A Review of Mathias Malzieu’s The Boy With The Cuckoo Clock Heart
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I first came across The
Boy with the Cuckoo Clock Heart by Mathias Malzieu in a
Waterstones bookshop on Oxford Street in London. I found the little book
nestled away among the legions of stacked bestsellers and beloved
classics. It seemed a perfect oddity as I plucked it from the shelf and
observed the scrolling white lettering on the cover, and an illustration of two
Tim Burton-esque figures dancing; a raven-haired girl and a man in black that I
could only assume to be the owner of the cuckoo clock heart. I promptly bought
the book and began reading it (and subsequently finished it) on the train ride
to Edinburgh.
Edinburgh is where my
tale ends but where the story of The
Boy with the Cuckoo Clock begins. For in
1874, on the coldest day on earth, Little Jack is born on Arthur’s Seat, the
towering hill that looms over the city of Edinburgh. It is so cold that his
heart is frozen solid and the midwife and tinker, Dr. Madeleine, is forced to
replace it with, of course, a cuckoo clock. Jack’s mother leaves the delicate
boy in the loving care of Madeleine. She keeps Jack at home until his 10th birthday,
when he finally convinces Madeleine to bring him into town. But already, Jack’s
delicate little cuckoo clock is in danger when he meets and falls hopelessly in
love with a beautiful and bespectacled street singer, Miss Acacia. Such
emotions are too much for the cuckoo clock and the gears start grinding, the
clock heats up, and the cuckoo makes an awful racket. Madeleine rushes him home and decrees
that he can never fall in love if he should hope to survive.
But Jack is beyond saving,
smitten to the point of obsession. He enrolls in school hoping to see Miss
Acacia but she is nowhere to be found. Instead, he attracts the attention of a
bully, Joe. Several years go by and Jack decides he must go find Miss Acacia.
On that day, he and Joe get into a fight; Joe loses his eye, and Jack must flee
Edinburgh to evade the police. So, ready or not, he starts out on the journey
to Granada in the Andalucía region in Spain , where Miss Acacia is
from. Along the journey he has a run in with Jack the Ripper and in Paris
meets George Méliès , a mustachioed magician and inventor with a specialty in
clockwork who agrees both to tend to the maintenance of Jack’s clock and to
accompany him on his journey to Andalucía. It seems as though everything is in
place and Jack’s dream is within reach, but nothing ever quite goes according
to plan, does it?
Jack lives in a world where
eccentricities and impossibilities are not only possible, but taken for
granted. I love this world of magical realism; all the little quirks of
the world author Malzieu created are what I found most intriguing about the
book. Jack’s clockwork heart is of course at the forefront. The gears which
keep his flesh heart beating also help (or hinder?) the emotional functions
mythically associated with the cardiac muscle; although in Jack’s world they
are unquestionably part of its function. But Jack’s prosthetic is not the only
such one in the story; Madeleine fixes up her friend Arthur with a creaking
metal spine which can be made into a xylophone of sorts when struck with a
small hammer, and Madeleine keeps draughts of her own tears mixed with vinegar
to abate deep sadness. Quirks aside, another decided strength of the book
is the understated humor that often arises from the eccentricities of
characters. For example, Jack names his hamster Cunnilingus, a word he
learns from Madeleine’s prostitute friends Anna and Luna, imagining Cunnilingus
to have been some brave Roman warrior. Acacia refuses to wear glasses, though
she needs them desperately, and her arrivals and departures are often marked by
the thud of her walking into something. Jack finds this endearing.
The entiretya of the book is
told from the present perspective of Little Jack, the narrative providing
details even before his own birth, with the additional curious insight from the
future looking back. Jack speaks as though he goes through the world with
eyes open wide in amazement. He is poetic in his observation, his descriptions
both curious and startlingly accurate. For example: “She has this gentle way of
laughing, as light as beads tumbling over a xylophone.” For the first half of
the book, the style is enjoyable and even refreshing, but by the second half of
the book, it becomes a bit old and cumbersome. I should add, though, that I’m
unsure whether this is purely Malzieu’s writing, or due to choices made by the
translator, Sarah Ardizzone. The second half of the book also went downhill for
me because while as a reader I was pleased that Jack was so happy, I did not
like Acacia very much, and liked her less as the book progressed. She refused to
see Jack for what he was and to believe that the cuckoo clock kept him alive;
it made Jack feel inadequate, somehow less than human. But, at the same
time, the way Jack regarded her was very much as an object of his affections. She didn’t
often speak, and most of Jack’s descriptions of her were possessive and focused
solely on her looks. A reader is not given the opportunity to hear and know
Acacia and when she does speak, it’s generally
antagonizing. Her portrayal, in the end, doesn’t lend much to liking her.
