A bank, a 15-minute parking zone out front and a bungled robbery. So begins Markus Zusak’s acclaimed award-winning novel The Messenger for young adults.
Ed Kennedy is lying facedown in the bank more concerned about Marv’s car in that parking zone than the gun-toting bank robber. His best mate Marv is concerned too – the gunman is useless and he can’t afford another parking ticket.
Such irreverence sets the tone of the book as Ed, from nowhere, inadvertently prevents the robbery and becomes something of a media celebratory for a week or two before returning to a life stunningly boring in its ordinariness.
Just an ordinary bloke going nowhere
Nineteen, an underage taxi driver, living in a dump with a dog that ‘smells like the sewer’, Ed plays cards, avoids telling Audrey what he really thinks of her and is constantly belittled by his mother. He does little else in the unnamed small town on the edge of the metropolis.
But then the first ace arrives: the Ace of Diamonds. And written on the playing card are three names and three addresses (although somewhat cryptically presented).
Originally confused by ‘the message’, on visiting the first, Ed sees the drunken husband return home and rape his young wife. He recognises he has been chosen, that he has been given an assignment, to help, to care, to act.
Initially, he vacillates between action and inaction, bravado and fear. How is he to stop the drunkard?
The message or the messenger?
And so we travel on the journey with Ed as he works through the cards – never straightforward in the clues to the identities or the action he is supposed to take.
From media hero to everyman quietly going about his instruction, Ed himself changes. No longer the emotional doormat, he challenges those around him.
Whilst he may bring comfort to a lonely old lady who mistakes him for her long-dead husband killed in the Second World War, he confronts the bullying father of the former schoolmate, now single mother. He gets badly beaten for his trouble when trying to help two tearaway brothers communicate with each other, but Ed is at all times trying to help. That’s the message of the cards – and he finds out the physical cost to himself if he doesn’t follow instructions.
Zusak is a magician with words, conjuring imagery out of alliteration and onomatopoeia "... the silence of the street is swollen. It's scared and slippery as I wait for something to happen."
He has also, in Ed Kennedy, created a funny, immensely likeable and charming character. Initially a self-absorbed deadbeat (hence his mother’s attitude towards him) who believes he gets no respect because he does not deserve any, Ed becomes stronger as a result of actions.
The Messenger builds suspense as, more and more, we want to know just who is behind all these messages. But the suspense is also in the messages themselves. What’s in it next for Ed?
But then that is its point. The reveal at the conclusion may be a slight disappointment, but nothing is going to be straightforward with Zusak. He is a master of imagery and concept.
It is the message within the book that is the ultimate message and The Messenger is just that – the messenger.
Source
- The Messenger by Markus Zusak (Knopf Books, 2005)
Keith Lawrence - Published writer of articles in magazines, newspapers and websites, predominantly on culture, alongside ghostwriter/editor/copywriter.
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