The Piper's Son

The Piper's Son, by Melina Marchetta

Five years have passed since Saving Francesca, but now it's Thomas Mackee who needs saving. After his favourite uncle was blown to bits on his way to work in a foreign city, Tom watched his family implode. He quit school and turned his back on his music and everyone that mattered, including the girl he can't forget. Shooting for oblivion, he's hit rock bottom, forced to live with his single, pregnant aunt, work at the Union pub with his former friends, and reckon with his grieving, alcoholic father. Tom's in no shape to mend what's broken. But what if no one else is, either?

Look, y'all know how much I love Melina Marchetta, and if you don't, then, uh, I'm sorry that my statement, "Marchetta has always been one of my favorite authors," was too subtle for your peanut sized brain. Plus, Saving Francesca was always one of my top books, top. It's unlikely that I will ever be able to write about it because any kind of objectivity goes out the window when I talk about it, it would basically be me typing things like, "And then the eggs, and she makes friends, and Tolstoy and Trotsky, and Justine is her rock(!), and then she runs away but she calls home, and Luca, and then they get picked up at school!!!!!!!!!" and it's a big sloppy mess. Hearts in my eyes, hand to god.

So I was excited about The Piper's Son, because Frankie was always such a great character and I really wanted to know how she's doing for herself, five years on. The Piper's Son is tonally a fairly different book than Saving Francesca and Searching for Alibrandi, though, and even Jellicoe Road.

The Piper's Son alternates viewpoints from chapter to chapter between Tom Mackee, the, well, kinda doofus-y guy from Saving Francesca, and his aunt Georgie. I was going to refresh my memory about Tom (I always got him mixed up with Jimmy) but I can't find my copy of the book, which is very odd, since I brought Jellicoe Road and Finnikin of the Rock down with me, and I distinctly remember squirreling away Saving Francesca to take with me, so I am suspicious about its absence. I've also misplaced something else that I can't seem to find anywhere, so I'm wondering if there's some Bermuda Triangle box that I haven't unpacked all the way where all these wonderful items are hiding. Or if I'm just losing my mind and they're right out in plain sight.

Now that I'm completely sidetracked, let's talk The Piper's Son! But first, a short digression about Finnikin of the Rock. This book is messed up, man. It's well written, for sure, but it's sort of like if you were dropped into the world of Candyland, only instead of getting Gumdrop Pass and Queen Frostine, Lord Liquorice was a prisoner in the mines, Princess Lolly watched her brother murdered in front of her, Grandma Nutt had been gang-raped by soldiers, and Gloppy had died of the plague after being exiled from Molasses Swamp. It is a dark fantasy book, peeps. And I was completely unprepared for it. Marchetta usually likes to keep the major drama offscreen, so that her characters are dealing with the aftermath, more than the event itself. It's like the exact opposite of thrillers or murder mysteries, which generally move on to the next book in the series as if all these dead bodies are just another day at work, ho-hum. (Not that I'm complaining. I'm not reading Agatha Christie because I want to find out about trauma counseling.) Also, a fun fact: my brother dressed up like Lord Liquorice as a camp counselor once, probably because he enjoys making children cry.

In The Piper's Son, the great off-screen drama is the death of Tom's uncle Joe, who was blown up on his way to work in London. The death half a world away of the beloved younger half-brother of Tom's father Dom, and his aunt Georgie completely destroys the family, and Dom spirals down into an alcoholic mess that further fragments the family. Now, two years later, Tom's hit rock bottom and winds up moving in with Georgie because he's got literally nowhere else to go. Georgie has her own problems, as she's having a baby with her ex, whom she hasn't been on good terms with since he fathered a child while the two of them were on a break, seven years ago.

