The Iron Man (Faber Classics) by Ted Hughes
| The Iron Man (Faber Classics) by Ted Hughes | |
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| Category: Confident Readers | |
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Reviewer: John Lloyd
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| Summary: Certainly deserving the name classic, this dramatic yet eerie oddity is well worth a revisit. | |
| Buy? Yes | Borrow? Yes |
| Pages: 144 | Date: November 2013 |
| Publisher: Faber | |
| ISBN: 9780571302246 | |
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I'll start with a confession. I read a book recently, and got all the way through and still didn't realise I'd read the whole thing about eighteen months before. I mention it only to say that such a thing is impossible with The Iron Man. With the opening scene, of the behemoth on top of the cliff he is about to fall over, I was there. I was immediately transported to a much younger me, sat in the primary school library or classroom, getting the willies from the vivid description of the Iron Giant's hand helping put the whole robotic monster back together. I don't know of a better way to paraphrase the word 'classic' – but this book stayed with me for over thirty years, and it's just fine to revisit.
It's not perfect to put a sensible adult eye on it – how can a seagull flap around carrying the spherical eye of a robot whose head was as big as a bedroom? (I thought that even back then.) The concluding couple of chapters are a bit unusual too – something coming from heat disliking heat? There is also something a little off perhaps about such a short book having a moral that's hard to pin down – the Iron Man goes from villain to hero, but is the conclusion supposed to be that mankind needs something that seems greedy, violent and very inconvenient in order to have peace? Is a tamed wildness that we can control the lesser of two evils? Written in the 1960s it might be read as an eco-conscious classicist arguing for a nuclear deterrent – he does come out of a manmade silo-type hill after all.
But rereading the pure, crisp words on the page it's much more clear to see how the book became such a modern classic. It's dramatic enough, with determined action from all the characters, human and robotic. Yet the writing, even as a lumbering hunk of metallic man crashes down a cliffside and smashes to bits, is incredibly poetic. It's the combination of gentle lines listing things, the one-word paragraphs and the sheer alien-ness of the Iron Man, whose origin nobody ever learns, that helped keep the eerie feeling in the back of my mind over all the generations. You might argue some of that mood is lost towards the end, when the robot starts to talk, and you see Hughes not quite having his cake and eating it too – the enervating yet poetic descriptions slightly losing out to the matter-of-fact clarity of the action, but that surely is nitpicking.
Once again, so many years on, I've got the indelible scenes of the robot hand carrying its eye across the beach picking up its own wreckage. (I didn't have these brilliant woodcut illustrations when I first read this, they come from 1985.) I've gained an appreciation of how cutting edge the book was, for I've credited much more recent novels for playing with font size and design, and all you need is here. I have also gained a lovely, gilt, embossed, er, 45th birthday edition, but hang it – any excuse. The Iron Man stands at the clifftop of enigmatic yet dramatic children's reading.
I must thank the publishers for my review copy.
You can read a review of a very differently-styled edition here. For another blast from the past for the young, try Mr Bliss by J R R Tolkien.
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You can read more book reviews or buy The Iron Man (Faber Classics) by Ted Hughes at Amazon.co.uk Amazon currently charges £2.99 for standard delivery for orders under £20, over which delivery is free.
You can read more book reviews or buy The Iron Man (Faber Classics) by Ted Hughes at Amazon.com.
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