Customer Reviews

The Rat: A Perverse Miscellany

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This book is a fascinating collection of literary and historical references to rats. There are quotes, urban legends, comic book covers, movie synopsis, and lots more. My favorite is a photo of an ivory carving of a ratcatcher, with the rat escaping by climbing over him. If you have a horror of rats, you'll enjoy the book. The author herself seems fascinated but horrified with them. If you like rats as pets or just as interesting animals, you will find that the book leans heavily toward the horrific and sensationalistic. References to bitten babies and devouring hordes abound. There are positive references to rats as well, but they are in the minority, including a quoted paragraph from the Rats of Nimh. Positive references have obviously only been cursorily researched. There is, for example, no reference to the history of keeping domestic rats, stories of prisoners in the Bastille taming rats, mention of Jules Verne's(!) story The Adventures of the Rat Family, though much lesser authors are quoted for much less rat-oriented literature.

Barbara Hodgson opened every basement door, manhole cover, and ship's hold to turn up these tidbits about rodents in literature and popular culture. Her material ranges widely and, other than treating on the title rodents, has little commonality. The book seems to collect everything people have written about rats. And that is what this book is really about: what people have written down, passed down, stored up, invented, imagined, and feared about rats. Hodgson's miscellany builds up an image of rats as people have perceived and misperceived them over the centuries.

The Rat is about human reactions to these animals as icons; mostly negative but also sometime positive. We find how rats have been used to invoke mood and symbolize degradation, poverty, doom, and terror in numerous books, comics, and movies. We encounter little-known morsels about rats in societies around the globe. (Did you know there is a Jain temple where rats are worshipped?) There are rat tales from around the world and through history, with period illustrations on every page. Some entries may unsettle you; we are not spared the many ways rats have been killed. Other entries are cute; here are rats as storybook heroes. Others are simply gross; a rat king is not a rodent monarch but a bizarre phenomenon that I will leave for you to read about, if you care to.

Hodgson doesn't interpret her collection. We readers are left to draw our own conclusions. This book may satisfy your curiosity, settle some bar bets on obscure movies, provoke you to research previously unheard of topics, or amuse you with rodent and human oddities and wonders.

I admit it, I am facinated by rats. This is due in part to my owning terriers, the ultimate rat-dog (the Norway rat first showed up in the British Isles in 1714, and England is the "mother country" of almost every terrier breed). I enjoyed reading this book and picking up little snippets of information about our ratty friends. The information is presented in an interesting format and if you like rats (even secretly), give the book a read. After all, long after human's are extinct, the rat will still be thriving.