Customer Reviews

Joker

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When I was in high school I never got why they made us read depressing books, even if the books were old. It proves this book's points about adult's hypocrisy that when Baz Luhrmann turned Romeo and Juliet into something that kids watched without being forced by school, adults suddenly started worrying that the same story they'd been forcing their kids to memorize for exams might romaticize suicide. By contrast (and since the official review on Amazon gave the ending away I don't feel bad for saying this), Ranulfo gives his updated Hamlet a more positive solution to his family problems and the potential madness personified by Matt's alter ego/imaginary friend/demon, the joker. Besides making this book less likely to get banned than would be an accessible young adult book in which the lead kills his mum's new boyfriend, I guess the new ending is more plausible for a modern teenager than giving up everything for the sake of dad's honour. It's kind of like in the old days romances could make the parents the main obstacle between the lovers, but in a modern romance parents' disapproval stopping kids from hooking up is less believable. Ranulfo's message seems to be that parents' problems are not yours to solve, and that if conscience doesn't make us all cowards, it can make us martyrs pointlessly sacrificing ourselves for stuff we have no control over, and I guess that's the point of the references to the attacks on the world trade centre and the futility of violent political protests.

Matt is the child of divorce. His mother has taken up with a sleazy salesman. His father now "haunts" their house late at night obsessed with and humiliated by his broken marriage. This trauma, in addition to the death of Matt's best friend in a hostel fire, has sent Matt, "athlete, top student, and Mr. Cool at Elsinore High," into a tailspin. His response to an insane world is to retreat into the chaotic persona of The Joker who questions everything Matt has been taught and leads Matt into a wild dance on the edge of sanity.

"All my life I had asked the wrong questions. Questions which already had answers. Questions provided to me by the authorities," Matt says. With the Joker's questions, and a solemn promise to help his father knit their family together again, Matt treads in the footstep of one of literature's most famous madmen, Hamlet.

Ranulfo's JOKER is at its most enjoyable in its humorous allusions to Shakespeare's melancholy prince. The famous windbag Polonious is personified by a high school principal, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are beach bums, and Elsinore's resident bad boy Brad stands in as Fortinbras. The scene in which Hamlet puts on a play to reveal his father's murder is transformed into Matt staging a rap sequel to "South Pacific." Prostitution, pollution and revolution have overrun the island, which is ultimately destroyed by a tsunami.

While Ranulfo occasionally twists famous lines from Shakespeare's play into the vernacular of an Australian teen, JOKER is largely free from the kind of language that can make Shakespeare's HAMLET difficult to read. Instead, Ranulfo focuses on Matt's internal conflict, and his questions about life's meaning and mortality. It is written in extremely short sections, jumping from reality to Matt's morbid fantasies about what the future might hold.

The difficulty in retelling a story as well known as Hamlet is the inevitability of comparisons. The layered complexity of Shakespeare's play is rendered in JOKER as a monologue told solely in Matt's voice. HAMLET is a puzzle. It contains great poetry, lots of bizarre Elizabethan jokes, and a malleable plot that opens itself to endless interpretations. By comparison, JOKER is straightforward. It even ends happily and no one dies, making it comedic, instead of tragic.

Readers already familiar with HAMLET are best placed to understand the humor in JOKER. But it may appeal more to those readers who have not read HAMLET, or have found the play confusing or irrelevant to their lives. JOKER is HAMLET as it might be interpreted by a teenager reading the play for the first time. It is most successful when read on its own terms and not compared to its predecessor.

--- Reviewed by Sarah A. Wood

Apparently, JOKER is the classic story of Hamlet (Folger Shakespeare Library), torn to pieces, set in modern-day Australia, and stuck back together again. Having never read Hamlet (Folger Shakespeare Library), I can't say anything about JOKER 's relationship to that story, but I can definitely say that it is a brilliant novel.

It's the real story of Matt, a teenage boy with problems like any other, and the story of Joker, one that blurs the lines of fact and fiction. Joker drives Matt to do things he would not normally do, to say things he would not normally say, to eventually throw away his life as a popular, athletic high school student with a great girlfriend and great friends. Perhaps the change came when Ray, his best friend, died in a fire; even if Ray's murder wasn't the cause of the change in Matt, it couldn't have helped.

Now Matt is never alone; he always has Joker, though it is never clear who or what Joker is, or if he is a figment of Matt's imagination or if he is real, or maybe even another part of Matt himself.

This is a beautifully written, at times disturbing, and certainly moving story. Reminiscent of a darker Francesca Lia Block, Ranulfo follows Matt as he destroys his life, runs away, and eventually returns, seeing all the possibilities of what could lie ahead of him. Readers looking for straightforward, clear, easy to follow, black-and-white stories will not find that in JOKER, but anyone looking for fantastic writing, realistic characters, and a story that's not so easily pulled apart will love this novel.

Reviewed by: Jocelyn Pearce