In The Motherless Oven (2014) Rob Davis presents a vivid fantasy world where the human and inhuman live side by side. However, he imbues the world with a sense of the everyday in keeping with a long history of British Social Realism. The three teenagers at the heart of the story are all human but their parents are a strange inhuman mix of sculptures, murals, monsters, and mechanical objects. Not only that but they have been constructed by the children themselves.
Panel from p.64 ‘The Motherless Oven’ © Rob Davis 2014.
The basic plot about three adolescents who run away from school to go on a quest to find one of their dads (who may have been kidnapped) sounds fairly straightforward, but from the very first page it is obvious that we are not in Kansas anymore. An odd circular object with dials and spikes, looking like a steampunk sun sculpture, announces that it is “knife o’clock.” Below it the narration text says “So I chained up my dad in the shed.” The next page shows a dark sky filled with kitchen knives that are plunging to the ground like rain, pouring down on a row of suburban houses. This, it seems, is a perfectly normal turn of events. We are then introduced to the main character Scarper Lee who is watching the “rain” from his window
‘The Motherless Oven’ p.7 © Rob Davis 2014.
Scarper is a moody teenager but he has more reason than most to be temperamental–he knows that he will die in three weeks time. In this universe people know their death day but not when they were born. Davis also introduces an ingenious narrative device; a vase next to Scarper starts voicing his thoughts, we see speech bubbles emanating from its long neck.This is a “home gazette,” given to Scarper by the school nurse to record his thoughts and help him in his dying days like some sort of ceramic therapist. It also helps the reader (and other characters) know what is going on.
The only person crazy enough to go out in a knifestorm is the mysterious new girl in school Vera Pike. She turns up at Scarper’s house carrying a cafe table over her shoulder, its thick round top acting as an umbrella protecting her from the deluge of sharp blades. Vera barges into Scarper’s life, sitting next to him in class and waiting at his front gate to walk him to school. She also befriends Curtis Smith in the “Deaf Unit,” the part of the school were kids with “needs” are sent. Curtis has “Medicated Interference Syndrome” which seems to be some sort of autistic spectrum disorder. To help him cope he carries around some sort of retro-futuristic ipod that has a dial to modify his “signal to noise.” If turned up too high his nose starts to bleed and his dialogue turns into a messily drawn stream of consciousness. This newly-formed gang soon escape from school (past the guard lions obviously) to search for Scaper’s dad. We never see Mr Lee in his entirety but he appears to be a large boat on wheels festooned in various brass pipes and horns. He was kept chained in the shed and is wife is a hairdryer. The Motherless Oven has its genesis in an earlier short story How I Built My Father (2009).
‘The Motherless Oven’ p.39 © Rob Davis 2014.
Davis likes playing with words as much as he enjoys drawing the story. Try saying Scarper Lee, Vera Pike and Curtis Smith out loud and feel the syllables tumbling around in your mouth. He also makes much of words with double meanings. When Scarper’s friend Pete’s mum has a breakdown she is emotionally bereft and lying in the school playground but because she is also a machine she has mechanically failed and can’t be fixed. Later Vera tears the legs off another pupil’s mum who is a paper mural pasted up on the school wall. Wondering whether she will die someone replies “I reckon. Mother paper bleeds really bad.”
Another interesting aspect to the book is the way that gangs are presented like pop groups and, instead of newspapers, posters on bus shelters give out the news. After a run in with another gang, Orson and the Morons, locals are warned about the exploits of the lead characters with a poster calling them Vera Pike and The Heels “The hottest new band on the estate.” When another band releases something it isn’t a record but someone’s mother into the sky like a balloon. Intriguingly Davis does also depict vinyl records, Scarper has one on his wall and there appears to be a record shop in town. Circles, wheels and spheres are a recurring motif throughout the book. At school one of the lessons is “Circular History” where “God creates Man and Man creates God” and one of Scarper’s textbooks is “The Four Cycles of Life: A Practical Guide to Gods, Immortals, Women and the Sea.”
‘The Motherless Oven’ p.105 © Rob Davis 2014.
Davis has created a complete world with its own natural laws and consistencies. The person who recommended the book to me suggested it was similar to A Clockwork Orange (1962) by Anthony Burgess in the way it depicted a distinct world. Even with all the fantastical elements in The Motherless Oven it is still rooted in the everyday world of teenagers–parents, school, music and friendship all being important in different ways. Davis’ earlier work on Nelson (2011) and Don Quixote (2013) was more cartoony and colourful but here the art is subdued with its thick black ink and grey washes. Davis was attempting to keep the story grounded and in an interview he acknowledged the influence of British kitchen sink films of the 1960s “I felt that a black and white world would bind the ordinary and the fantastical together and give it a stark reality.”
Films like Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1960) by Karel Reisz came out of the documentary movement of the the 1930s and were depicting real working class lives on the screen for the first time. This wave of social-realist dramas would later lead to TV shows like Grange Hill (with its comic book style opening titles) surely another influence on The Motherless Oven along with British comic strips such as The Bash Street Kids in The Beano. Davis discussed his influences in an interview Broken Frontier and they run wider than these. Some such as Ronald Searle’s illustrations and Barbara Hepworth’s sculpture made complete sense–many of the parents look like a piece of Hepworth’s work. Other influences such as Zora Neale Hurston, seem less obvious but no less intriguing and perhaps hint to finding out more about Vera Pike in later volumes. The Motherless Oven is mooted to be the first in a trilogy. It would be fascinating to see how Davis broadens the world he has created. I hope he continues to resist the urge to explain everything in it.