Book Review: A Monster Calls by Patrick Ness

Conor blinked. Then blinked again. “You’re going to tell me stories?”

Indeed, the monster said

“Well-” Conor looked around in disbelief “How is that a nightmare?”

Stories are the wildest things of all, the monster rumbled. Stories chase and bite and hunt.

Conor O’Malley is a thirteen year old boy whose mother is dying of cancer. What’s worse, he knows it too. No matter how often she tells him that the medicines that make her throw-up and leave her too tired to get out of bed in the mornings will help her get better. No matter that no-one  will tell him what’s really happening. At school his classmates don’t know how to talk to him, and at night he’s wracked by a recurring and elemental nightmare.

Then, one night, a monster shows up. But its not the monster Conor has been dreaming of, this one is wild and ancient and wise. After what Conor has seen in his nightmare, he’s not afraid. But the monster wants to make a deal. It will tell Conor three stories and when they are done, Conor will tell his own story, the one of his nightmare, the one thing he can’t bare to face.

Written by Patrick Ness from the final idea of Carnegie Medal winning author Siobhan Dowd, who tragically died of cancer just as she was making a name for herself, A Monster Calls is a powerful and moving tale of finding ways of dealing with the impossible. Told in a untamed style and accompanied on nearly every page with dark and brooding black and white illustrations by Jim Kay, it is a rare and utterly extraordinary book. The style and ambiance is classic Ness. There are short sentences, unfinished thoughts, an omnipresent voice that cannot be ignored. The Monster, a Green Man like figure that emerges from a yew tree in Conor’s garden, offers wizened advice through a series of fairy-tale-esque stories that don’t turn out quite as we expect. That is the point. Patrick Ness understands and adeptly conveys the contradictions and moral ambiguities at the heart of being a human. The anger that burns in the middle of love, the fire of revenge sitting side-by-side with acceptance, the good intentions that turn out wrong. He’s a wonderfully humane writer, and this is perhaps the most coherent expression of the world view he presented in his multi-award winning Chaos Walking trilogy.

There is not always a good guy. Nor is there always a bad one. Most people are somewhere inbetween.

Yet for all the focus on stories, A Monster Calls is as much about the limits of what a story can do, as it’s power. “You do not write your life with words, the monster said. You write it with actions. What you think is not important. It is only important what you do.” There’s a focus on the catharsis of storytelling and writing, the forum they provide for learning about oneself and expressing and experiencing difficult emotions.

More than anything, and perhaps fitting for a book which claims that “you do not write your life with words”, A Monster Calls is an aesthetically beautiful book. For all Ness’s skill and the poignancy added by the background against which it was written, it is the illustrations by Jim Kay that steal the show. Produced with a variety of materials including beetles and breadboards, they are really rather scary and a perfect accompaniment to the novel. I’ve not seen illustrations as exceptional as these in a long time. They are right up there with the most stunning works of art one finds in children’s literature, comparable in every way and often surpassing those of Brian Selznik in The Invention of Hugo Cabret, or Shaun Tan. To hold A Monster Calls in one’s hands and flick through the fifteen or so double page illustrations is to see what good illustration can bring to a book.

A Monster Calls provides an engaging and moving exploration of the grief that comes while waiting for a loved one to die, and the complex emotions that precipitates. Conor is a likable character one cannot help feeling deserves more than life is giving him, but through the Monster’s stories, we come to see that not everyone gets what they deserve in life, and often the hardest thing of all is to determine what one person actually deserves. This is a modern day fable on dealing with whatever life throws at you, which argues that you can be forgiven for feeling even the most horrible things, so long as you are true to yourself, and realise from where these emotions spring. 

Published by Walker Books, 2011, HB, ISBN: 9781406311525, 216pp

Book Review: Monsters of Men - Patrick Ness

Read: April 2010

Monsters of Men in one tweet-sized chunk:

Monsters of Men is a near perfect conclusion to a near perfect trilogy.

“War,” says Mayor Prentiss, his eyes glinting. “At last.”

So begins Monsters of Men, the final volume in Patrick Ness’s multi-award-winning Chaos Walking trilogy. Lines have been drawn, armies are marching; divisive and polarising leaders have got what they wanted. And Todd and Viola are caught in the middle of it, faced with ominous odds and unenviable choices. The first of these is to split up, with Todd staying behind to keep an eye on the Mayor and fight the invading Spackle army while Viola goes in search of the scout ship that has just landed. Once again, their trust in each other will be tested to its absolute limit.

