The Mysterious Benedict Society - Paranoid Tales for Exceptional Children
Written by Maria Gaura
SANTA CRUZ (November 2009) - The bestselling Mysterious Benedict Society series opens with a newspaper solicitation: “gifted children” are sought to participate in a special test. The test is not what it seems, however, and the “winners” – four misfit kids - are sucked into a dangerous and frightening quest.
The stage is set for an ominous adventure story that serves up some seriously paranoid subject matter.
The plot of this three-volume series, aimed at children ages ten and up, revolves around subliminal mind control, ineffective and corrupt authorities, cult-like brainwashing camps for children, and other staples of the tin-hat conspiracy crowd. But this anxious tale is not simply Kafka for Kids. The bleakness is leavened with transforming friendship, and the triumph of clever children outsmarting the adult world.
This fictional world, much like our real one, appears to be in a hopeless mess. The setting of the tale is a vaguely-described American port city whose leaders and citizens are mired in an anxious fugue state, paralyzed by an ongoing civic “Emergency” that dominates the news and is never resolved.
There is a fiendishly intelligent madman on the loose, who seeks to control the minds of the multitudes with a machine he calls “The Whisperer.” For complicated reasons, the villainous Ledroptha Curtain requires children to broadcast his subliminal messages, and his benevolent mirror-image, Nicholas Benedict, requires children to foil the evil plot.
It is Benedict who recruits the four young heroes of the story and sets them on the task of preventing mass enslavement.
The children, Reynie Muldoon, Kate Wetherall, Sticky Washington and Constance Contraire, couldn’t be more different. Reynie is an analytical thinker, Kate is a superb athlete, Sticky has photographic memory, and tiny Constance has uncanny mental abilities.
What they have is common is that they are alone in the world, orphans and runaways, and thus unlikely to be missed should their quest go badly.
Their first assignment – infiltrate The Learning Institute for the Very Enlightened, an elite and highly secure boarding school run by Ledroptha Curtain, where children are secretly brainwashed, trained, and used to send messages through The Whisperer. In addition to broadcasting subliminal messages, the Whisperer drains away memories, provides a drug-like euphoria, and leaves its victims craving another session.
The basic plot is bizarre enough, but author Trenton Lee Stewart amplifies the general weirdness of the story by sprinkling random jokes and oddities into the mix.
Both Curtain and Benedict are narcoleptic, for instance, and prone to nodding off at critical moments in the action. Both favor green plaid suits, because the pattern’s supposedly soothing qualities help reduce narcoleptic attacks.
Many character names are jokes or wordplay, a device that keeps the reader on her toes, but doesn’t appear to have any deeper meaning. Constance Contraire is reliably ornery, and S.Q. Pedalian talks too much. Moocho Brazos is a circus strongman with brawny arms, and Ledroptha Curtain, well, does he intend to “drop the curtain” on our free society?
A pair of thugs are named Jackson and Jillson, but why? Why does Benedict’s sidekick look and dress like a pencil? Why does Sticky shave his head? Why does Milligan call himself Milligan, even after he’s recovered from amnesia and discovered his true identity?
None of these details ends up being important to the plot, leaving the reader unsure if they were red herrings or simply irresistible imaginative flourishes on the part of the author.
Other elements of the tale are equally hard to pin down. The manners and settings are oddly stylized, with an old-fashioned feel. The dialogue and even the villain’s plot – mind control!– have a whiff of the 1950’s about them. And the city of Stonetown, is it in the modern-day U.S., or in a slightly off-kilter parallel universe?
While Curtain is a bad man, the real enemy in these books is oppressive technology. Curtain works out the kinks in his Whisperer by bombarding the population with subliminal messages buried beneath the chatter on television and radio. It is these messages that have convinced the public that the Emergency exists, though nobody can say specifically what the Emergency is, or what might be done to resolve it.
Our heroes, on the other hand, are not enthralled by technology. They read newspapers and books, with nary an e-mail address, an iPod nor a Game Boy between them.
The Mysterious Benedict books start slow, and the action doesn’t begin until about halfway through. But the slow buildup isn’t wasted - though it may turn off impatient readers - and the action, when it arrives, is inventive and thrilling.
The Mysterious Benedict Society series is being promoted as a cerebral read for intelligent kids – the kind of ten to 14-year-olds who enjoy puzzles and riddles, and are familiar with the Dewey Decimal System.
In fact, the books are accessible and enjoyable to kids of average reading skills. There is no sex or romance in the books and no bad language, though there is plenty of menace, and cartoonish violence.
The first Mysterious Benedict Society book has been parked on the New York Times bestseller list for more than a year, and the subsequent books have also sold well. The third installment was release in October, 2009, and is still available only in hardcover.
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