(courtesy Allen & Unwin Book Publishers)
If you have read any novels featuring a “Chosen One” hero, you will be quite familiar with the idea that someone of great talent and abilities but no real awareness of them will be plucked from anonymity and obscurity to become the saviour of the land/world/universe, triumphantly succeeding where only days/weeks/months before they had been a person of no real effect or consequence.
It’s a beguiling, very Christ-like idea, and it appeals to our sense that not only is there always justice and karma in the form of a newly-formed hero for even the very worst of situations, but that if you are so selected or ordained, that you will not only rise to the occasion but shoot right on past it, not only fulfilling your destiny but damn near exceeding it.
Sure, it’s all a bit hackneyed these days but even in our digital days, we still need heroes so it’s not all that surprising that the protagonist at the heart of Ransom Riggs’ buoyantly fun and emotionally heartfelt novel, The Extraordinary Disappointments of Leopold Berry (Sunderworld Vol. 1), seems to be a saviour of sorts in the classic mold, someone fated to rescue the world of Sunder from a dark and perilous threat.
Leopold aka Larry (but her prefers the former) ticks all the boxes – unsuccessful, treated terribly by what’s left of his family and desperately in need of some sense that his life has value and meaning and some sort of worthwhile trajectory.
Leopold sat there, stunned, as the last traces evaporated. He couldn’t hear the horns anymore, or Sunset Boulevard at all–only the blood pounding in his ears.
All signs so far are that he doesn’t, and still caught in the trailing aftermath of his mother’s death when he was 12, he is finding it hard to define himself in a world where his demanding father wants perfection, vaulting achievement and success, and he feels manifestly unable, or unwilling, to rise to the challenge.
His only comfort in the dark years since he lost his mother to cancer has been a roughly-made series, only on videotape and found in his mum’s closet (not long before going into a dumpster) featuring the land of Sunder where extraordinary beings, like half-mechanical raccoons and magical occurrences stole him away from the searing grief that overlaid every last shred of his existence.
In Sunder, he was able to find escape and solace, and he and his BFF Emmet would recreate scenes and add to the mythos and lore, imagining themselves as they filmed a new or recreated adventure that they were the Chosen Ones of Sunder, the heroes of the hour.
It gave Leopold some sense that life had purpose and would continue even after his mother hadn’t, and that everything would turn out to be all right; five years later, though, he’s getting nowhere fast, life is far from saviour-laced magic, and he is beginning to worry that he’s losing his mind.
He’s begun to see Sunder sights in real life again from glowing trapdoors in parkdoors, to the aforementioned raccoon, on fire no less, and a man popping a tooth into a parking meter to gain admittance to a secret passageway below the footpath.
He’s clearly losing his mind – or is he?
Emmet thinks he is, his dad is convinced his waste-of-time son is most definitely diving off the deep end of her perilously-held sanity and after he appears to summon a rain shower in Los Angeles out of nowhere, so does Leopold.
It all seems very much like he’s falling back into old escapist habits when one night when he’s out with Emmet and his friends – Leopold, save for Emmet, really doesn’t have any friends – he finds out that Sunderworld is not only real but in danger and that, cloaked within plain sight of ordinarily Angelonos is a world much like our own in many respects but also wildly and magically different.
If that isn’t exciting enough, it looks like Leopold, a young amn quickly amounting to nothing, might in fact be the one, THE CHOSE ONE, who can save this most extraordinary of places from certain doom and destruction and that this night could change everything.
For Sunderworld. For Emmet.And most definitely for Leopold.
Alas, chucking the cliched outcome rather cleverly and quite affectingly to the wind, Leopold fails miserably, and what should have been a triumph cap to a very ordinary life so far, turns out to be a massive disappointment as he not only fails to do what he believed he could do but all the transformative change he thought would come his way crumbles into a whole lot of nothing.
Leopold stood still for what seemed like a long time. He felt water snaking down his neck and shoulders, and only vaguely registered that the precipitation was coming from the ceiling, Slowly, he looked up.
It was raining inside his room.
The Extraordinary Disappointments of Leopold Berry is one of those marvelously imaginative books that comes with a premise that on the surface looks like something you have seen many times before.
World in peril, the Chosen One, who didn’t know he was the Chosen One, saves it and hurrah, lives and destinies changed; but when everything goes wrong, it become clear that Riggs intends to tell a much different and emotionally rich story, one where the hero doesn’t get to be heroic and all the muted, ordinary certainties of his barely-realised life come crashing down upon him.
It’s a great inversion of the usual tropes and cliches, but even better, it is a deep dive, a hugely moving and groundedly honest one, into how long and creeping the tendrils of grief can be and how even when we think it has run its course and its effects have ceased, that we can find ourselves caught inside its vortex once again.
To be fair, Leopold never really left it, and what Riggs gifts us with in The Extraordinary Disappointments of Leopold Berry is not only a wildly adventurous tale, full of action, fun and some stunningly robust world-building, but a beautiful, arrestingly moving and glaringly honest rumination on grief, loss and the way the loss of someone we love deeply and profoundly can seemingly forever tilt our world off kilter.
It’s exuberantly immersive and emotionally intimate, a novel that soars to the heights of possibility and falls into the chasm of disappointment but above all, it’s about raw, broken and hopeful humanity with The Extraordinary Disappointments of Leopold Berry, the first in what is a continuing series, leaving you feeling as if someone really gets what grief is like, and that even though you want to save the world, it may not even begin to work out the way you expect it to, and maybe, just maybe ordinary is all you have.
Or, and here’s the kicker, IS IT?