Given that its title stems from the warning delivered by various characters throughout the series – “war makes monsters of men” – it is no surprise that war is the predominant theme and, for better or worse, shapes everything that takes place. Yet Monsters of Men is as complex and multifarious as war itself, an investigation into the many ways and many ends for which people are drawn into it. It is an enthralling culmination to the finest series I’ve read in many years. Chaos Walking combines first rate characterisation with heart-stoppingly exciting plots and engaging, direct, and often lyrical prose. I run out of superlatives when describing just how good it is.

Best of all it challenges the reader. You cannot sit back and watch passively as events unfold. At every turn you are placed in the characters’ shoes, confronted with the question: what would you do? What would you do if your greatest enemy were the only person who could save you from a marauding army bent on revenge? What would you do if your “one in particular” were about to die and the only way you could save them were to fire a missile that would kill hundreds, if not thousands, of enemy soldiers and destroy all hopes of a desperately wished for peace. Faced with the choice between vengeance and forgiveness what would you do? What space is there for idealism when your very survival is driven by a need for realpolitik?

Every choice is played through to its conclusion, laying clear the full ramifications of that choice, the characters forced to live with and adapt to the world they have shaped.  Reading is a dynamic experience; different fonts for the different narrators bring the text alive, Noise sometimes squeezing, sometimes ramming its way onto the page. Characters feel alive because their choices are your own and because they are each three- dimensional, capable of a whole gamut of actions and reactions, none of which are black or white. Ness seems to instinctively appreciate that it is in contradiction and hypocrisy that life is lived and experienced. Uncomfortable truths demonstrating just how difficult some choices are:

“Come!” he says to me. “See what it’s like to be on the winning side.”
And he rides off after the new soldiers.
I ride after him, gun up, but not shooting, just watching and feeling-
Feeling the thrill of it
Cuz that’s it-
That’s the nasty, nasty secret of war-
When yer winning-
When yer winning, it’s ruddy thrilling-

Or how about this, a realisation that love might be the most destructive possibility of all:

“I’d have done the same, Viola,” Todd says, one more time.
And I know he’s saying nothing but the truth.
But as he hugs me again before I leave, I can’t help but think it over and over.
If this is what Todd and I would do for each other, does that make us right?
Or does it make us dangerous?

Monsters of Men combines gripping storylines with real moral quandaries. In Todd and Viola it has heroes you root for with every ounce of your being. They are far from perfect and it is their self-abasement, their doubt, which makes them so likable. And the point that Todd and many other characters come back to time and again is that it’s not how you fall, but how you get back up again that counts.

Contrarily it is the absolute certainty of Mayor Prentiss and Mistress Coyle that makes them so hideous. Their bloodthirsty eagerness for war only adds to this, as does their calm and rational defence of its transformative nature, the Nietzschean survival of the fittest test by which you walk into the fire and either emerge bigger and stronger, or fall away. War doesn’t make monsters of men, Mayor Prentiss and Mistress Coyle chillingly echo each other early on. “It’s war that makes us men in the first place.”

Yet whereas The Knife of Never Letting Go and The Ask and The Answer had, at their heart, a message that power is the ultimate end, Monsters of Men begins to reveal the inherent flaws in that argument. Madness is often defined as continuing to do the same thing time and time again yet expecting different results, and the longer the book goes on, the more those who seek to divide and rule appear ridiculous. Stuck using the same tactics as before, without recognising the new opportunities that exist.

Underlying their military struggle is another battle – this one an ideological struggle between competing visions of how peace is won (discussion versus force, individuality versus collectivism) – and they are losing it.
What would life be like if you could hear everybody’s thoughts, and everybody could hear yours? What would be the effect on individuality, free thought, privacy? These are the questions Ness posed in The Knife of Never Letting Go. In The Ask and The Answer the question evolved into competing ideas of how to run such a society. In Monsters of Men, the circle is completed and the benefits of Noise presented. What if communication were organic rather than active, a natural inter-connectedness that provided community to all and bred trust and unity rather than secrets and lies? How much more intimate might relationships be if miscommunication were no longer possible?

“I think it could be the way forward for all of us,”…If we can all learn to speak this way, then there won’t be any more division… That’s the secret of this planet, Todd. Communication, real and open, so we can finally understand each other.

Warmth, love, and hope abound. As the book goes on these choices begin to congeal around a coherent moral stance, a single call to arms: be the change you want in the world. No matter how hard that might be.

“I’m sorry, Bradley,” I say. “I couldn’t have done any other thing.”
He looks up sharply. “Yes, you could have.” He pulls himself to his feet and says it again, more firmly. “Yes, you could have. Choices may be unbelievably hard but they’re never impossible.”
“What if it’d been Simone down there instead of Todd?” I say.
And Simone is all over his Noise, his deep feelings for her, feelings I don’t think are returned. “You’re right,” He says. “I don’t know. I hope I’d make the right choice, but Viola it is a choice. To say you have no choice is to release yourself from responsibility and that’s not how a person with integrity acts.”

