I Want My Hat Back

Number 153

Title: I Want my Hat Back

Author: Jon Klassen

Summed up in one line: Bears, profane Barbies and the forgotten power of Japanese Noh theatre.

Overall, I: hear you saying, “hang on, this is a –picture book-! Are you that desperate to reach your GoodReads reading challenge goal now?”

Well to that I say: Yes, yes always and I already completed my goal, thanks!

I actually wasn’t going to review this at all, because it is a picture book, but a couple of things happened recently and crossed paths in my head and I thought of something quite interesting.

Let’s start with I Want My Hat Back. It’s very simple- a bear wants his hat back. He asks different animals and then in the end (spoilers!) he gets his hat back. And that summary of the plot does nothing to demonstrate how screamingly funny it is. I had a mild fit the first time I read it, and made gaspy gargling noises over it on the second run, which was immediately after the first. It’s just brilliant- the concept, the timing of the jokes, the art, the bear having an existential crisis over a little red hat. It. Is. Gold.

I nearly bought it for myself.

I REGRET NOT BUYING IT FOR MYSELF.

But if pressed to put my finger on –why- exactly it’s so hilarious, I think the answer is the art because it manages to just convey so damn much. Which for cartoons is impressive. It’s even more impressive when the characters have no mouths and remain in static positions throughout the whole book. The only difference is a slight widening or narrowing of eyes. On one page, the bear is tipped horizontal. That is IT for physical depictions of emotion. Just think about that for a moment- think about how much you rely on facial expressions to convey emotional meaning.

Now, I wouldn’t have anything more to add on this, if I hadn’t recently been watching a Youtube show called The Most Popular Girls in School. You can watch it here, but perhaps not a home or in front of impressionable people, vocally talented parrots, etc. It’s basically a rude version of Mean Girls, stop-animated with Barbie dolls and Kens. In the Making-of special, the creators talk about how they debated having mouth-flaps for the Barbies, but ditched that because it looked creepy and it was too much effort on top of filming and recording.

And, as it turns out, it would also be utterly unnecessary. It doesn’t actually matter that the characters all have a permanent pretty smile plastered on because there’s never any doubt what emotion is being presented. In fact you get a kind of face-blindness; you stop noticing the smile. Considering humans are hard-wired to focus on faces and in particular eye shapes and mouth movements- even down to subconsciously noticing micro-displays of emotions- this is a pretty weird effect.

However, it’s not a new one. I have a student who makes traditional Japanese theatre wigs for a living, and recently she’s swapped from making Kabuki wigs to making a set of Noh wigs. Both of these styles of theatre are somewhat in decline in recent years, particularly Noh. They are as difficult for Japanese people to understand as it is for the British to follow high Germanic operas, and young people especially simply aren’t interested. Noh is particularly hard to grasp because the aesthetics of the plays are so far removed from any other kind of art. The lines spoken by a character might not be their own, or might be suddenly from the viewpoint of a neutral narrator. Movements are heavily stylized and slow and to top it all, the actors usually wear carved wooden masks.

Noh is a protected but somewhat dying art. Kabuki does better, if only because the artists enjoy a kind of celeb status. Put it this way, if there’s a Justin Beiber for middle-aged artistically interested Japanese women, he’s probably treading the boards of a Kabuki theatre. Probably in drag, and there’s simply not as much fun to be had in Noh, although it was once considered the pinnacle of artistic expression.

So I’ll leave you with that thought; no pithy philosophical wisdom here, all I have is an observation, that believe it or not, in the grand scheme of the art-o-sphere, angry cartoon bears, crass barbies on You-Tube, and Japanese theatre have a surprising amount in common.

Also, go and read ‘I Want My Hat Back’ if you can. I promise, it’s worth it.

And: But if you can’t you can read an Avengers version of I Want My Hat Back here

War of the Worlds

Number 154

Title: The War of The Worlds

Author: H. G. Wells

Summed up in one line: So a Scientist, a Solider and a Reverend walk into an alien invasion...

Overall, I: think before I make any comments that I give War of the World’s it’s due hat-tip as being one of the precursors of it’s genre and for the basic facts that for it’s time it was leaps and bounds of imagination into the wild. And even now I think if you’re not being forced to read this for a class and pick it apart, its pretty decent reading.

The story goes, (and as it’s 117 years old I think you can allow me spoilers) that a bunch of Martians come to earth, catching humanity by complete surprise. They stomp all over the home counties, slurp on tasty human plasma like we’re walking Capri-suns and then die of the sniffles and athletes foot.

