The Joker (youth novel)

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The Joker (original title The Messenger ) is a book for young people published in 2002 by the writer Markus Zusak .

content

The novel is set in an Australian suburb and is told by the 19-year-old main character Ed Kennedy himself. Ed sees himself as the average young man who hasn't achieved anything in his life, and he sees no way that could change.

However, Ed's life takes a sudden turn when one day he gets caught in a bank robbery and finds a playing card in his mailbox - an ace. It is the first of four aces that Ed receives throughout history. Three addresses or references to such are noted on each card. At the addresses, Ed finds people whom he has to help in various ways. In the course of the novel, various characters appear who have to do with the playing cards, but the question of who sends the aces remains unsolved until the end of the book and keeps the story tense.

The novel ends with a fifth playing card, the joker, on which Ed finds his own address, and the solution of the puzzle about the playing cards.

The story is shaped by Ed's thoughts and feelings, because until the end of the story he is insecure and scared about his sudden mission and does not feel up to the responsibility he sees in the playing cards. The novel is about friendship, moral courage and above all self-confidence and a good self-image.

Summary

The novel begins with Ed and friends witnessing a bank robbery. The bank robber asks Marv for the key to his rickety but beloved car and tries to escape with it. But the car does not start. Ed courageously grabs the perpetrator's broken rifle, aims at him and smashes the car's windshield. The bank robber can be arrested and suddenly Ed becomes a hero. From that moment on, Ed's life changes.

A few days after the bank robbery, he received a strange message in the form of a playing card with addresses written on it. Ed doesn't know who sent him this card or why. Having become curious, he researched the addresses and got to know different people whose fate touches him. He has the feeling that he has to help them, almost as if he was just chosen to do so.

A short time later, Ed gets a summons to court and faces the bank robber again. He tells Ed that he is a dead man when he looks in the mirror. A little while later, the young taxi driver goes to the first address. As a secret observer, he witnesses an intoxicated man raping his wife while the little daughter in the next room overhears everything. Ed finds himself hesitant, thoughtful and weak. But when he happened to meet the raped woman with her small child in the supermarket and realized how much she was suffering, he decided to act, but initially shrank from the task.

The next address he goes to brings him to an old and very lonely lady. Ed visits this old woman. Her name is Milla and she is overjoyed to see Ed. She thinks she recognizes in him her former lover Jimmy, for whom she has been waiting for many years. Ed befriends Milla and lets her fall in love. When he searches for said Jimmy in the cemetery, it turns out that this (Milla's husband) has been dead for 60 years.

Ed is still unsure how to help the woman with the drunkard, so he goes to the nearest address that was written down for him. This time he observes a young girl doing a run. She is 15 years old and her name is Sophie. She always runs in the early morning and barefoot. One day Ed follows her and talks to her. During his further observations, Ed realizes that the girl is very shy. Ed attends a running competition in which Sophie participates. In the U15 competition over 1500 meters, she does not reach the speed of her morning training and loses. Ed's young friend cannot win the next competition either. She wears older sneakers that apparently she was given as a present.

Ed, who believes that Sophie's failures at the competitions are due to the fact that she always runs barefoot during morning training, brings her an empty shoebox as a present. Sophie's father, who receives the box, is of course quite surprised at the unusual gift. But Sophie understands Ed's quiet message. At the next competition, the girl runs barefoot and impresses the audience with the ease of her run and only a fall prevents her victory. When Ed runs up to her, Sophie thanks him and asks if he is an angel, but he replies that he was just a runaway guy.

Ed does not let go of the sad scene with the alcoholic. He drives to this house a second time. Again he witnesses a brutal rape. He meets the woman's daughter, the six-year-old Angelina, who asks him if he has come to help them. He promises the little one to do this. The following night Ed got a call asking him to check the mailbox. He finds a gun there with a single bullet in it. After some doubts, Ed decides to take action. He waits until the bars close at night and offers to drive the drunk home. Instead, he takes him to a mountain top called the cathedral. The drunk passenger has now fallen asleep. Ed wakes him up by slapping the gun in his face. With the gun he forces the drunk to run up the mountain to the abyss. While Ed is still reluctant to commit the murder, but is aware of how much suffering this man brings to his family, his victim falls asleep. In the morning Ed makes it clear to the brutal man what he did to his wife and child. The scene uncertainly ends with Ed actually shooting.

Did he kill the alcoholic?

