Mr Strong

Yaaaaay! It’s Mr Man Week and for seven days, we’ll be bringing you the most excellent and amusing Mr Man Book Reviews by Hamilton Richardson.

Today, we have a high-brow five star review of Roger Hargreaves’ Mr Strong:

What a triumph it is, this Nietzschean parable of the Superman. Mr Strong’s very being brims with the Will To Power, for which his physical strength is not a delicate metaphor. He hammers a nail into walls with his finger, he ties a knot in an iron bar.

Furthermore, he manifests this sheer force and charisma often quite despite himself. He tears a door off its hinges totally by accident, and barely notices as a bus is written off in collision with him. The symbolism of both of these events is important. The incident with the door makes explicit that it is the world around Mr Strong that must change – not he – however violent this birth of the new. It is equally significant that Mr Strong’s own inattentiveness to road safety causes the crash – he cannot help but exist above the social rules that govern the majority, beyond Good and Evil.

This is not to say that Mr Strong ever uses his innate superiority to do wrong – he is every bit as good an egg as those which form his principal diet. One feels he would be just as horrified as Nietzsche himself was by the anti-Semitism of Wagner.

Whatever the case, destiny calls the Superman. And with a fire in a field he yanks a barn from its foundations (a clever metaphor for the dramatic social change brought about by iconoclasts such as he). He fills it with water, empties it upon the chaotic inferno, dousing its flames with his might. Without so much as a second thought, he seizes his moment in history.

Thus sprach Zarathustra.

And here is the illustrious Hamilton Richardson’s website.

Mr Happy

Yaaaaay! It’s Mr Man Week and for seven days, we’ll be bringing you the most excellent and amusing Mr Man Book Reviews by Hamilton Richardson.

Today, we have a high-brow five star review of Roger Hargreaves’ Mr Happy:

In his third work, Mr Happy, Hargreaves takes us on a Jungian journey to the integrated self.

The story starts by introducing us to the supposedly perfect life that our eponymous hero appears to live – the tranquilized bliss and counterfeit euphoria of Happyland. Yet what is it that leads Mr Happy to wander away from an existence that, if truly flawless, should suffice to satisfy and sustain him? Why this need to venture deep into the mysterious unknown of the forest? To open a door in a tree-trunk and descend a staircase beneath the ground to the deepest recesses of the unconscious?

Here lays the crux of this exploration of analytical psychology – the defining happiness of our central character is revealed as nothing more than a persona. His name and outward appearance are a mask to the outside world and from himself. It is the very inauthenticity of this state of affairs that drives him on the voyage to seek out and confront the root of the dissonance that this generates within him.

For indeed, what does he come face-to-face with at the foot of these stairs but his own repressed sadness? This comes in the form of his miserable alter ego – physically identical, polar opposite in mood. It is only through this confrontation with the shadow that his unsustainable persona can find authentic resolution and true integration of the self be achieved. These archetypes are quite literally brought to light as Mr Happy coaxes Mr Miserable up to the surface and into view of the conscious mind in a climax of now genuine peace and bliss.

In a knowing nod to his source material, Hargreaves depicts Mr Happy as round – a shape he shares with the mandala.

And here is the illustrious Hamilton Richardson’s website.

Mr Bounce

Yaaaaay! It’s Mr Man Week and for seven days, we’ll be bringing you the most excellent and amusing Mr Man Book Reviews by Hamilton Richardson.

Today, we have a high-brow five star review of Roger Hargreaves’ Mr Bounce:

An infant’s primer in Existentialism, we find in this book a weighty treatise on the personal politics of agency and empowerment, taking ownership and authorship of one’s own life.

Such is the force with which this Heideggerian hero is hurled into the world that he has not stopped bouncing since. This is Mr Bounce’s facticity – the set of circumstances, both of himself and his environment, in which he finds himself as a subjectivity. That is, his ceaseless bouncing is the hand that life has dealt him, owing to his unique position in time, in history, as a conscious being in a sensory world.

The phrase above is the key to this tale – ‘he finds himself as a subjectivity’. In the early stages of the story, his experience is more that of an object as he randomly bounces his way through his life, exerting next to no control. It is important to be aware, as ever with Hargreaves, that this is not merely a matter of the physical, the material. The most crucial passage of this masterwork is where Mr Bounce is beaten around like a tennis ball by two players who appear to lack any concept of his personhood. This is just as we are all to some extent shunted to and fro by the whims and vagaries of das Man, The They – the unthinking, amorphous collective abnegation of Will. Here we confront Bad Faith – inauthentic existence.

Unlike many though, perhaps due to his particularly vivid and immediate experience of this phenomenon, Mr Bounce is spurred into action. In a visit to a doctor (of philosophy?), Mr Bounce is presented with the perfect solution – a pair of heavy boots.

Acknowledging his facticity he also transcends it, through choice – the active exercise of free will. Newly grounded in the uniqueness of his being, his bouncing ceases – the emancipatory conclusion of this work is the achievement of agency, authentic being.

And here is the illustrious Hamilton Richardson’s website.