I enjoyed this book, although I didn't feel it had the humor that Saving Francesca had, which I'm still not sure was intentional or not. At one point in the book, Tom's grandmother and aunt are having a bit of fun at him about his thing with Tara Finke, and his grandmother goes, "Too sensitive, that one." Tom's way too sensitive about a lot of things, from his father's actions, to his need to work off the debt his skeevy ex-flatmates incurred at the pub, to his need for Tara. He needs to lighten up, Francis.

A common theme through Marchetta books is also the way the men and women always seem to have these life-or-death feelings toward each other. There's always at least one couple in which the man loves the woman to pieces really loudly, and it's just killing him inside. And the woman returns the love, but it's usually much less flailing and floppiness, and more determination and duh-ness going on for her part. That kind of unswerving loyalty is maybe the least-realistic of her books, as I've not met one couple who's expressed their feelings like that publicly (even if they feel it privately) the way that they do in Marchetta's books.

Of course, maybe the genius in Marchetta's books is the way that everyone seems to be able to say what they've been keeping in all this time, and they feel better for it, and everything works out in the end. It's like a billboard-sized advertisement for the truth shall set ye free, which I can get behind, although that happy ending is not how things usually work out in real life, sadly. I always employ a go-for-broke mentality when it comes to relationships, at least, and even though I've made quite a sight of myself, I still don't regret it, even though I'm not even on speaking terms with the people with whom I've been so honest any more.

Maybe I don't feel so strong a connection with The Piper's Son as I did with Saving Francesca because this one is more about grief and losing a sibling than about depression and feeling alone, which I have more experience with. I can't imagine what it would be like to lose my brother, and I don't want to. It still made me tear up some, though not the full-out sobfest that the others did. Marchetta is a master at the hopeful outcome, the we're-going-to-have-a-fairytale-ending-because-we'll-work-our-butts-off-to-get-it-because-we-know-the-alternative-is-terrible ending.

Georgie was not a very compelling character to me. Perhaps because of the structure of the book, with the alternating chapters, Georgie and Tom just had very different concerns (although the same grief about Joe) and it was harder to get Georgie's thoughts fleshed out. Tom was easier - I'd read him before, and he lives everything in technicolor, while Georgie is washed out in immobilizing grief, anger, and indecision. I think Georgie's issues could have been a book all their own, but because they were sort of side-alonged to Tom's, they got somewhat short shrift and wound up being an afterthought. It would have been better, maybe, to do it all from Tom's perspective, but give more scenes of him and Georgie together talking to get a sense of her problems.

I can't even tell how much of this review is about The Piper's Son, and how much is about Marchetta in general. Any book of Marchetta's is worth reading, but The Piper's Son isn't in the same class as Saving Francesca and Jellicoe Road, in my opinion, more like a Searching for Alibrandi-type, which at least isn't horrifically scarring like Finnikin of the Rock. I think I went through PTSD with that book, hand to god. It's nice to see Frankie again, although one of my most-beloved things about Saving Francesca was the deep deep friendship between the girls and Tom and Jimmy, which is missing here, mostly because half of them have moved away. I will never get tired of reading about these people though, and I'm half hopeful about the way that Marchetta leaves Jimmy out of The Piper's Son, like maybe she'll write a book about his problems, and how friends and family overcome it all, although at this point, I'm not sure what new trauma she can send him through, maybe amputation or paralyzation, and don't even think about doing that to Jimmy, Marchetta, haven't I cried enough already?!

I wanted to talk a bit about the title, which refers to Dom, Tom's father, the union man who is a natural born leader, who winds up going round the twist after Joe dies (and possibly a bit before) and leads everyone into a cave and seals them up while the rats feast on the leftovers. Wait, wrong fairytale. OR IS IT? It was a bit tricky to get a handle on the family dynamics, and I couldn't tell what to feel about the step-grandfather Bill. That could have used some more explication, I think. One thing to note though is that this too is a book about the third sibling dying and leaving the other two in pieces (a la Prince of Tides), except this is somewhat more grounded, and less over-the-top. Unfortunately, this is a terrible paragraph to end on, but I don't really want to move it somewhere else, and I've sort of run out of things to say about it.