The reader later learns that the drinker survived and disappeared from the city. Ed receives a night visit from two ominous characters who eat pies in his apartment and then beat him up. The masked men, Daryl and Keith, bring him the message that he has done well so far. They give Ed an envelope with a message that his life depends on completing his assigned duties and another card. The next card does not contain any addresses, but the advice that he should say a prayer on the Mount of the Brothers. A mysterious passenger, whom Ed pursues for not paying, leads Ed to the Brothers' Mountain. There are three names carved into a rock there. This leads Ed to a priest named Thomas O'Reilly, who lives in a slum area. Ed and his friends attend a poorly attended service at the Father's.

Ed organizes a free beer party in the church that is a huge hit. Ed's protégés come as well as Father O'Reilli's brother, with whom he has grown apart. Two other names lead him to a young mother and a 14 year old. The woman sacrifices herself for her children. Ed can do his job here by giving his mother an ice cream. The woman asks his name and thanks, her little daughter promises the happy woman that she will give her own ice cream the next time.

He beats up 14-year-old Gavin Rose, who is a creep and tries everything to win his older brother's approval, and then alerts the brother. Satisfied with himself, Ed returns to the Brothers' Mountain. To his surprise there are hooks behind the first two names, only the name Gavin Rose has not yet been checked. He is later beaten up by the two brothers and their friends.

In the following chapter, the friends’s annual “Bone Breaker Game” takes place, where football is played barefoot. A boy on the sidelines plays bouncer with Ed's dog. He receives the next card from him. This time he finds the names of writers on it. The next few people in whose fate Ed is drawn are a family whose friendship he wins and whose Christmas lights he fixes and makes them very happy, his own mother, whom he gets to know from a new side, and an old cinema owner who is in vain waiting for someone to visit his cinema.

More and more people whom Ed did not know before are becoming part of his life. Suddenly there are references to people who are very close to him personally, namely his friends Ritchie, Marv and Audrey. Ed watches Ritchie, who spends every night in front of the radio and has lost self-respect. After a conversation, Richie goes looking for a job and wakes up from his lethargy.

Marv has completely different problems. Ed reaches him only with difficulty, although the friends spend a lot of time playing cards together. Marv loved a girl named Suzanne who he became pregnant when he was 16. To avoid the shame, the family moved, but Marv is saving all his money for his child. Ed encourages Marv to deal with his ex-girlfriend and her angry father. Marv then finally gets to know his little daughter and sees his girlfriend again. Another card concerns Audrey, his beloved. Ed takes heart and almost wordlessly confesses his love to her after learning from her lover that he is the only one who really touches her heart. The joker is the last card Ed receives, with Ed's own address. Ed first suspects it's from Audrey. But then a trail leads him to the cemetery. One of the men who beat Ed is standing near his father's grave. Ed is still wondering who will send him the cards.

One day a passenger wants to be driven to Ed's own address. Ed recognizes him as the hapless bank robber. He takes him to all the people he has helped, Ed is no longer a “dead man”, he has found himself in his concern for the fate of his fellow men. When he gets home, he finds the man who brought him the tickets on his sofa. He learns that it was a test of whether an average person like Ed can change. Ed has changed and encourages everyone to do it.

expenditure

The English original edition was published by Pan Macmillan Australia in 2002 . The German original edition in the translation by Alexandra Ernst was published in 2006 by cbj- Verlag, Munich. In the USA the novel was published under the title I Am the Messenger .

Awards

The book was awarded mainly in Australia and the USA, but also with the German Youth Literature Prize.

Reviews

  • "So good it breaks your heart." Teenreads

Audio book

The Joker was published in 2008 as an audio book by cbj audio, read by Rainer Strecker in an abridged version.

"" The brutality of truth is sometimes of immaculate beauty. " A wonderful sentence. And just one of many that you can let yourself melt on your tongue in this exceptionally good audio book. Because the precision, dexterity and ease with which Markus Zusak celebrates language is taken to extremes by Rainer Strecker's remarkable reading. Strecker dives into the text of the 20-year-old Australian, makes the words his own, sensitively changes pace and color of voice, and manages to breathe life into even breaks with great timing. "

- Buecher-Magazin.de

Others

  • In 2008 Ross Mueller worked the novel into a play (but only in English). It premiered on November 24th, 2008 at the Canberra Youth Theater .

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Review on Teensreads
  2. ↑ Review on Buecher-Magazin

Web links