It’s a nightmarish scene, but is just the beginning. ‘An evil smelling huddle of gambling dens, gaming booths, dancehalls and taverns… the dancehalls thumped and whistled savagely with tin can drums, reed pipes and matchbox banjos while the dim light of candles through the doors and windows sent bobbing shapes dancing blackly on the snow.’ The mouse and his child are helped by a psychic frog and pursued by Dickensian style villain called Manny rat, who runs a clockwork toy racket out of a rubbish dump next to the train track. What unfolds is a journey so horrifying that one internet commentator accurately compared it to Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. The sights they pass through include a junkyard, swamp and ominously something called ‘shrew war’. It begins with a comforting map that shows the path taken by the conjoined clockworks. One of the books on my slowly depleting list of betterment, I came to the Mouse and His Child with only a little knowledge: A fifty year old classic by one of the greats of children’s (and literary) fiction, Russell Hoban’s story tells of a pair of clockwork mice cast out one Christmas to find their way in an unwelcoming world. 'There seems to be a good deal more to the world than the Christmas tree and the attic and the dust-bin.
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