![]() I think it’s good to be reminded of what got you to this point.”ĭuring his eighth year of writing – and rewriting – Bridge of Clay, Zusak went back to the opening pages of his manuscript and realised it felt as though it was written by a complete stranger. Steven Spielberg watches his first film Duel every year or two to remind himself what he was like – I think that is pretty cool. I was less concerned with detail, and I should be like that more. “With The Messenger, if there’s blue carpet on the floor, it’s just blue carpet. Bridge of Clay was a tremendous effort to write, but you can feel that effort in every sentence. The Book Thief was a tremendous effort to write, but it appears to have been effortless. “It is just not as worked on as my other books. “I was young, I didn’t really know what I was doing,” he says. While reading The Messenger, he saw glimpses of his twentysomething self: an ambitious writer completely free from the world’s expectations. But if it doesn’t go as planned, I can always say, ‘Well, I wrote the book!’” “The world is bigger, the characters are more complex. “And to be totally honest, I think the TV series is better, in a lot of ways,” he says. He told the show’s writers – Sarah Lambert, Kim Wilson, Kirsty Fisher and Magda Wozniak – to “take some risks and make some mistakes – it’s not like the book is mistake-free! There are some big differences between the book and the show, but the heart is still the same.” We use Google reCaptcha to protect our website and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply. For more information see our Privacy Policy. Privacy Notice: Newsletters may contain info about charities, online ads, and content funded by outside parties. “She’s always been very ambivalent about my books, which I really like. “She said, ‘Well if it is going to be on TV, I guess I should,’” he says, laughing. His teenage daughter also read it for the first time. Twenty-one years after he wrote The Messenger, Zusak went back and read it before serving as an executive producer on the ABC show. ![]() But I’d rather be an open book and just show who I am. “But for whatever reason, we’re often embarrassed about loving something that is going into the softer side of ourselves. “No one will ever say, ‘I’m a bit embarrassed about loving Trainspotting,’ But they might say, ‘I’m a bit embarrassed about loving The Notebook,’” Zusak says. (Indeed, The Book Thief was published as a book for adults in Australia and as a YA novel in the US.) It’s another quality that once made Zusak hard to pin down: now, we could probably say he is Australia’s answer to the US’s John Green, who also writes about young people muddling along with an open-hearted earnestness that is easy to tear down. You can’t whinge about the pressure – it’s only there because something really fortunate happenedĪs a book, The Messenger toes the line between young adult and adult fiction in the way all of Zusak’s big-hearted books do. ![]() ![]() His friends Audrey (Alexandra Jensen), Ritchie (Kartanya Maynard) and Marv (Chris Alosio) watch on as Ed’s life is steadily taken up with his quest, assigned to him by a mysterious taskmaster who – if the show follows the book – is identified in a spectacularly audacious conclusion. He befriends an elderly woman who thinks she is his wife, takes on an abusive husband and attempts to unite two fighting brothers, among many tasks. The eight-episode arc sees Ed come up with solutions ranging from small acts of kindness to outright deception and violence. Sign up for the fun stuff with our rundown of must-reads, pop culture and tips for the weekend, every Saturday morning Each one has addresses or clues written on them, directing him to complete strangers who need help in ways he must discover. For a while, nothing spoke to me as much as this strange novel following Ed Kennedy (played in the ABC show by Will McKenna), a hapless young taxi driver who starts receiving mysterious playing cards in the post. As a teenager and later as a bookseller, I was evangelical about The Messenger. ![]()
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