![]() It’s packaged like a children’s book, but it definitely isn’t that, despite the protagonist aging through it. It’s a dark book and an uncomfortable book. She’s got other characteristics, they’re shown glancingly, but we never get to learn much about her outside of her encounters with Jack, and he’s focused entirely on one thing. But he talks about Acacia almost exclusively through her physicality. The book starts with his birth, but then essentially covers the years between ten and twenty at the oldest estimate. He’s naive to begin with, but he’s uncomfortably oversexed, and begins a sexual relationship when he is at most fifteen. To have him set alongside Jack’s obsession diminishes both Méliès’ very real accomplishments, and Jack’s very fictional, unhealthy behaviour. If you are unaware of Méliès, he is deemed one of the fathers of cinema, and appears as a character in the book The Invention of Hugo Cabret, and its film adaptation Hugo. But his obsessive fixation on his dreams is likened to Jack’s in a way that seemed disingenuous. Meanwhile Méliès accompanies Jack on his adventures, acting as both guide and documentarian. Jack the Ripper seems like the oddest and most incongruous cameo, and feels very jarring for how little he impacts the plot, to be featured so significantly. The two don’t sit entirely comfortably together. There are cameos from other historical figures with obsessive traits too – Jack the Ripper and Georges Méliès. Madeleine wants to keep Jack safe by her side, to be the child she was never able to carry herself, regardless of what is healthy or natural. Jack wants Acacia entirely based on his own fantasies and desires, regardless of anything she might want, or the realities which may face him. It’s a story about obsession and the way it can drive you regardless of the truth. I was most of the way through my re-read before I realised what this book was really about, in perhaps a way I hadn’t the first time I read it. Madeleine tells Jack not to fall in love, puts up a sign in his room telling him that love will kill him, sings him to sleep with songs about love being dangerous. He becomes obsessed with Acacia, who he only ever refers to as Miss Acacia, and finding her again. We’re given to understand she is the same age as him, so the presence of any breasts is a little unlikely, but also the discussion of them makes me uncomfortable and it felt very unnecessary. Again, the description is strangely sexual for such a young age, and he also keeps talking about her breasts. Like Cunnilingus, which is the name he gives his hamster.Īt age ten he goes into town and first sees Miss Acacia, the girl who drives his motivation for the rest of the book. There are two prostitutes who visit the doctor’s house where he lives, and they teach him new words. I’m not sure if this is because it’s a French book (although it begins in Edinburgh and spends the bulk of time in Andalusia), or whether this is uniquely the voice of the author, but the book continues in this tone. His heart is frozen, and she fits a cuckoo-clock into his chest to help it keep beating, but even as she leans over him to do so he only cares what her boobs look like. Jack narrates the whole story, and from the instant of his birth he’s talking sexually about the breasts of the woman who delivers him. It’s magical, and descriptive, and a little bit dark. People freeze walking the streets, fountains freeze mid-spray, tears freeze as they drop to the ground. There’s a magical description of the coldest day on Earth, where everything freezes. The first thing which startled me about was how strangely sexual the book was from the very beginning. When I found it during a big tidy of my bookshelves the other week, I looked forward to seeing if it lived up to my memories. I recalled it being one of those unusual, slightly fantastic, and romantic books. This book was one of them, he bought it for me about ten years ago, and it was quite a magical discovery. My brother has this maddening ability to always buy really unusual but amazing Christmas presents. So when the beautiful young street-singer, Miss Acacia, appears – pursued by Joe, the school bully – Jack is in danger of more than just falling in love… he is putting his life on the line. At school he is bullied for his ‘ticking’, but Dr Madeleine reminds him he must resist strong emotion: anger is far too dangerous for his cuckoo-clock heart. Little Jack grows up different to other children: every day begins with a daily wind-up. But Dr Madeleine is no conventional medic and surgically implants a cuckoo-clock into his chest. On the coldest night the world has ever seen, Little Jack is born with a frozen heart and immediately undergoes a life-saving operation.
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