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Jacob Two-Two, one of the late Mordecai Richler's most famous characters, could be forgiven if he felt uncomfortable with being immortalized in a trilogy. After all, he's two plus two plus two years old, has two brothers and two sisters, and has to say everything twice just to be heard – odd numbers aren't his thing. So perhaps it's fitting that a fourth book will soon be added to the series.
The Globe and Mail has learned that Tundra Books, the children's book arm of Canadian publisher McClelland & Stewart, has contracted Toronto-based author Cary Fagan ( The Fortress of Kaspar Snit) to write a new instalment that sees the precocious and imaginative Jacob take to the turbulent seas for a new adventure.
The book will be illustrated by 2007 Governor-General's award finalist Dusan Petricic and will be the crown jewel in a larger project that will see Richler's three books re-released, all with new illustrations and covers by Petricic, with Fagan's new work in the fall of 2009.
The seed for the project was sown in December by Tundra publisher and vice-president Kathy Lowinger, who brokered the deal with agent Michael Levine, the Richler family estate lawyer.
“When Mordecai died, he was under contract to do a fourth Jacob Two-Two book and we'd talked about all kinds of permutations, everything you can possibly imagine. He also left 14 pages of a manuscript and the book was about the Stanley Cup, and it was certainly fabulous. It was vintage Mordecai, no question about that,” Lowinger said.
But the team from Tundra decided that to finish a book that began in Richler's own words and ended in a foreign hand would be “an act of bravery” and decided instead to start from scratch.
Six months ago, Lowinger turned to Fagan, author of 10 children's books including a trilogy of his own built around the character Kaspar Snit and adult novels such as The Animals' Waltz and Felix Roth.
“[Lowinger] phoned me up one day and said, ‘I have this amazing proposal for you,' and told me about it and my jaw sort of dropped. It's not something I would have ever thought of happening,” Fagan said. The final draft is currently with Lowinger for editing.
In keeping with Lowinger's decision to give Fagan free rein in creating the revived Jacob, members of the Richler family have kept their distance throughout the process, though Fagan said he would welcome comments on the manuscript. Mordecai's widow, Florence, said she is more than comfortable with the project.
“It doesn't please everyone that someone else will be writing another Jacob Two-Two book, however, we're all just privileged that it's happening. If one really wants to read Mordecai Richler, you go to the bookshelves or you go to the library, so it really doesn't in any way harm him,” Florence said.
Lowinger said Fagan was the only writer considered and was chosen in part for his “enormous talent for channelling others.”
Fagan turned immediately to Richler's trilogy as research, beginning with his favourite, Jacob Two-Two Meets the Hooded Fang (1975), and moving on to Jacob Two-Two and the Dinosaur (1987) and Jacob Two-Two's First Spy Case (1995).
“I had some concerns,” he said. “The first book has a great deal of charm to it, which is very Richlerian, and could I capture some of that?”
Thanks in part to his Jewish background, Fagan said Richler loomed large in his literary consciousness. He quickly found a common ground through humour – though he says his style tends toward basing it in plot events rather than the pure, unbridled satire Richer made famous. He also said he would have been uncomfortable trying to replicate the free-wheeling whimsy of Richler's children's tales.
“His books are full of incident and if he wants to end something and jump somewhere else, he just does it. He does whatever he pleases,” he said.
Fagan said his tales, by contrast, are woven around a well-defined narrative structure – “If somebody buys a hat in Act 1, he's going to use a hat to smack someone in Act 3” – which meant his greatest hurdle was choosing the time and setting for the new story.
He was reluctant to have his book follow the Spy Case instalment, which would force an older Jacob as the subject. In the course of re-reading the trilogy, he noticed that the voyage from Jacob's English home in Hooded Fang to his new home in Montreal in Dinosaur (a move the Richler family made in real life) was glossed over in a single sentence. He decided to craft his tale around the boat crossing, and said the working title is Jacob Two-Two on the High Seas.
“I quite liked the idea I was filling in a part of the story that hadn't been told,” he said.
Fagan feels proud to have synthesized his writing with the hallmarks of the original series. He designed characters satirizing the “preening, self-aggrandizing, vain, selfish and two-faced behaviour that adults often practise,” one of Richler's most delightfully cheeky habits.
And he worked hard to keep the family dynamic intact. He found Jacob's struggles as the family baby and simultaneous admiration of his not-always-kind siblings charming, and he has expanded the role of the father, whom he thought at times bore poignant resemblance to Richler himself.
Finally, Fagan added a crucial layer to the editorial process. He has two daughters, aged 16 and 11, and two stepsons of the same age, and he said their input has been invaluable.
“Sophie, my 11-year-old, didn't even let me finish [High Seas] before she just took the pages from my desk and not only started reading it, but also started copy-editing it.”
Though the new Jacob Two-Two book follows a trend of beloved characters revived by other authors (think James Bond, Anne of Green Gables), many Richler purists are sure to look skeptically upon a full-length book penned by another writer.
“You can imagine all of us were very nervous about this,” Lowinger said. “It's taking truly a Canadian classic and playing with it.”
