By all accounts, Edward the hamster fell short as a childhood pet. He refused to play with his young owners, lived for less than a year and had strange tendencies.
He “jerked around, hopped on one leg, had a mad squint in his eye and hoarded his own feces,” recalls Miriam Elia, a London-based writer and comedian whose mother bought the hamster for her and her brother, Ezra, in 1990.
“We wanted a dog,” recalls Ezra, now 34 and a writer and teacher, also based in London. “She came back with a hamster.”
But while Edward might have failed as a pet, he did leave what the Elias call “an enduring mark on their collective psyche.” So much so that he’s the force behind the sibling duo’s new graphic novel, “The Diary of Edward the Hamster 1990-1990.”
The book came about after Miriam performed a stage reading of Edward’s “journals” in London in 2011 and attracted a publisher’s attention. It positions the brother-and-sister team as translators and Edward as a disillusioned author who thinks there must be more to life than eating seeds and spinning on his wheel for Ezra and Miriam’s entertainment.
“They can take my freedom, but they will never take my soul,” Edward writes in his diary after his captors force him to run through a maze they’ve constructed out of toilet-paper rolls.
It’s not the first time that the siblings have resurrected the hamster’s memory for artistic purposes. Edward’s character has also appeared in a radio show and a BBC animated short.
“In any piece of art, you are going to be inspired by your own life,” says Miriam, 31, admitting that the fictional hamster has a far more elevated personality than the creature that lived in their London home years ago.
At the outset, the actual Edward looked just like any other hamster with his brownish coat and white underbelly. The Elias embraced their new furry ward with gusto, subjecting him to toy-boat rides in their paddling pool and the aforementioned maze. But it wasn’t long before both children began to suspect that something wasn’t quite right with Edward. He refused to play with them but would secretly run on his wheel at night, and his body appeared twisted and deformed.
“He was clearly mentally ill,” says Miriam, 31. “We just weren’t able to articulate that as children.”
But the Edward of the book, is whip-smart and hyperarticulate. He makes wry observations about life, punctuated with lofty existential theories. Of a cat, he writes, “He is just a dumb and senseless brute — he is allowed to roam free, for the bars are locked firmly on his mind.”
Both fictional and real-life Edward do meet the same tragic end. In real life, after they’d had Edward for less than a year, he bit Miriam’s finger out of the blue, leading her mother to put an end to the pet.
“I remember going to the school nurse for some sort of injection, returning from school, and finding out that Mum had ‘let him go.’ She told me she had taken Edward to Highgate Woods, and set him free,” Miriam recalls. “I soon found out that she had taken him to the vet, where he had been injected with a lethal dose of hamster morphine.”
“I pass into shadow,” the fictional Edward writes as he succumbs to death.
Looking back on the incident, Ezra admits to feeling an “inkling of loss” at the time, but Miriam claims she felt no remorse.
She still feels the same. “We all pretend we feel guilty and read into things, when there’s simply no meaning there,” she says.
And as for her feelings about keeping hamsters as pets, Miriam says she’s not against it, so long as the critters aren’t too intelligent. Otherwise, she says “they might end up writing an autobiography.”