With a host of new characters – including an angry third narrator bent on revenge – who provide fresh impetus and perspective, Monsters of Men is a fitting conclusion full of all the qualities and insight that made its predecessors so rewarding. As you’d expect from a final volume, loose ends are tied up, though not at the expense of the narrative flow, and plenty remains unanswered. Most notably of all, Ness integrates the vast and powerful themes into the plot so seamlessly that they appear effortless. This is a rare and remarkable achievement. Monsters of Men is a near perfect conclusion to a near perfect trilogy.

Walker Books, May 2010, 9781406310271, 624pp

9.5 out of 10

The Ask and The Answer - Patrick Ness

This review first appeared on Vulpes Libris.

Read: July 2009

The Ask and The Answer in one Tweet-sized chunk:
A penetrating and perceptive, edge-of-the-seat intrigue with a host of engaging characters.


“Not everything is black and white, Todd. In fact, almost nothing is.”

The Knife of Never Letting Go ended on a cliff-hanger. Having spent the entire book fleeing for their lives across New World, with a marauding army laying waste to towns and villages behind them, a psychopathic preacher trying to kill them, and with Viola wounded and near death, Todd stumbled into Haven only to find they were too late.

“We were in the square, in the square where I’d run, holding her, carrying her, telling her to stay alive. Stay alive till we got safe, till we got to Haven so I could save her-
But there weren’t no safety, no safety at all, there was just him and his men-”

For unbeknownst to them Mayor Prentiss has arrived first. The city has surrendered without a shot being fired. Now he is President, and Haven has been renamed New Prentisstown. The Haven they dreamed of throughout the first book is now just a bigger, harsher version of the town Todd left. It is a beginning befitting of a book in which an insidious air of fear and impending doom replaces the relentless hope the characterised The Knife of Never Letting Go.

New Prentisstown has its surprises, most notably a Noise suppressant which allows men and women to live in harmony together. But that is the first thing to go. By confiscating it, the Mayor sends the entire population into a frantic cold turkey come down which becomes another tool in his authoritarian control. In the gender apartheid that follows, the Mayor seeks to recreate society as he wishes it.

“The borders between men and women had become blurred, and the reintroduction of those borders is a slow and painful process. The formation of mutual trust takes time, but the important thing to remember is, as I’ve said, the war is over.”


Yet the interesting thing about this segregation is that it does not appear to be based on a belief in the weakness of women, but rather their strength. Mayor Prentiss’s hatred of women is not a sexualised or violent misogyny, but rather a cold and aloof one born, one suspects, of fear and hurt. But that is long in the past. Amongst the ensuing cacophony, his control of Noise sets him apart as a man to be feared, a man not to be trusted, a man able to keep secrets in a world where other men’s thoughts are as transparent as if they were speaking them aloud.

Another great departure from the first book comes as Todd and Viola are separated and the narrative splits between them. At first they don’t seem to do too badly. Each is kept alive in bearable conditions, Viola for what she knows, and Todd for something unspecific, some unrealised potential the Mayor sees in him. Viola is locked up in a House of Healing, a sort of hospital run exclusively by and for women, under the direction of Mistress Coyle, while Todd is partnered with Davey Prentiss and set to oversee the management of Spackle (the native alien species on the planet) prisoners who have been quarantined on the edge of town. There he is forced to do the Mayor’s bidding, ‘processing’ the Spackle, managing them, dampening their spirits. The Mayor’s Noise reverberates inside his head; he cannot escape the omnipresent cajoling.

The chapters alternate between Todd’s punchy voice and the crisper, more orthodox narration of Viola. Yet the effect of this is to spread the focus of the plot away from them. They are no longer in control of their destinies, the crux of the story moves to those who control them. In Viola’s case this is Mistress Coyle, for Todd it is Mayor Prentiss.

Each, but particularly Todd, is driven to rationalising the actions they are compelled to take. Todd tries to convince himself that it is better that he be the one doing these things, someone who cares for the Spackle wellbeing, rather than the Mayors infinitely crueller henchmen.

What else can he do?

Then the attacks start. At first they are just raids on shops but are soon followed by explosions. What at first appeared to be a peaceful passing of power turns out to have inspired the reformation of The Ask, a guerrilla band of women led by Mistress Coyle and originally formed during the Spackle Wars. Soon, and without much choice on their part, Todd and Viola find themselves on opposite sides of a war being fought between competing ideologies and systems of control. As they each seek to justify and explain their actions, their once unbreakable bond begins to waver, as rumour and separation give way to doubt and suspicion.

