ITA Il paradiso degli orchi
ENG The scapegoat
First of all, I’ve sometimes found this book in the children section… this is NOT a fairytale for children, get a look at the story not just the title! Yes, it is written in a modern, funny way, and it tries to tell everything in a sort of light way, but still, there are murders, and there are horrors discussed, there’s talk of the war and how people killed back then… so it is like this: would you put Animal Farm by Orwell in the children section? (another book I saw there often). I don’t think it should be there, but this Pennac book is tougher plot-wise.
Benjamin Malausséne has a peculiar family. His mother had him when she was fourteen, and since then she sort of always followed the same procedure. She finds a man, stays away with him for a while until she has a child, leaves the child home and goes away with another man.
They all have different fathers: after Benjamin came:
- Louna, who is a nurse, and when she was 19 she met Laurent the doctor and they fell in love and it was bliss until she stopped using precautions and got pregnant and the problems started because he doesn’t want kids. She spends some time not sure if she wants to give up the child to keep Laurent, but at the end she can’t, and she has twin daughters, and luckily at the end Laurent is happy and still in love, it is the best line of the whole book when he says ‘I have three Louna, I had one and now I have three’ more or less. Adorable.
- Clara, his favourite, he loves Clara and she loves him, but they are brother and sister so… anyway, she is at her last year in high school, and loves taking pictures, it’s her way to analyse the world to exorcise all the bad things.
- Therese, she’s a bit weird, nobody really understands, but she always talks of astronomy and tarots and they say she can see the future, and keeps writing down every word being said when Ben tells them stories or read something for them (in steno, for practice)
- Jeremy, who swears worse than anyone I’ve ever heard
- Le Petit (Il Piccolo, meaning the little one), who draws Santa-orcs and collects pictures of Theo with his many outfits.
-Theo is a friend of Ben and his family, a dear friend. He's gay and has a good heart. He loves to take pictures of himself at the automatic photo machine at the store.
They live in a Paris that is real, not the ideal image seen in movies sometimes. It’s alive with its dirty streets and polluted air and bad dangerous people around as well as good, like Amar and his wife Yasmina who were almost parents for Benjamin when he was little.
(Just a note: Benjamin absolutely loves Gadda and Quer pasticciaccio brutto de via Merulana, and so does the inspector Rabdomant and the old man in charge of the books at the store.
Benjamin is called to Mr Lehmann’s office where a woman is complaining about the malfunctioning fridge she just bought that ruined everything inside and almost burned her. Benjamin’s real job is that of scapegoat, although to the woman they say he is responsible of tech control. Lehmann goes hard on how he will have to pay the damage himself, how he will be fired even if it’s Christmas and will never find a job again, and Benjamin cries until the woman feels pity and doesn’t want the damage money anymore, only a new fridge. Of course Benjamin had nothing to do with controlling the fridge or anything else.
All of a sudden there’s an explosion in the toy section of the store, panic everywhere, but only one man died, nobody else was seriously injured.
Benjamin meets a girl - in his usual pick up way, he follows a beautiful girl and when he sees her stealing a sweater he swoops in to save her from the guard, calling her aunt Julia as usual.
There’s another bomb, Benjamin saw two elderly person, a man and a woman kissing (bit weird since the police say they were brother and sister) with a bag between them, blow up and die.
Benjamin is attacked by people from the store, who probably think he has something to do with it all since he’s the scapegoat for everything.
Benjamin is tired of his work there and wants to quit but they don’t let him, they say that the investigation demands no change of personnel, so he comes up with a plan to force them to get rid of him: he tells everything to aunt Julia who works for a newspaper, and has Clara do the picture.
His dog Julius has an epileptic crisis or something and remains still for a few days, so Benjamin calls Laurent begging him to save his dog, and he does everything he can and eventually Julius starts moving again - still with his tongue out all the time, but at least he’s alive.
Another man blows up inside the photo machine while Theo is outside waiting for his turn, but nobody else is seriously injured. Theo finds a picture the dead man was watching when he died. It was horrible, something like the man naked with a dead child, and the guy was getting off watching the picture when he died, so Theo hid the picture because he didn’t want whoever killed such a person found.
Once again, Benjamin was there. He starts asking himself questions: why it all happens always when he’s around? Why always at the store?
While cleaning Ben’s room, Clara saw the picture. Her usual way to deal with the horror is to take a picture of it, so she did, then she enlarged some part of it and it was clear that : the fact happened some forty years earlier, at the store, that there was a dog there, that it happened in the toys section, and that the man Leonard wasn’t alone. Of course, at least one person who took the shot, but also others, monsters who preyed on children in that sick way, and Theo is determined not to give the police that picture, because he wants whoever it is that is killing off those monsters to complete his task before someone has the whole thing hushed up - the last dead man, the one in the picture, was someone with either money or power, actually money also means power, anyway they already stopped any talking about him.
Ben finishes his long story to the children, giving a solution to the bomb case of his imaginary investigators. Jeremy burns down part of his school with a bomb made, somehow, by him.
Therese walks into the story while Ben is at Jeremy’s school and waits outside a locked bathroom who will turn out to be where the latest person died.
Only Rabdomant believes his innocent, everyone else thinks he has something to do with it.
Finally Ben saw one of Theo’s old men (meaning those elderly people that keep wandering the store because Theo lets them, because he wants to give them a place to be and something to do, and since Theo is so good at his job nobody tells him anything) taking some bullets that he used to make the latest bomb. Later the man will approach him to tell him everything, of how in 1942 the store was closed for a few moths, and these people used to lure the children in with the toys (what did they do then, kill them in some kind of ritual or eat them or what?) and the old man tells him exactly when the last person will die. Ben tells the police immediately.
When the article about his real job comes out, a guy at the store (Sainclair I think) says they’ll sue him for it because he signed a contract and they’ll take everything he has, and that scared him good, but aunt Julia of the article tells him that it won’t happen, at most they’ll sue the paper.
The day of the last murder, Ben is there (because he has to) and sees the old man. At first he thinks the ‘victim’ will be the old man in the book section, but then he starts thinking it’s him, because the killer smiles at him and sends him a toy-kong and Ben is terrified, but when he jumps on the toy it’s the other man that dies. Yep, that was the plan, the little old man was one of the monsters, the one who convinced the families that their child would be safe somewhere abroad or something, but instead he brought the children here.
It will be Rabdomant to explain everything to Ben. Those people were in some kind of sect, and now they planned their deaths according to the same star readings that Therese did, and each one of them orchestrated his own suicide. The last one wanted Ben to do it, because in his eyes Ben was the saint who took other people’s sins on himself, and also the saviour of children and orphans or something like that, because he was the scapegoat and also because of his family situation, and he knew everything about that because Theo speaks often of him, he’s like family, there’s love there.
At the end, Ben’s mother comes back, pregnant again, without a man again, so with a promise of another child to maintain Ben has no other choice but to accept the offer he got from an editor, not for his book but for his talent as a scapegoat, so he calls the Queen Zabo to accept it.
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