The Invention of Hugo Cabret

This handsome cinematic novel is a striking object: almost literally so, as it weighs in at 1.2 kg for a volume of about 1,500 cubic centimetres. Its other physical attributes are also impressive. Each of its 540-odd pages is printed on creamy paper with bible-black outer margins that give the body walls a silvery charcoal sheen. The front cover shows an antique clock mechanism against a Parisian night skyline, bordered with a pattern which makes a visual pun of pen-nibs and clock towers. The dust jacket enfolds a beautiful black book as solid as an anthracite slab, tooled with a rectangular coil of white marble. Crimson sewn headbands hold it all together, and inside you discover that most of the pages bear intricate chiaroscuro pencil drawings, interspersed with equally intriguing old photographs, photomontages and stills from vintage films.

The printed text, which occupies a relatively small number of pages, tells a two-part story which is almost as captivating as its receptacle. It is 1931, and 12-year-old orphan Hugo is living inside the walls of a Parisian railway station, secretly maintaining the clocks and thieving for survival. He also pilfers mechanisms from the booth of an embittered old toymaker in order to reanimate a broken, man-sized automaton that he believes will deliver a posthumous message from his beloved father, an horologist and lover of films. When Hugo is caught, and the precious notebook he has been using as a repair manual confiscated, he joins with the toymaker’s learned and determined stepdaughter in an attempt to recover it and to solve the secret origin of the old man’s misery. Their efforts unravel a tangle of coincidences involving clockwork, magic, madness and the early history of cinema.

The genius of this book is the way in which the motion of the story is physically represented: sequences of images work like flick-book animations or the scanning and panning of a movie camera; the text becomes a voice-over, often ceding the narration to the black and white graphics depicting crowd- and chase-scenes, zooming in on details of setting and character, fading to flashbacks or, most dramatically, cutting to drawings and stills from the films of the surrealist pioneer Georges Melies. (His famous 1902 vision of the Moon’s face pierced through the right eye by a rocket is a powerful motif in this story.) This is a magical book that will engage readers of all ages. It is particularly fascinating that so adventurous a text has been forged from the creative fusion of such enduring arts as picture book design and silent cinema.