Previous installments of Jaya Catches Up can be found here.
There’s a certain wispiness to stories that exist entirely as metaphors. You can sense when you begin that the people don’t feel round, and you could knock over the scenery with a slight push. Everything has been built to serve you, and you’ll never find the sensation of stumbling on an existing world that so many stories provide. This is not a bad thing: I listen to Harry Nilsson’s “The Point” on a pretty regular basis. It’s more like walking into the rainforest room at the zoo, and feeling piped-in steam curl your hair while all the plant life is on the other side of the glass.
I thought The Whipping Boy’s plot could be seen from a mile away, since they set everything up pretty quickly in the beginning–Prince Brat cannot be legally harmed, so every time he misbehaves his Whipping Boy gets beaten up. Since Prince Brat lives up to his name, he never cares what happens to the Whipping Boy, Jemmy, and never learns his lessons. (This is figuratively and literally; Prince Brat never bothers to learn how to read or write). However, Prince Brat gets bored, and one night grabs Jemmy and says they’re escaping.
Here’s what I thought would go down: Prince Brat and Jemmy would get into some trouble, and Jemmy would get them out of it. Prince Brat would see, through Jemmy and his interactions with his old friends who all fight rats for a living, that he has it very good, and that he should care for the people of his kingdom who are not as lucky. He would then return to the castle and set Jemmy free and take some responsibility for himself. That sounds like a nice little fable, right? The book is about 80 pages long so that’s really all we have time for anyway.
It’s close, but the metaphor takes a turn. Prince Brat and Jemmy are indeed captured by two known criminals, one of whom eats raw garlic, and Jemmy convinces them that he is the Prince and the Prince is the Whipping Boy. He instructs them to write a ransom note to the King, promising them wagonfuls of gold, so that the Prince may return to the castle as a messenger. But the Prince is slow on the uptake, and even when he figures it out, he has no interesting in following through with the plan.
Why’s that? Because he’s bored! It’s lonely in the castle! He’s not allowed to do anything so he has no excitement in his life! He just wants to be a kid! Okay, so not to get all Occupy Wall Street on anyone, but I am so tired of this trope. It’s true that everyone has their issues and their demons, and in order to be a more empathetic society we need to stop making assumptions about other peoples struggles and listen to their stories. But I also think that an actual fucking Prince is maybe the last person on the storytelling list.
The book is told from Jemmy’s perspective, and because of that, the main emotional arc we see is Jemmy coming to understand the plight of Prince Brat. Throughout the book Jemmy finds himself in situations where he could escape, only to stay back and take care of the Prince, who he realizes is helpless. Jemmy leads them through the forest and the sewers, away from their captors, and hatches plan after plan to keep them safe. I’m not saying he shouldn’t have sympathy for this Prince who obviously can’t fend for himself and would wind up being killed if left alone in the woods. I’m just saying that if he were to leave this Prince alone in the woods to die it would be pretty understandable.
In the meantime, the Prince also begins insisting on calling Jemmy his friend. We can only assume this is because the Prince is starting to fucking get it for once in his dumb life, but since he never narrates we just have to assume so. Eventually they stumble through the woods and wind up at a fair, where they eat hot potatoes and overhear some people talking about how the prince is missing, and how horrible it’ll be when he’s king because he’s such a dick. Prince Brat is understandably hurt when Jemmy confirms that this is indeed what most people think of him. After one more scuffle with the criminals, Prince Brat decides it’s time to return to the palace, giving the reward for finding him to the hot potato guy at the fair. Seemingly, he learns, and Jemmy gets to live in the castle as his friend, not a Whipping Boy.
The thing that I love about fables, which is really how this story is structured, is the absolute sense of morality. The downtrodden win and the bad people get what’s coming to them, and often in ways that are terrifying and absurd and immensely satisfying. I want the assholes to beg for forgiveness, and never have it granted. I want them to live their lives knowing exactly the path they carved to get them here, to whatever hellish place they have to endure for eternity, and blame only themselves. I want there to be no such thing as redemption, only regret. I want all of you to know you should maybe not be friends with me because if I didn’t keep myself in check this is exactly how I’d conduct myself in real life.
Maybe the Whipping Boy is more realistic. The Prince can have his feelings hurt and learn a lesson and still be a Prince, and Jemmy can live a nice life in the castle with a new friend. Life will get a little better for some people, but mostly go along as planned, and I guess as a child this is also an important lesson to learn, that adventures don’t change the world, they just change you a little bit, sometimes. Welcome to the world.
