By Paul Carrier
The Invention of Hugo Cabret is a book. That much is clear. It has 550 pages sandwiched between two covers, which would seem to meet the definition. But then things get complicated. What species of book is it?
The inspiration for the new Martin Scorsese film Hugo certainly isn’t a conventional novel, because it relies on full-page artwork to tell much of the story. Yet it isn’t a graphic novel either, because the stand-alone drawings, which include no dialogue or captions, are interspersed among pages of text.
This hybrid doesn’t minimalize pictures by using them merely to illustrate text, the way a traditional novel does. Nor does it meld art and words into a cohensive unit, like a graphic novel. Instead it uses written and visual forms of communication separately, to drive its wonderful tale forward.
As author and illustrator Brian Selznick said when his book first came out, The Invention of Hugo Cabret is “not exactly a novel, not quite a picture book, not really a graphic novel, or a flip book or a movie, but a combination of all these things.”
The book tells the story of Hugo Cabret, an orphan who lives in a hidden apartment above a Paris train station in 1931. A mechanically gifted child who learned how to maintain and repair clocks before his father died in a museum fire and his uncle disappeared, Hugo single-handedly keeps the station's gigantic clocks running smoothly by using pathways in the station’s walls to secretly access the clockworks.
When he died, Hugo’s father was trying to rebuild an abandoned mechanical man - an automaton - that had been tucked away in the museum. After the fire, Hugo finds the automaton in the debris and brings it to his room, where he works on restoring it using parts stolen from Georges, an old man who sells toys from a booth in the train station.
Hugo comes to believe that, if he fixes the automaton, which has a pen in its hand, it will write a message to him from his late father.
Through a series of twists and turns, Hugo befriends Georges’ godchild, Isabelle, and together the duo uncover Georges’ hidden but illustrious past. (I won’t spoil it by revealing Georges’ identity; suffice it to say he is based on a real person.)
Thanks in part to its compelling characters and fast-moving plot, The Invention of Hugo Cabret is hard to put down once you crack it open. But it’s Selznick’s detailed, dreamlike drawings that really give the book its unique feel and cinematic quality, as the story unfolds through artwork that propels the action in a film-like fashion.
For example, the first 40-plus pages consist of Selznick’s drawings, without a word of text. In this way, we enter and explore the train station where Hugo lives and Georges works, and meet both characters. This is followed by two pages of text, a two-page drawing that introduces the reader to Isabelle, two more pages of text and then several pages of art.
The results are magical. To describe this as a children's book is true as far as it goes, but that’s nowhere near far enough.