Who is right when both sides are wrong?

The Ask and The Answer is a book of questions. We are the choices we make, that is its message. How we respond to these questions defines who we are, and how we feel about the choices made defines our place in the world. There are no right or wrong choices, Ness seems to be saying, no black and white just a whole lot of grey uncertainty. It is a pretty bleak book. As Todd and Viola stumble between difficult choices with harsh consequences the reader becomes almost personally culpable, through association and loyalty, for the mess that follows.

It would all be so much easier if the Mayor were a one dimensional evil presence. But he is more complicated than that. He makes generous gestures, offers reasonable arguments and rational explanations. He can be warm and friendly when it is in his interests to be so. But he keeps his motives to himself, and it is these motives that seem to harbour all his malicious intentions. He says he has The Answer, but in trying to impose it just poses more questions. Similarly, Mistress Coyle is far from a heroic freedom fighter and The Ask, while posing many questions, seem to have relatively few worthwhile answers. When the veneer of political opposition is stripped away they can be seen as little more than a destructive force bent on retribution and settling old scores. In fact, it would be perfectly possible to argue that in their righteous single-minded crusade, the guerrillas incidentally become at least as accountable as the Mayor. If not more. If war is destructive, then aren’t those who actively pursue it not the most guilty of all?

And the problem with seeming omnipotence is that there is always someone who will come along and challenge it. Increasingly powerless, Todd grows ever more furious. And that fury is something not even the Mayor can control.

The Ask and The Answer is a superb sequel. Along with The Knife of Never Letting Go it was the best book I read in 2009. Although less breathlessly exciting than its predecessor, it is a more penetrating book, one whose ideas ruminate long after the adventure is concluded. It is perceptive, edge-of-the-seat enthralling, and populated with superbly powerful characters. Just as The Knife of Never Letting Go commentated on contemporary themes such as knife crime and gender stereotyping, The Ask and The Answer tackles debates around governmental control, legal opposition, and the War on Terror. It is a book with significance far broader than its own plot.

Yet it is noticeably the middle book in a trilogy. Sandwiched between the freshness of the first book and culmination I anticipate in the third, it can feel a little passive. Things are building, forces are amassing, situations are reaching boiling point. Yet this is all presented in tiny incremental shifts. There are neither great denouements, nor clear ends in sight. What is started here will find no resolution until Monsters of Men is published in May 2010.

Patrick Ness is an awesomely talented writer, controlling information to shape the responses of his readers and drawing them into emotional and intellectual engagement with the events taking place. I am utterly hooked. When it is released, there will be a fight in our house as to who gets to read Monsters of Men first. It was 240 days and counting when I reviewed The Knife of Never Letting Go; now it is 124. And still I’m counting.

Perhaps it is best to finish as The Ask and The Answer begins, with its Friedrich Nietzsche epigraph:

“Battle not with monsters
lest you become a monster
and if you gaze in the abyss
the abyss gazes into you.”

** Earlier this week The Ask and The Answer was named as the winner of the Children’s Book Award at the 2009 Costa Book Awards. The judges described it as “a major achievement in the making.” The  overall Costa Book of the Year will be chosen between the five catagory winners and announced on Tuesday 26th January.

9.5 out of 10

The Knife of Never Letting Go - Patrick Ness

This review first appeared on Vulpes Libris where I write a guest review on the first wednesday of every month.

Read: July 2009

The Knife of Never Letting Go in one Tweet-sized chunk:
The Knife of Never Letting Go is a frantic, hair-raising, terrifying, complex, heartbreaking, exhilarating, novel.

“But a knife ain’t just a thing, is it? It’s a choice, it’s something you do. A knife says yes or no, cut or not, die or don’t. A knife takes a decision out of your hand and puts it in the world and it never goes back again.”

Public Health Warning:
This book contains probably the most horrific event I have ever read. Having swept through the first two thirds in a frenzy of enjoyment I was so traumatised that I threw the book across the room and had to be persuaded like a petulant toddler to pick it back up and finish.

Additional Public Health Warning:
Read this book. Health is about so much more than simply avoiding trauma and ill health. It is about promoting good health and that comes in many forms. The Knife of Never Letting Go may have cut me to the quick at times, but I still came away from it hungry for more. Everything about it, even those parts I really wished weren’t there, contributed to one of the most rewarding and exciting reads I have had in months.

But on to the book itself.

Todd Hewitt is the last boy in Prentisstown. But Prentisstown is a town like no other. There are no women, only men. And everyone can hear everything that everyone else is thinking in a constant and never-ending stream of Noise. There is no such thing as silence. No such thing as privacy. And until he becomes a man there are secrets which the rest of the town is keeping from him.

