From the archives: The Cuckoo Clock (book review)

First posted November 2008

Crayons and I are reading The Cuckoo Clock, by Mary Stolz. It's the type of European-village fairy tale that reminds me of Tolkien's Smith of Wootton Major or maybe Walter Wangerin Jr.'s Elisabeth and the Water Troll (which we also just finished reading). It's also the kind of magical story that I can't imagine writing--at least, not going through all the "normal" drafting and editing processes. It seems, like some of Rumer Godden's stories, to have sprung to life complete and whole, like the wooden cuckoo bird itself that begins to sing all the songs of the forest.

You can find short descriptions of the plot anywhere, so I won't go into it much. A needy young boy, Erich, manages to connect with the one kindred spirit in town: the elderly clockmaker, who begins to train him as an assistant and allows him to help carve his final masterpiece. When the clock is finished, the clockmaker dies--shattering the small security Erich has found with him, but leaving him a fiddle and his carving tools. That's only the first half of the story: the rest of the adventure is Erich's.

I found this description on the Amazon site:

"Stolz' delicate ironies and precise writing style save her story from sentimentality, enabling it to teach an interesting and rigorous lesson about the liability of the self-involved to understand the true beauty of the world. Original, wise, and thoughtful. Christine Behrmann, New York Public Lib. (Copyright 1987 Reed Business Information, Inc.)

And that's very true; the abused-orphan story has been done to death, and Stolz herself pokes fun at this tradition: "Boys even younger would leave unhappy homes and go into the wide world seeking their fortunes, which, according to the stories, they always found." It would be easy for this story to become forced and overdrawn. But in the hands of a master craftsman, even such a plain stick of wood can become something beautiful.