I have to say, I do like the Martians. H.G. Wells goes to great lengths to describe them and it’s effective- you get a really good visual image of some kind of oozing, creepy-ass octopus beast, and he even goes so far as to try and provide some logical sciencey reasons for how they act, and look and relate to the world around them. Of course this is fiction, so all the science should basically be taken with enough salt to cure a moderately sized gammon, but as we’re generally allowed to believe that the narrator of the tale isn’t nearly as clever as he thinks he is and basically enjoys pulling conjecture out of his arse, then the somewhat flimsy science is quite tolerable.

Let’s talk about him. Comparing him to the Invisible Man, who was a ball of rage and chemicals, and the Professor in The Time Machine, who was just reprehensibly useless, I found this character a lot easier to stomach. He at least has a sense of purpose- he’s unsure and prone to misguided titting about, but he kind of has some idea of his next step, even if not his end goal. The other characters still feel rather archetypal; more like tropes than people, especially the religious man and the soldier, and I’m not even sure they do their tropes very effectively either. One thing though- read the Solider’s post-apocalypse plan and play Time Machine bingo, because I’d happily put money that those paragraphs spawned the idea of Eloi and Morlocks and the splitting of man’s evolutionary path.

It’s an interesting mental exercise to try and imagine the invasion happening in modern day exactly how the Martian’s tried to do it in the novel. It would basically boil down to them failing a lot quicker; facebook being flooded with millions of selfies of people with the tripods stomping about in the background, and America would start a special branch of NASA dedicated to sending Mars a warhead with a massive Fuck You written on it. God knows what PETA would do, but it’d no doubt be pretty funny to watch.

As to the ending, well, at first I thought it was a bit lame. The protagonist waddles around in swamps waxing philosophical and waning woe is me, and then the Martian’s just die of the flu and no one really has to do anything about anything after all. As with Dracula, and being the spoilt modern Blockbuster-raised child that I am, I felt a bit cheated of my hoped-for blaze of glory. He could at least have died interestingly, on the brink of realizing that there was hope for humanity, but you’re never quite sure. Thinking about it now though, I guess I don’t mind as such. It’s no doubt more realistic and at the bones of it, a damn British approach to most issues. Have a cup of tea dear and wait- this silly invasion business’ll probably all just blow over and won’t we have a laugh then.     

And I will: Stop slacking and write up my other reviews.

The Diary of a Chambermaid

Number 155

Title: The Diary of a Chambermaid

Author: Octave Mirbeau

Summed up in one line: Oh, you naughty girl!

Overall: One of the best things about downloading books from the net is that you’re often given little to no information about the book other than it’s title, and this can lend itself to a really interesting reading experience in the case of historical diaries because you have no idea if it’s fact or fiction. I don’t know about you but I get a bit more invested in stories, especially tragedy, if I believe it’s real- and The Diary of a Chambermaid is pretty chock full of horrible and saucy happenings.

Fisherman’s daughter Celestine has an awful childhood, but thanks to nuns, she learns to read and write and ends up bouncing around the linen closets of the bourgeoisie, none of whom impress her very much at all. She describes the current, frequently terrible happenings in the small country chateau she has wound up in, and also recounts past adventures in Paris.

I have to say, if you jump into it blind, it’s...nearly credible? There's an effort in the preface to convince you it is, but there were a couple of times I found myself thinking ‘this girl’s life is unbelievable!’ and/or ‘well, that was convenient…’ and once I think her hair colour changed, but I don’t think it really looses out too much by being just fiction. Rather than being stupendous, it becomes an 19^th century romp, slightly better than, say, The Scarlet Pimpernel, if only because the characters are more realistically gross. I suppose the novel is meant as a kind of satire, but as what it's satirising is pretty well wedged in history now, I think I'll leave it to others to review it on that score. 

When I found the book on Goodreads, I was surprised to note it’s genre is apparently ‘French Literary Erotica’. Personally I didn’t think it was particularly detailed enough to go as far as to say it’s erotica, but then it was published in 1900, when English authors general idea of erotica was to stage whisper at the reader ‘and then they had –sex-!’

I suppose Octave takes it that scandalous step further by adding, under his breath, ‘and she LIKED it!’

And I will: caution sensitive readers against the few anti-jewish characters in the book. It’s a trait of the character rather than a perspective of the book, but still unpleasant. Also they say ‘outraged’ instead of ‘raped’ throughout. Not sure what to make of that.