A couple of years ago I read a book called Edison’s Eve which is by an author named Gabby Wood.
It’s about the history of automata which were very complicated wind-up figures that could do amazing things like write or draw. They were first invented right after clocks were invented and people would take the clockworks and gears and instead of making clocks, would do these incredibly strange and complicated and whimsical machines. In this book, Edison’s Eve, I found out that George Méliès, the filmmaker, had a collection of these automata, and he loved them very much.
When he got older, he ended up — he had made 500 movies in his life time, during his career — losing his money. Eventually he lost his movie studio and he couldn’t afford to take care of his beloved automaton collection and so he donated them to a local museum. The museum promised to take care of them and put them on display, but they never did. They put them up in the attic and the roof leaked on them and a beam fell on them and they were all destroyed and thrown away.
When I read that, I imagined a kid climbing through the garbage and finding one of those broken machines and trying to rescue it. As soon as I had that thought, it turns out I had what was the beginning of the Invention of Hugo Cabret even though at that moment I didn’t know who that kid was, I didn’t know why he was interested in machines, I didn’t know what he doing going through the garbage. I then spent a long time, about 2-1/2 years, figuring out the answers to all of those questions.
That became the story of the book, which is that Hugo is an orphan and he lives secretly in the walls of the train station in Paris in the early 1930s and he has this broken automaton that he’s found that he’s tries desperately to fix it because he thinks that there is a message for him hidden within the clockworks of the machine from his father who died. He thinks if he can just get the machine to work, that the machine will write the message from his father and it will tell him what he should do with his life and rescue him.
Then he meets this mean, old toymaker in the train station and the toymaker’s goddaughter. The book is sort of two mysteries that interweave with each other. The first half of the book is a mystery about that machine and who made it and where it came from and the message that eventually comes from it, and the second half is a mystery involving the old man who’s the toymaker and his history.