Tags: all boys should be whipping boys, books, jaya catches up, jaya saxena, the whipping boy
Ahaha best tag ever!
This book confused me so much as a kid. I couldn’t get past thinking what a pointless policy it was to have a whipping boy. Although I probably read it 2-3 times (it was always on the classroom bookshelves) none of the plot summary here felt remotely familiar. I must have just been tracking my eyeballs over the pages thinking, “But that doesn’t make any sense!”
Mostly I remember the hot potato man. Mmm, potatoes.
I can’t believe this is an actual book. I honestly thought Jaya was writing a fake book review until I got to the comments.
NOPE completely real, this book is really really read by schoolchildren.
Yeah, to be honest it sounds like the set-up for some classic British boarding-school flagellation porn.
The only thing I remember about this book is the scene where they eat hot potatoes, and Jemmy doesn’t know whether he wants pepper or salt, and someone says “when in doubt, salt.” I think there’s a dancing bear. That is all.
Same but for the bit where the bandits from Home Alone (they are totally the bandits from Home Alone) fall into, like, an ocean of rats in the sewers, because there was an illustration of what being totally encrusted with vicious sewer rats looks like and it was pretty great.
Not the most memorable of novels, no.
Words cannot describe how much I love this feature! Jaya, you rule.
ALSO, this is a PERFECT EXCUSE for me to tell everyone to go read Proxy by Alex London! It’s a really subversive YA that is loosely based on The Whipping Boy that TOTALLY EXPLORES all the things that Jaya points out as being obnoxious in the original story! If you can get past some of the sci-fi-dystopia tropes of stuff having dumb names, it’s a really fascinating story about how to be an ally and how to live with privilege. The main character is not only a gay teenage boy of color, but he was born into debt so (because someone in dystopia thought it would be practical somehow) he works it off by being the “proxy” or whipping boy to a privileged white kid who has Draco Malfoy tendencies and a lot of dad issues. However, through some pretty clever plot twists they end up on the run together, with a privileged girl who’s got a total condescending savior complex. And basically, the two privileged kids are forced to figure out what the repercussions of their privilege are and how to be allies to the protagonist, and that the things that make them unhappy (the kid’s father, the girl’s search for meaning) are tied to the way they’re complicit in oppressing the proxies. Essentially, they have to learn that they are not the protagonist of this story, and the protagonist has to figure out what to do with these two idiots who really mean well but still think he exists to absolve them when he really is just trying to survive and live in peace. As soon as I finished it I wanted to scour the city for teens to browbeat into reading it! Guys, it is so interesting. Proxy!
This is a very sensible review, but I would also like to point out that one of the dystopia gimmicks of Proxy is that orphans/children processed by the state are randomly given names from literary classics. (MC is named Sydney Carton – which also turns out to be nicely subversive in the way it plays out). Because I am deeply shallow, that was what sold me on the book: it is such a little detail, but SO CLEARLY what Our Future Dystopian Capitalist Overlords will use Project Gutenberg for.
Also, did you think that “Syd” might also be an allusion to Sid Flesichman? I thought it might be.
The thing I remember is wondering where in the world the name Jemmy comes from. Was it like Jimmy in an accent? A name I had never heard of? Short for Jeremiah? So many questions!
“I want the assholes to beg for forgiveness, and never have it granted. I want them to live their lives knowing exactly the path they carved to get them here, to whatever hellish place they have to endure for eternity, and blame only themselves.”
I think we would be GREAT friends. Great friends, indeed.
OK so in the Anne books (sorry, in my world, everything leads back to Green Gables), Anne's first son is named James Matthew, and they shorten it to Jem or (very occasionally) Jemmy. So I just assumed whipping boy Jemmy's real name is James? (You know what they say when you assume something…)
I seem to have quite fond memories of this book, but when Jaya wrote that “the plot can be seen from a mile away” I had a panicked moment of “WAIT. WHAT WAS THE PLOT? All I can remember are potatoes and bears. And the woods, maybe?” And there was an author’s note at the back that said, “Whipping Boys were totally true history, kids.” So obviously it made a huge impression on me.
I know a guy who goes by Jem, and his full name is indeed Jeremy, so that seems to be a Thing That People Do.