Your Humble Blogger picked up I am the Messenger on the strength of reviews, although it turns out that they were reviews of a different book. Does that ever happen to you? I don’t mean that in a there is no way the reviewer could have read the same book I did and written that review way, I mean it in an is there another book with this title, or did I totally misremember the review way. For anyone who wants to know, this book is not set in World War II, so if you have read a review of a book called I am the Messenger that was set in World War II, it isn’t this one. Or a review of a book that is not called I am the Messenger but is set in World War II. Also not this book. This book is set in the present day in Australia, and is by Markus Zusak. Also, Gentle Reader, if you know what book I did think I was getting, I’d be curious to know what that book really is called, and who wrote it.
Also, is it just me, or does the name Markus Zusak sound like a failed attempt at a palindrome? I suppose the palindromic name would be Markus Zsukram. Or more likely Markusz Sukram. Or Markus Sukram, but it works a lot better with the zed, doesn’t it? He can hang around with Stanley Yelnats from Holes and Roberta Atrebor. Anyway.
This book, the actual book, I mean, and not any other book that I thought this book was or might have been, where was I? I’ll start again.
I am the Messenger is an interesting book with a lot of arresting scenes and powerful images, but its main conceit falls apart toward the end. It feels a bit as if the author, having conceived of Ed and his hand of aces and tasks, was sufficiently captivated by them that he wrote the book despite knowing that the answer (messenger for who?) was not going to work. And I don’t know if I blame him. I mean, if you had a great idea for a book, and you knew you could manage to write the shit out of that idea for a couple of hundred pages, and you knew that the idea didn’t hold water, that there was a fundamental mystery for which no authorial explanation would suffice, would you go ahead and write the thing, or would you throw it away? Well, and YHB would throw it away, because I’m that way. I’m not a writer. But if you were, well, wouldn’t you just cadge together the best ending you could, and send it out?
Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.