In The Marzipan Pig, Hoban suggests that it is the sorrows of life that help us grow, and that make the unexpected joys taste that much sweeter.
The tale opens with the Marzipan Pig falling behind a sofa where he remains undiscovered, his purpose unfulfilled, his life unlived. Into his loneliness comes a mouse who discovers in him such sweetness that she eats him all up. But by taking him in in this way she absorbs his spirit too—his experience of the world as lonely, with help ever hoped for but never come.
She is not trapped behind the sofa, however, and his yearning for others becomes, through the filter of her personality, her yearning for love. She falls for the clock in the hall, but her love is unrequited. The clock takes her for granted and will do nothing but his duty: to tell the time.
One day, however, the mouse does not return from her daily wanderings and the clock, waiting in vain for her, dies of a broken spring.
The mouse meanwhile is eaten by an owl who lives opposite, on the common. He absorbs all her longing for love, and his affections are then won by a taxicab meter. He steals a lady’s handbag, hoping in this way to get enough money for a ride in the taxi where he can be near his love. The taxidriver takes pity on him. He returns the handbag and tells the owl he can ride in the taxi provided he pays him back sometime.
‘I love you so much! said the owl to the meter. ‘How much do you love me?’
’25p,’ said the meter.
‘Love me more,’ said the owl.
’30p,’ said the meter.
‘More and more!’ said the owl.
’35p,’ said the meter. ’40, 45.’
‘Yes,’ said the owl, ‘that’s how it is. More and more and ever more. I am so happy with the lovely violet glow of you!
But the driver stops the taxi eventually, at the Albert Bridge embankment, so he can practice his trumpet. The owl is upset and demands he turn the meter on again. He dances up and down in his rage and unconsciously does so in time to the music. Passers by think he is performing and throw coins until enough is amassed that the owl can have another ride, and this sequence is repeated through the night.
Back beneath the owl’s tree, meanwhile, the indigestible bones of the mouse are absorbed by the soil and nourish a flower which is visited by a bee. The bee takes in the mouse’s marzipan yearnings along with the flower’s marzipan flavored nectar. The bee dozes off after its sip, waking after nightfall. Since it navigates by the sun, it cannot return to the hive, so instead it flies inside the window of Number 6 where the pig lived. In the window stands a hibiscus. The bee falls into conversation with a hibiscus flower, and the flower reveals that tonight is its last night for tomorrow its petals will fall. The bee offers to do a honey dance and the flower joyfully accepts. As the bee dances its marzipan scent mingles with the flower’s fragrance until at last the flower droops and the bee flies off.
Meanwhile, another mouse living at Number 6 has been observing the way the flowers bloom and fade so quickly.
‘Poor silly things,’ she used to say to herself. ‘They’re pretty enough but they have no grasp. One after another they make the same mistake: they let go. The thing to do is, once you’ve bloomed, hold on. Just simply hold on and don’t let go. There one is and there one stays. Yes.’
The mouse retrieves the fallen marzipan-hibiscus and makes herself a frock from it. Then,
The mouse climbed up the bookshelf and into the flowerpot. She carefully began to work her way up the long curving stem of the hibiscus plant so that she could take her place as a flower on the end of it.
‘The thing to do is simply hold on,’ she said, but the stem drooped and swayed with her weight, the tight frock made her clumsy, she lost her grip and fell out of the window.
Fortunately she falls into the postman’s bag just as he is arriving to deliver the mail. He doesn’t see her fall. The first he knows about her is when he reaches into his mailbag and the terrified mouse bites his finger.
Not knowing what else to do, she kept her teeth closed on the postman’s finger and held on.
“Ow!” yelled the postman. He flung up his arm and the mouse shot up into the air like a rocket.
This time she hits the owl dozing in his tree. She knocks him right out of the tree still sleeping, his wings folded. The owl believes it is love that has hit him “like a thud in the stomach.” He looks up and sees the mouse still holding on to his branch.
“‘Love!’ shouted the owl. ‘The breakfast of your eyes!’ He meant to say ‘brightness.'”
He flies up, but the mouse scurries down the tree and back to Number 6. Once inside she spies a package in the letter basket. She climbs up to investigate and discovers a new marzipan pig which she eats. “The pig was fresh from the confectioner’s and had no experience of life whatever. There was not a single thought in him, just marzipan.” She dozes off until the boy who lives at Number 6 opens the package. The mouse takes fright and jumps out back to her hole.
The boy’s mother [called] from the kitchen, ‘Any letters?’
‘Three for you and one for Dad…and a mouse in a pink frock for me but she ran off.’
The mouse decides she doesn’t after all want to be a hibiscus, but she does not remove the frock, and is seen at three o’clock in the morning dancing by the Albert Bridge.
In this gently haunting tale, we see again Hoban’s view of, as he terms it, “the human situation”: the way we are all connected to each other; the way serendipity mingles with pain; and the way life renews itself keeping hope and joy alive as we search for meaning and purpose.