Three YA novels by Michael Bedard

My blog will be jumping back and forth between what I am currently reading and what I read last year…at least for a while.  This entry begins my 2014 reading journey, so I will begin with an explanation of how the journey started.

            In my blog of 7 January, I mentioned the category system I used over the past several years to encourage reading on different topics, by different authors, fiction, non-fiction, etc.  Although the system served its purpose for at least five years, my compulsion to fill each category sometimes sent me on a frantic search through my collection as the year drew to a close.  This year I decided to start with something easy, recently acquired, and calling to me from the shelf: Redwork by Michael Bedard. 

            My first experience with Bedard was in 2012 when I read The Green Man and quite enjoyed it.  I am still drawn to YA books and love exploring the works of Canadian writers.  I will admit the title and cover called to me while in Fanfare Books; it was encouraged by my interest in Green Man mythology.  The book, a mystery involving time travel and magic, stands well on its own, but I discovered it was actually a sequel to an earlier book.  Finally this December I acquired Redwork, not the book I was looking for, and then found a used copy of A Darker Magic, which is now out of print.  And this experience is part of what I find important about my reading: one book leads to another.  Sometimes the connections are obvious, but other times the link of cause and effect is tenuous.

            Redwork was in my hands on the first day of 2014, and so my reading year began; this novel is the winner of the Governor General’s Literary Award, the Canadian Library Association Young Adult Book Award, and a co-winner of the IODE Book Award – National Chapter.  I never expected to be reading a mystery with a parent finishing up her dissertation on William Blake and an elderly man seeking to create the Philosopher’s Stone. 

            Cass is a young teenage boy struggling to help his mother survive on her part time cleaning job.  The novel begins with their move to a second floor apartment in an old house facing a park.  Cass is immediately interested in the mysterious unseen landlord living in the first floor of the house.  A gang of bullies rules the park, people seem to avoid walking on the sidewalk in front of the house, and as the plot line unfolds, Cass begins to see the suspicion surrounding the mysterious landlord Mr. Magnus.  It is a world filled with pain, both physical and emotional.

            Cass connects with Maddy, a girl down the street, and together they befriend and work with Mr. Magnus.  But the novel also has well-thought out subplots.  Cass works at the local movie theatre for another recluse who loves old films.  And there are the strange connections between Cass and Mr. Magnus; he hears old songs played on the phonograph directly below his bedroom:

He stared up at the crack snaking its way through the ceiling, following it from where it began as a tiny trickle of dark just above the bed, watching it widen as it went, till by the window it disappeared down a ragged hole in the chimney flue.  It had become a nightly ritual.  Following it, he seemed to fall asleep through that hole…but it seemed now that he was looking down on it from a great distance, and the crack was like a cleft of darkness snaking through a countryside.  Downstairs the music died.  He felt himself drifting downward, ever downward, saw the crack yawn open under him, and felt the darkness draw him slowly in” (51).

It was as I read these words that I realized how much the writing had pulled me into that room.  Bedard’s writing encourages a visceral experience. 

            The physical and emotional pain in this novel is frequently from bullying.  Perhaps I was more attuned to it having just finished reading The Fault in Our Stars, but this line in particular heightened the importance of the pain each character was feeling: “It was a funny thing with pain, the way it sort of wrapped you up in itself” (131).  And yet, this mystery ends happily. 

            Immediately after finishing Redwork, I began reading the mystery that inspired The Green Man: A Darker Magic.  Written in 1987, three years before Redwork, Bedard has some interesting parallels: magic, time travel, garages used for mysterious purposes, dysfunctional families, and a loner as the main character – quite independent and willing to take rational risks.  He obviously has the middle school audience in mind.

            But despite the similarities, this novel has a strikingly different tone.  Emily Endicott, like Cass, is about 14 or 15.  She is responsible for babysitting her three younger siblings, but her summer is changed when her teacher, Miss Potts, calls with a question.  Did she see the old paper in her desk advertising a magic show?  And so the mystery begins, with memories of a magic show for Miss Potts that seemed to spell death for the children involved.  And this year, August 8 is again a Saturday.  Magic, a magician who apparently defies time, and in a separate story line, two boys who know about it but are not in contact with Miss Potts all working, wondering about, and moving forward to the special night.  Unlike Redwork, A Darker Magic has a truly chilling ending.

            Now jump forward to Emily Endicott as an old woman learning to trust her niece, Ophelia Endicott.  Ophelia, or O as she prefers to be called, is another independent young teenager pulled into family responsibilities.  Emily became a poet, and finally returned to Caledon, where she obtained a part time job and later bought a bookstore: The Green Man.  As a poet, Emily creates a strong poetry section in the store and there are references to William Blake, Arthur Rimbaud, Emily Dickinson, and Ezra Pound.  Again Bedard’s interest in poetry is in evidence as O’s dad and Emily’s brother, Charles is a college professor in Italy for the summer researching Ezra Pound. 

            One of the things I enjoy about all three of these books is the timelessness of the setting.  Although there are references to dates, the novels lack the obsession with mentioning every current gadget that may be available.  It works as comfortable anachronism for me; a reviewer on Goodreads found this extremely frustrating.  However, I can imagine Bedard receiving letters from readers of A Darker Magic asking for a sequel and his desire for the connection of an elderly person connecting with a teenager:  it is a method employed successfully in all three novels.

            And in the end of The Green Man, O learns, “It was her business now to believe – in the power and beauty of words, in the spirits that move among us always, in the worlds of light and dark that neighbor us – to believe in the possibility of the impossible” (304).

            Michael Bedard creates an imaginative magical world but never loses sight of educating the reader of the source and/or history behind the story: people trying to create the Philosopher’s Stone, understanding the pain of a war veteran, learning the Green Man mythology.  He is an author I’ll return to…

Bedard, Michael. A Darker Magic. New York: Avon Books, 1989. Print

---. Redwork. Toronto: Stoddart Publishing Co., 2001. Print

---. The Green Man. Toronto: Tundra Books, 2012. Print.