Disposable Lit Reviews

Alfred A. Knopf, 2002
28 pp.
ISBN 0-375-81611-9

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Raymond Briggs is best known around the world for The Snowman, a wordless fable about a young boy’s midnight adventures with the snowman in his yard. He’s best known around the Cold Fusion Media Empire for Fungus the Bogeyman, a verbose and multilayered day-in-the-life of a subterranean society which bears an odd resemblance to a warped version of British middle-class life.

Ug: Boy Genius of the Stone Age splits the difference between the two greatly divergent storytelling styles. It’s a simple but pointed story of a cavechild who hasn’t had the inquisitiveness and invention conditioned out of him yet by his neolithic society, who uses the word “Why?” with reckless abandon, and who can actually conceive of — and hope for — conditions improving on his own. All of that sounds high and heady; but what he really wants is to trade his stone-chiseled pants for something a little more comfortable. (The subtitle on the title page reads, “And His Search for Soft Trousers.”

Of course, there’s great cultural inertia to overcome, despite there not being any culture to speak of. Ug’s father simply doesn’t grasp the concept of invention, and can’t understand why his boy insists on speculating about things that aren’t, instead of accepting things as they are. Ug’s mother, threatened by her son’s innocent malcontent, reacts violently to his ifs and whys with commands to “Stop THINKING!!”

As a faint echo of Fungus the Bogeyman, there are frequent footnotes, though not nearly as long and exhaustive as the ones in Fungus (where references and sidebars would often eat up three-quarters of the page around the artwork, like some sort of graphic midrash). Instead, they’re confined to pointing out the anachronisms in the cavepeople’s speech:

MINUTE: (anachronism) NO ONE KNEW ABOUT MINUTES IN THE STONE AGE. THERE WERE, OF COURSE, MANY MILLIONS OF MINUTES (PROBABLY BILLIONS) IN THE STONE AGE BUT AT THE TIME THEY WERE NOT RECOGNISED AS SUCH. NEVERTHELESS, THEY WERE THERE ALL THE TIME.

It’s a witty feature the first few times it’s used, but as the book stretches on, the anachronisms seem more and more contrived simply for the sake of justifying footnotes. “Minute” and “lunch” and “butter” I can swallow, but it seems pretty obvious when Ug’s mother makes passing reference to Sisyphus that we’re just fishing for footnote fodder here.

But what decisively drops this book a tier down from Briggs’ other classics is that it simply has no place to go; it’s a one-trick pony. Ug has vague, half-formed ideas about soft trousers, cooked food, soccer balls that aren’t made of stone (and bedspreads that aren’t made of stone, and boats that aren’t made of stone), fire for heating, fruit juice, irrigation, animal domestication… but nothing gets beyond the dimwittedness and resistance of his parents. And then the book ends. Or, rather, it stops. The last page comes with a sudden lurch, as if Briggs was merrily meandering his way through and discovered he only had one more sheet of art paper to use.

Even bad Briggs, of course, is pretty good. But one can’t help feeling that the book, not unlike Ug’s glimmering ideas, was never really brought to full fruition.

Nathan Shumate