I do want to point out that I am grading on a curve here, since I hold Marchetta to a different standard than I do, say, P.B. Ryan, whose Gilded Age mysteries are a nice treat on a Sunday night, but which do not inspire me to harangue my mother until she reads one of them, the way I forced her to read Jellicoe Road and then relished each one of her tears. Homework assignment: Am I a terrible daughter? Discuss amongst yourselves behind my back.

Jellicoe Road

Jellicoe Road, by Melina Marchetta

Abandoned by her mother on Jellicoe Road when she was eleven, Taylor Markham, now seventeen, is finally being confronted with her past. But as the reluctant leader of her boarding school dorm, there isn't a lot of time for introspection. And while Hannah, the closest adult Taylor has to family, has disappeared, Jonah Griggs is back in town, moody stares and all.

Nothing is as it seems and every clue leads to more questions as Taylor tries to work out the connection between her mother dumping her, Hannah finding her then and her sudden departure now, a mysterious stranger who once whispered something in her ear, a boy in her dreams, five kids who lived on Jellicoe Road eighteen years ago, and the maddening and magnetic Jonah Griggs, who knows her better than she thinks he does. If Taylor can put together the pieces of her past, she might just be able to change her future.

Jellicoe Road is really two stories in one: the events of twenty-two years ago (it says eighteen in the description because the people in the "B" plotline age about four years throughout the novel) and how they affected five friends, and the senior year of Taylor Markham, who has a new position of power in the Territory Wars at her boarding school. The stories intertwine (through a manuscript that Taylor has read) and eventually intersect in ways that would seem pat in the hands of a lesser author. Marchetta does wonderful things with all the characters, even secondary and tertiary ones. Even characters that never appear on the scene, and are only mentioned by other characters, are imbued with personality, like Jonah's mother and brother.

This is one of the most fantastic books I've read. It starts out slow, as Marchetta sets out the threads of all the story lines, but as you get further into the two time lines, you begin to match up events and people, so that by the end of the book, you immediately want to re-read it, just so you can lengthen that "Aha!" moment. I freely admit that I was sobbing straight through the last third of the book the first time I read it, and the whole way through the second time.

It's a complex book, in that you really are sort of given a lot of pieces which don't fit together, until later events in the book put them into order and context. Sort of like Pulp Fiction, only about teenagers instead of gangsters. Marchetta is a master at spooling out details, things that seem insignificant until they suddenly become very important. She does this in such a way that although you may not take very much notice of this or that small detail, when the revelations come, you remember what came before very clearly - so that the process of piecing these stories together isn't a strain on your memory or patience. Which is all the more impressive because I have a terrible memory, so managing to make seemingly irrelevant details memorable is quite a feat.

Marchetta has always been one of my favorite authors in terms of what she understands about teenage girls, and she manages to get humor, sorrow, love, action, romance, and mystery all packed in, without being melodramatic or overbearing. Or well, it is melodramatic, but only in that teen angst, my-whole-world-is-splitting-apart-and-no-one-even-realizes-it kind of way. In Marchetta's hands, the unabashed rawness of the emotion is both thrilling and terrifying.

I am kind of a sucker for this type of book (if it is a "type" and not just some one-off description) where people love each other so much, but it's still not enough to keep out sorrow and pain, and the characters just have to find a way to manage the pain and find the joy in life. Actually, that's what most of Marchetta's books are about - the equivalent of her characters all ending the books singing, "I get by with a little help from my friends". And there's no need to sneer, finding out you're not alone can be the best feeling in the world.


How do I feel by the end of the day
(Are you sad because you're on your own)
No, I get by with a little help from my friends.
Do you need anybody?
I need somebody to love.
Could it be anybody?
I want somebody to love.

Oh, I get by with a little help from my friends.
Mmm, gonna try with a little help from my friends.