Although I would not call the book perfect, it is still to be appreciated due
to the lessons about love, passion, and loss that Malzieu encases in this
fantastical story, which is ultimately not unlike the tales of the Brothers
Grimm.
La Mécanique du Coeur
in the original French, the story of Jack and his clockwork heart it the
brainchild of French musician and author, Mathias Malzieu. I say
brainchild because the story does not end with the novel, but rather
contributes to an entire body of work including an album and soon to be
released movie. Before taking a literary bent, Malzieu was (and still is) the
lead singer of the French rock band, Dionysos, whose work has been heavily
influenced by the films of Tim Burton. After the release of the book in October
2007, the band released the album, La Mecanique du Coeur, in November of that
year. I was curious, upon discovering there was an album for the little boo, to
see how well the story as a whole could be told through music and (French and
English) lyrics as opposed to words.
My original intention was to
compare Malzieu’s telling of the story in the book and on the album. But upon listening to the album, I realized that that
really wasn’t the right way to treat these works. The album on its own creates
a much more mosaic kind of narrative (Especially for me because my French
skills are limited. Google translate is wonderful). There are songs for major events of
the story, songs which may be an expression of the characters’ strong feelings,
or songs which illustrate the struggles at a point within the
narrative, much like a musical. The
instrumentation for each song was really creative and (for a lack of a better
word) just good; each song really characterizes the scene it corresponds with,
though some did so in a way that surprised me. Tim Burton/Danny Elfman
influence was very strong in the instrumentation. In the lyrics, each character
expressed their voice in every sense; each was sung by a different performer.
Despite the theatrical quality of the album, something of the narrative quality
was undoubtedly missing.
That being said, it seems
best to consider the book and the album not as separate works, but two parts of
the same work. If we look at these two in the same vein as a work of
musical theatre, the novel is the script and the album the music book and
score. The novel is needed to fill in the story between the songs in a more
descriptive way than the music can. The music is needed the give a scope and
feeling to the story that the words alone cannot impart. I went back and reread
parts of the book while listening to the album and the story came alive in a
way that it hadn’t when I read the book on its own. My suggestion is, for
those who want to experience Malzieu’s works at their fullest, to do so
simultaneously. Below I’ve included the track listing for the album and
suggested points within the book where the songs should accompany, with all the
page numbers drawn from the UK edition.
1. TRACK 1- Le Jour Le Plus Froid du Monde (The
Coldest Day on Earth)- Start with the opening of the novel.
2. TRACK 3- When the Saints Go Marchin’In Page
12.
3. TRACK 3- La Berceuse Hip Hop du Docteur
Madaleine (The Hip Hop Lullaby of Dr. Madeleine) Directly
after Track 3.
4. TRACK 4-Flamme À Lunettes (Candle
Glasses) Page 17.
5. TRACK 5-Symphonie Pour Horloge Cassée (Symphony
for a Broken Clock)-Start at the beginning of Chapter 3.
6. TRACK 6-Cunnilingus Mon Amour! (Cunnilingus
My Love!) Should be played directly after Track 5 (about page 26).
7. TRACK 7-Théme de Joe -Start this
song when Jack first arrives at the school and is told off by Joe in the school
yard. (Or don’t. Admittedly this song isn’t that great.) Page 31.
8. TRACK 8-L’Ecole de Joe (Joe’s
School)-Start at beginning of Chapter 4.
9. TRACK 10-La Panique Mecanique (Mechanic
Panic): Start at beginning of Chapter 5.
10. TRACK 9- L’Homme Sans Trucage (The
Man Without Tricks): Start at beginning of Chapter 6.
11. TRACK 11-King of the Ghost Train -Page 75.
12. TRACK 13- Candy Lady - Page 82.
13. TRACK 12- Les Effets de Mademoiselle Clé (Mademoiselle
Key)-Start about a page into Chapter 9, when Miss Acacia comes to visit Jack at
midnight. Page 97.
14. TRACK 14-Le Retour de Joe (The Return
of Joe)-Start at beginning of Chapter 10.
15. TRACK 15-Death Song- Page 132.
16. TRACK 16-Tais Toi Mon Coeur (Shut Up My Heart)-Page 150.
17. TRACK 17-Whatever the Weather – Start directly
after Track 16.
18. TRACK 18-Épilogue -During or
after the epilogue. Do listen all the way to the end.
Happy Reading
and Listening!
Written by Meaghan O'Brien