It is no wonder he is a so pissed off.

Then one day Todd and his dog Manchee stumble upon a hole in the Noise, a spot of absolute silence. The silence of a girl.

But that is impossible. There are no women left on New World. Unless everyone has been lying to him. And if that is the case, he is in danger. While Todd, Manchee, and the girl flee across New World in search of safety and answers, the men of Prentisstown are preparing for war...

 

The Knife of Never Letting Go is a frantic, hair-raising, terrifying, complex, heartbreaking, exhilarating, novel. It combines the pace and excitement of Suzanne Collins’s Hunger Games, the invention, intelligence of quality of writing of Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials, and the moral ambiguity of Philip Reeve's Mortal Engines. It is a great book.

It is always difficult to write a good review of a book you love – the tendency to overuse hyperbole, bore the reader with irrelevance, or fail to view it all with a critical eye – but when that book is as multi faceted as The Knife of Never Letting Go it becomes doubly so. It would be so easy to compile a long bullet point list of all the diverse things I love about it, yet drawing them together as Patrick Ness does is far harder. His skill is in telling a poignant and intellectually rewarding tale which remains utterly unputdownable. The Chaos Walking trilogy, of which this is the first book, is packed with political intrigue, social commentary and thoughtful set pieces. Above all, it is about growing up and finding your place in a world which is nothing like you have been told it was. Gender relations are a good example of this. Because only men's thoughts are audible in Noise, New World is racked by pretty horrendous inter gender tensions. But instead of the usual sloppy journalistic stereotyping of the 'Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus' brigade, Patrick Ness actually explores what it is like to try and get to know someone whose background and communication style is different to your own. It takes time, and is a far cry from the fantasies he has grown up with, but as Todd gets to gets to know Viola, he comes to understand that despite the apparent differences, men and women are really not much different. There is a profound moment towards the end when this realisation hits him.

“And there, in that morning, in that new sunrise, I realize something.
I realize something important...
I know what she’s thinking...
I can read her Noise even tho she ain’t got none.
I know who she is.
I know Viola Eade.”

The Knife of Never Letting Go is crammed with similar Eureka passages where frenetic reading grinds to a halt as you stop and consider just how special it is to capture something so simply and with such little pretence. There is a whole secondary subtext to the plot itself which adds great depth to what is already a powerful work of imaginative fiction. Another glorious moment comes right at the heart of the novel, when they stumble into a sea of giant cows all thinking the same single word of Noise together, singing it to each other at different pitches so that it becomes a melody.

“They're singing Here. Calling it from one to another in their Noise.
Here I am.
Here we are.
Here we go.
Here is all that matters.
Here.
“It's-
Can I say?
It's like the song of a family where everything's always all right, it's a song of belonging that makes you belong just by hearing it, it's a song that'll always take care of you and never leave you. If you have a heart, it breaks, if you have a heart that’s broken, it fixes.”

That is what this book is all about: multiplicity, uncertainty, the absence of a simple truth. The struggles always just around the corner, and the beauty which can be found in the simplest of moments. If you are looking for a book to get a teenage boy reading this might be it. Todd is a very strong and engaging male lead. His mindset is that of many teenagers, his reactions to his world familiar. In the course of the journey he is forced to think long and hard about such things as the dangers of carrying a knife, how to interact with women, how to control his emotions. The narrative is written from his point of view, in his own vernacular style which is easy to get into and fits his caustic yet kind persona perfectly. This is not a 'boy's book' though, any more than it is a book solely for teenagers. It is another great example of the crossover literature which is in such a healthy state at the moment. The Knife of Never Letting Go is a book which I struggle to imagine anyone not liking.

And the tragic event which gave rise to my Public Health Warning at the outset of this review is the moment that really makes it. It may be painful, almost unbearably so, but at that moment you know that this is no light fairy tale in which everything will turn out okay. Here is a novelist who has no qualms about testing his readers. At any moment he may kill off your favourite character, or make them do something thoroughly horrible. There is no good and evil, no black and white, just a whole lot of moral ambiguity and painful mistakes. That uncertainty makes for an unpredictable read in which nothing ever turns out quite as you expect it to.

And just when you think safety and comfort are within Todd's grasp they are snatched away and the book ends on a precipice. Chaos Walking is a trilogy to really get your teeth into. The Ask and the Answer is a fitting and even more ambiguous sequel and I can't wait until Monsters of Men, the final part in the Chaos Walking trilogy, is published in May 2010. 240 days and counting...

9.5 out of 10