Back to the Bean Farm: Rereading the Freddy Books<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The Clockwork Twin<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n by Kevin W. Parker<\/p>\n\n\n\n WARNING: These articles are written with the assumption that the reader has already read the story in question. Don\u2019t read this article if you want any surprises to be preserved for you.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n This is an oddball book in two ways for me. First off, it\u2019s one of the \u201cmissing three\u201d so far as I\u2019m concerned. When I was growing up, the local library system had all of the Freddy stories but three: Bean Home News, Flying Saucer Plans, and this one. So I\u2019m not going to have quite the same attitude about this book as I would about most of the others. Rereading a Freddy book that I\u2019ve read many times before and with younger, more innocent eye, is a magical thing, bringing back fond feelings and memories. Reading it as an adult isn\u2019t quite the same thing. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Secondly, it\u2019s just not like a regular Freddy book. I get the impression that, as with the preceding book, The Story of Freginald, Brooks is trying to approach the Bean Farm animals from a different direction, making them less significant players in the plot. (He, of course, gives this up for good in the next book in the series, Wiggins for President.)
Like Freginald\u2014but unlike all of the remaining books in the series, so far as I can recall\u2014Clockwork Twin starts out away from the Bean Farm and with a character completely new to us.
Adoniram R. Smith lives on a farm beside a big river, which on this occasion is flooding. He spots a dog\u2014a talking dog named Georgie\u2014being swept along and rescues him, only to end up being swept away himself. In passing, it\u2019s mentione that Georgie\u2019s owner, Byram, is a boy who looks a lot like Adoniram. They\u2019re joined by another refugee, a rooster named Ronald.
They end up being washed into a major city and disembark into a large department store, where they run into our familiar heroes, Freddy and Jinx, a much earlier appearance than in Freginald. They thrive in the department store: there\u2019s plenty to eat, and Freddy teaches Adoniram to laugh. Eventually, though, the waters recede, and it\u2019s time to leave. The animals escape, but Adoniram is captured by the police and sent back to his aunt and uncle, only to be rescued by Freddy & co. and brought with them to the Bean Farm.
Here we meet one of two human characters introduced in this book who have a significant presence for the rest of the series: Uncle Ben, the clockmaker and inventor, who is eventually recruited to make for Adoniram a mechanical companion, the title character of this story, who is operated by Ronald the rooster, who has just married Charles\u2019s and Henrietta\u2019s daughter, Cackletta.
Everyone is happy, but of course this can\u2019t continue since we\u2019re only about to page 100. Adoniram\u2019s uncle and aunt want him back. The animals try to stop them, with mixed success as they end up going off with Bertram, Adoniram\u2019s clockwork twin, instead.
This is rather an ugly bit of the book as the uncle and aunt attempt all manner of child abuse on Bertram, thinking he\u2019s Adoniram. (This is the one really unpleasant aspect of the Freddy books.) This of course has no effect on Bertram, and Ronald eventually succeeds in frightening them enough so that they let the Beans adopt Adoniram as well as learning he wasn\u2019t really their nephew but was cast away by another flood.
Once he returns, the plot takes another twist: the quest for Byram, as Adoniram and Georgie think that the two might really be brothers. The animals think about this and decide to bring in the Boomschmidt Circus, since it travels all over the area. They have bills made up with Adoniram\u2019s image on them (which causes some confusion when Adoniram and lookalike Bertram visit the circus) and hand them out to attendees.
They get a lot of responses, one of which suggests that the boy is at an orphanage. Freddy goes there in disguise and is mistaken for the other new regular introduced here, Mrs. Winfield Church. Later, with a helpful visit from a hawk (something of a deus ex machina, frankly), they narrow down Byram\u2019s whereabouts to a canal up by Boonville. They head off in Mrs. Church\u2019s car where they have a bit of an encounter with some gypsies, another bit that is not one of the more admirable bits of the series. Eventually, Byram is rescued and takes up residence at the Bean Farm, and they even eventually determine that their middle names (beginning with \u201cR\u201d) are the same, though Freddy is the only one who finds out what the name actually is.
This plot summary leaves out a lot of the funniest bits of the book, such as Ronald as Bertram and a truck driver having a rooster soundalike contest, or Freddy trying desperately to pretend to be a female trustee of the orphanage. Those bits are the ones that really make the book, in my view, as the story is rather rambling and doesn\u2019t hold together all that well. And there are, as I note above, some bits that, as an adult, make me cringe to read them. On the other hand, I think I might have appreciated the book considerably more if I\u2019d had the opportunity to read it as a boy like Adoniram.<\/p>\n\n\n\n