The Iron Man: A Children's Story in Five Nights by Ted Hughes.
Title: The Iron Man: A Children's Story in Five Nights.
Author: Ted Hughes.
Genre: Fiction, literature, science fiction, YA.
Country: U.K.
Language: English.
Publication Date: 1968.
Summary: A mysterious creature stalks the land, eating barbed wire and devouring tractors and plows. The farmers are mystified-and terrified. And then they glimpse him in the night: the Iron Giant, taller than a house, with glowing headlight eyes and an insatiable taste for metal. The hungry giant must be stopped at any cost. Only a young boy named Hogarth is brave enough to lead the Iron Giant to a safe trap. And only Hogarth knows where to turn when a space-bat as big as Australia, hungry for every living thing on Earth, darkens the sky.
My rating: 7.5/10.
My review:
♥ The red lorry stood just as they had left it. The soil lay just as they had left it, undisturbed. Everything was just as they had left it. The Iron Man had not come.
Nor did he come that day.
Next morning, all the farmers came again. Still, everything lay just as they had left it.
And so it wet on, day after day. Still the Iron Man never came.
Now the farmers began to wonder if he would ever come again. They began to wonder if he had come at all. They began to make up explanations of what had happened to their machinery. Nobody likes to believe in an Iron Monster that eats tractors and cars.
♥ "Alas," said the space-bat-angel-dragon, "I am useless. Utterly useless. All we do in space is fly, or make music."
"Make music?" asked the Iron Man. "How? What sort of music?"
"Haven't you heard of the music of the spheres?" asked the dragon. "It's the music that space makes to itself. All the spirits inside all the stars are singing. I'm a star spirit. I sing too. The music of the spheres is what makes space so peaceful."
"Then whatever made you want to eat up the earth?" asked the Iron Man. "If you're all so peaceful up there, how did you get such greedy and cruel ideas?"
The dragon was silent for a long time after this question. And at last he said: "It just came over me. I don't know why. It just came over me, listening to the battling shouts and the war-cries of the earth - I got excited, I wanted to join in."
"Well, you can sing for us instead," said the Iron Man. "It's a long time since anybody here on earth heard the music of the spheres. It might do us all good."
And so it was fixed. The space-bat-angel-dragon was to send his star back into the constellation of Orion, ad he was to live inside the moon. And every night he was to fly around the earth, through the heavens, singing.
So his fearful shape, slowly swimming through the night sky, didn't frighten people, because it was dark and it couldn't be seen. But the whole world could hear him, a strange soft music that seemed to fill the whole of space, a deep weird singing, like millions of voices singing together.
...And the space-bat-angel's singing had the most unexpected effect. Suddenly the world became wonderfully peaceful. The singing got inside everybody and made them as peaceful as starry space, and blissfully above all their earlier little squabbles. The strange soft eerie space-music began to alter all the people of the world. They stopped making weapons. The countries began to think how they could live pleasantly alongside each other, rather than how to get rid of each other. All they wanted to do was to have peace to enjoy this strange, wild, blissful music from the giant singer in space.