Friday Sprog Blogging: book review of “Ug: Boy Genius of the Stone Age”

The offspring brought this book, Ug: Boy Genius of the Stone Age by Raymond Briggs, home from the library last night. Without even opening it, I agreed to read it for bedtime stories. Opening the book, I discovered that rather than being a straightforward picture book, it’s laid out in comic book/graphic novel style, with lots of panels (and lots of words) per page. Had I taken a peek and seen how many words we were committing to, I might have postponed our first reading until a middle-of-the-day kind of moment. However, we got through the book, and the elder offspring was held rapt for the duration. And so, I offer this review.

The Story: Ug is a Stone Age youngster. He lives in a cave with his parents, plays with his friends, and is starting to grow out of the sandstone trousers his dad carved for him. Typical kid stuff. But Ug has a dream: softer trousers. His parents, however, don’t understand why he’s not satified with the trousers he has. They’re so much softer than the gritty granite trousers his dad used to wear. And, as his mum points out, you have to be tough to make it in the Stone Age.
Ug isn’t as tolerant of the hard, cold, dark, and damp as his family and friends are, but he seems to be tough in a different sort of way. He keeps thinking and questioning and trying stuff, sometimes just to see what will happen. His parents, engaged in the struggle for survival, have little patience with his “thinking” all the time, and his friends are puzzled by it, too:

Ag (Ug’s friend): What are you doing Ug?
Ug (pounding away on a roundish piece of rock): It’s nearly round.
Ag: What’s “round”?
Ug: This is. I’m making it a bit more round.
Ag: Why?
Ug: I saw it rolling downhill. If I can knock the lumps off it will roll better.
Ag: Why do you want it to roll?
Ug: I don’t know … It’s good when it rolls. I … Let’s try it!
(Pushes it down from the top of the hill.)
Ug: Look! It’s going! It’s going! I made it do it! Look at it go! Wheeeee! Terrific!
Ag: What’s it for, Ug?
Ug: I don’t know …

Despite some fairly intense discouragement from his mum, Ug keeps thinking past the prevailing Stone Age conditions and ways of doing things. Gradually, he wins his dad over, and the two make a giddy attempt to construct a pair of trousers that is softer …
The reasons to read it: Ug is a character who doesn’t see eye-to-eye with his parents, but he doesn’t back down. On the other hand, he doesn’t launch a campaign of open defiance against them; he politely persists in asking about the ways things are and other ways they might do things. He has ideas about how things could be different. And, he finds value in just making things and observing things — even if he doesn’t yet have an idea what they’re for. In other words, the kid embodies some of the qualities of mind and temperment of a scientist.
Beyond the plot, some of the backdrop of the story puts some interesting proto-scientific questions on the table. Ug questions his dad’s claim that “there’s nothing in the world except mud, bushes, and stones”; what other substances are there (and which ones are softer, warmer, drier, less dense, etc.)? Given that the available animals are frightened, in the words of Ug’s dad, because “they don’t want to be killed and eaten,” how did humans manage to move beyond chasing animals to domesticating them? If landslides give Ug ideas about ways humans could reroute rivers, what other kinds of natural phenomena should the kid be watching?
A neat feature of the book is that many of the anachronisms are footnoted and explained. For example, when Ug’s dad compares sandstone trousers to those scratchy granite ones, calling them “soft as butter”, we get this footnote:

Butter (anachronism): There was no butter in the Stone Age. Butter is cow’s milk gone solid. And tame cows did not yet exist. They were still running wild with the pre-historic monster bulls and no one could milk them and make it into butter.

Not only are these footnotes a hoot to read, but they raise some interesting conceptual issues. For example:

Week (anachronism): There were no “weeks” in the Stone Age, nor were there “months” or “years”. In the Stone Age, time stood still. This is why so little progress was made and why it took an age to come to an end.
…
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.

So … what’s the nature of time? Is it something that’s “happening” even if we’re unaware of it? Is it a modern invention that depends on our awareness? Somewhere in between?
Things I don’t like about the book: Ug’s mum is a stereotypical overbearing nag. (On the plus side, no supermodel body to set an unattainable ideal … but there’s no way to tell whether she was buying in to the Stone Age ideal of beauty, and whether that could account for some of her grumpiness.) Also, the last page leaves us with an unhappy ending — maybe it’s more historically accurate, but it just feels wrong given what we know about Ug’s insight and persistence. But, this ending fits so poorly with the rest of the story that the offspring and I had a four minute discussion in which we established how Ug would really have solved the problem.
Both sprogs recommend Ug: Boy Genius of the Stone Age by Raymond Briggs, and I concur.