a romance game with a bit of murder mystery set in the same universe.

Ren Excellent, thank you.

Adam So I think Sunless Sea is my second top played game on Steam, or possibly third. It was after the Small World board game, which surprised me because I didn't think I liked it that much, but apparently I do. I think Sunless Sea is better, definitely much better and works really well when played to the Silent Hill sound tracks, I'll say. Though they’ve got good soundtracks though.

Stuart They've got lovely soundtracks. But you know, the Silent Hill they're doing a full full HD remake. Yeah. Sorry, this is completely off topic.

Adam No worries. OK, let's thank you for listening, everyone. Don't lose hope until you see the last visible dog!

Ren Oh, yeah. Thank you for coming on, Stu. It's been great to have you here to talk about The Mouse and His Child. And I'll catch you later, spooky kids.

Stuart Thanks for having me!

Adam Bye!