By Jane Mack
For Variety

BOOKS have been popular since Gutenberg ushered in the age of the printing press in the mid-15th century. Before the printing press, books with handwritten scripts and ornamented alphabets captured interest, and still garner attention at museums. The novel found its present form through transformations in the 17th century (“Don Quixote”) and 18th century (“Robinson Crusoe” and “Gulliver’s Travels”). We now have novels in specific genres with popular appeal, like science fiction, mystery, thriller, romance and fantasy.
Writing novels has generated mass appeal, and the easy availability of advice and comradeship on the internet have spawned novel-writing endeavors like National Novel Writing Month (www.nanowrimo.org) and blogs on every conceivable topic related to writing. Writers who eschew traditional publishing in order to get their books printed more quickly can use print-on-demand technology and have their books reviewed on blogs like PODdy-Mouth or POD Reviewer.
There are common threads in advice about writing novels, like the wisdom that there are (depending on who’s giving their opinion) only twenty-six, twelve, seven, five, four or two basic plots in the world. With the ground so well tilled, it’s hard to imagine an author coming up with anything new or remarkable.
Yet we had J. K. Rowling, with her hugely successful Harry Potter (HP) series, use a traditional form, an imaginative but conventional character-naming technique, and the fertile material of existing history, myth and superstition, yet combine them in such a fantastic and fresh way that we got something new. Japanese manga has crossed-over to mainstream American novel-making, so that we have graphic novels popping up in genre and young-adult fiction. And now, we have a new art form in the mid-grade book.
THE INVENTION OF HUGO CABRET, by Brian Selznick (Scholastic, 2007) combines new and old in a thoroughly delightful and innovative way to bring us something new. Released just this month, the book is 530 pages in length. Thanks to the HP and the Order of the Phoenix, we know that kids will read long books if the story is good, so don’t let the size of the book scare you away. The cover is beautiful: rich vibrant colors and an intricate keyhole on the front, with a charcoal portrait of a boy on the spine and back. When the book is closed, the fat spine has just a slice of face with eye, half a nose and mouth, and title in white at the bottom, giving it an intriguing, unique appearance, easily found on a shelf.
But it is what’s inside that makes this book truly remarkable and one to be “collected,” as well as read repeatedly. The story is told at first in pictures, like a graphic novel, or like an old-fashioned silent film, with the pictures in charcoal and pencil, black and white, mysterious and eerie. Then there is text that picks up where the pictures leave off. Then the story weaves back and forth between pictorial art and verbal art, seamlessly moving between the two forms, each playing its part. The book is like a concert of instruments in perfect harmony.
Brian Selznick is well known in children’s literature. I’ve included at least two of the books he illustrated (THE SCHOOL STORY by Andrew Clements, and WHEN MARIAN SANG by Pam Muñoz) in previous reviews in this column. His talent as an artist, though, is transcended by his power as a storyteller. Because THE INVENTION OF HUGO CABRET is first and foremost a great story.
It opens at night, in Paris, in a train station. We get there through pictures that close in like a camera lens, telescoping from the moon to the Eiffel Tower, to the train station exterior. And then we go inside the walls of the train station with a boy who keeps the clocks running. And we feel his loneliness as he spies on a toy maker and the girl who comes by the toy booth.
The boy, Hugo Cabret, clings to the only companion he has, a broken and charred mechanical man that his father found in a museum attic. Hugo has a notebook with pictures of the automaton and its internal mechanisms, drawn by his father. Hugo dreams of fixing the automaton some day and reading the message that it writes with the pen and ink that stands in front of it. In Hugo’s mind, the message will tell him about his father. Hugo’s parents are dead, and his uncle, the station timekeeper, has been missing for months, his paychecks stacking up uncashed, while Hugo does his job.
But the toy maker catches Hugo stealing a robotic mouse that Hugo wanted for parts. And worse, the toy maker finds Hugo’s notebook and takes it away. Hugo is desperate to retrieve the notebook so that he can fix the automaton and find the message. And he’s alone and hungry.
The girl, Isabelle, comes forward to speak to Hugo, to befriend him, to help, but in her own way she causes him more problems. And the story unfolds with the precision of a fine clockwork mechanism, the artistry of words and images matching the moods of fear, desperation and discovery.
The story takes place in the past when movies are new and magical, and it makes the connection between the surreal creations of moviemakers and the otherworldly aspect of a robotic man writing a message. For example, Hugo’s father, a clockmaker, felt inspired by a movie he’d watched by filmmaker Georges Méliès called A Trip to the Moon (which you can watch here: http://www.archive.org/details/Levoyagedanslalune). But the deeply researched underpinnings of the story don’t intrude on the pace and accessibility of it for young readers. And the appearance of the “real” Georges Méliès is a bonus, not a distraction. Boys and girls will love the train station, the clockworks, the mystery. Readers of all ages will love the intrigue, magic and warm-hearted resolution. And there’s already talk of making this book into a movie, with Martin Scorsese as the director! (Ages 9+).