Reading Themes 

Stories of Hope: Father-Son Relationships
by Christiane Bongartz

Survival and solutions to the impossible-a child can bring these about. This is the message in two books at whose center we find a father-son relationship with inverted roles—Russell Hoban’s The Mouse and His Child and Salman Rushdie’s Haroun and the Sea of Stories. It is the sons and their dreams for a better future that inspire the momentum necessary to make that future happen, even in the most adverse of circumstances, even in the face of parental despair.
          The Mouse and His Child (Harper & Row, 1967) and Haroun and the Sea of Stories (Granta Books/ Viking, 1990) were written a good twenty years apart, yet they explore their common theme with striking parallels. Both are narratives of authenticity and intuition. In The Mouse and His Child, the young protagonist is a wind-up toy without a name, entirely dependent on others to move around in endless circles. He is literally tied with interlocking hands to his father, also a mechanical toy, and they dance their circles together without self-motivation or aim. But the child has a dream, a dream to have a family, a dream that can only come true if they become selfwinding and free. This dream is what sees him and his father through countless adventures, including the capture by a rat in charge of a syndicate and philosophical dialogue with a C. Serpentina, a snapping turtle famous for his dedication to pure thought. As such, the turtle’s musings fail to show the way to freedom. With father and son helplessly trapped under water in a dull world of twilight, it is solidarity from friends that is required to get change under way.
          Waters in Haroun are not dull, but troubled. The sea of stories is about to be poisoned by the enemy, Khattam- Shud, whose name actually means “The End.” Unlike the mouse father, whose despair results in part from his inability to make his son’s dreams come true, Haroun’s father finds himself trapped in despair over his own life. He has lost his wife to another man, and he has lost his story-telling abilities. Darkness clouds his mind, and darkness is also threatening to take over the world of stories and with it all of human life. Haroun must confront the enemy and remove the split between light and darkness, between speech and silence, dividing the world he visits and troubling those he loves in his own world.
          Both Haroun and the mouse child see their dreams come true because of their persistence and faith, and that faith makes their worlds whole. This, in turn, brings about healing in the parent, so that with dream fulfillment they also receive a restored and reformed relationship with their fathers. Remarkable about both tales is how they are told, how the big themes are couched in light and flowing language. Word games, rhymes, songs, and verbal jokes shape this linguistic lightness. Language playfully acts as a counter theme to the seriousness of circumstance. In Haroun, we find place names that are letters of the alphabet (the Town of G, the Valley of K), which causes confusion for mail delivery. In The Mouse and His Child, crows stage their own play, “The Last Visible Dog.” Haroun and the mouse child let us experience these elements of the strange through their eyes-as part of their story. They must take in the strangeness with the freedom of staying bemusedly and amusedly aloof. Learning the hard things about life, then, is not always a hard experience. There are many sides to experience, and keeping the faith sustains both the children and their troubled fathers.
          A strength found in both books is that the difficult isn’t hidden or too easily overcome. Both are tales of complexity and political acuity. In our times of uncertainty in a linguistic universe that includes terror alerts, both books are timely reading and inspirational both to young readers and perhaps even more so to their adult friends and relatives.

A native of Germany, Christiane Bongartz teaches linguistics at the University of North Carolina-Charlotte.