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: Matilda by Roald Dahl

Read: Multiple times, the most recent of which is October 2010
 

Last weekend I did something I haven’t done in years: I went away without packing a book. I didn’t mean to, and certainly wasn’t happy to find I had, but it gave me an opportunity to pick up something I wouldn’t have read at home. After carefully browsing the bookshelves where I was staying it came down to a battle between two quite different books: The New York Trilogy by Paul Auster and Matilda by Roald Dahl. Of Auster’s comprehensive folio, I have only read Mr Vertigo which I enjoyed without being bowled over by. However, it is one of the favourite books of a writer friend of mine and it has been in my to-read pile for at least two years. I read the first page, complete with her annotation (I love scrawled in books) and was bowled over by the immediacy with which it gripped me.

“It was a wrong number that started it, the telephone ringing three times in the dead of night, and the voice on the other end asking for someone he was not. Much later, when he was able to think about the things that happened to him, he would conclude that nothing was real except chance. But that was much later. In the beginning, there was simply the event and its consequences. Whether it might have turned out differently, or whether it was all predetermined with the first word that came from the stranger’s mouth, is not the question. The question is the story itself, and whether or not it means something is not for the story to tell.”

What a stunning start. I could happily have continued reading and not stopped there. But for fairness sake I set it temporarily down to read a page of Matilda before making my choice. And I didn’t put it down until it was finished.

Matilda holds a special place in my heart. It is my favourite of Dahl's many books, and Dahl was my favourite author as a child. My first independent reading memory is of staying up late one night to finish it under the covers and I must have read it four or five times after that. Picking it up sent a shiver through my spine. I was shocked by just how good it was to be returning to Matilda after at least 15 and probably twenty years without reading it.

Mr and Mrs Wormwood are uncultured, crooked, neglectful parents who treat their children like a burden that has been unjustly thrust upon them. They spend their evenings eating TV dinners in front of the gogglebox, playing bingo and discussing how to make money. They are so self-interested they don’t even register their youngest daughter, Matilda, for school until she is five-and-a-half. They are vacuous, nasty, loathsome parents.

Matilda is different. She likes to read rather than watch TV and possesses intelligence bordering on genius. She can do mental arithmetic as quick as a calculator and spell words that most can only dream of. But when she finally gets to school she encounters a head teacher who makes her parents look almost bearable: a former hammer thrower named Miss Trunchbull. Trunchbull is a child-hating bully with a penchant for grabbing children by the hair and hurling them as far as she can. It is rumoured that she even has a punishment cupboard called The Chokey which is lined with glass and nails so children have to stand perfectly straight while confined. But when Matilda starts to find she has special powers, she concocts a plan to help her stricken teacher Miss Honey and punish the Trunchbull once and for all.

Roald Dahl writes a child’s fantasy perspective sumptuously, complete with the terrors of being small and the dreams of impacting on the big world around you. His characters – with their Dickensian names like Miss Trunchbull (rotten) and Miss Honey (lovely) – and the illustrations by Quentin Blake are broadly drawn caricatures we read with a child’s sense of uncomfortable awe. We make visceral, immediate judgements of them which never change, even as we see their humanity emerging around the black and white of their actions.

As a child I identified with Matilda, not because I was a genius or had horrible parents or scary teachers, but because we each loved reading. She reads every book in the children’s section of her local library by the time she is four and then graduates to grown-up classics which she reads with equal voracity. I wanted to be her, genius and speed reading and all. She is mature beyond her years, caring, considerate and generous. She has a well developed sense of morality, a wicked sense of mischief, and is able to do things that the many various gorwn-ups she comes across cannot.

The fact is, I still love Matilda and I still want to be her.

Matilda is a bibliophiles dream, an unfettered celebration of the joys of reading and a typical Dahl rejection of cold technology in favour of vivid imagination. However, the biggest surprise I had on reading Matilda again is that it didn’t inspire me to read the classic novels Matilda does. Early in the adventure, Dahl lists some of the books she has read, including Nicholas Nickleby, Oliver Twist, Jane Eyre, Kim, The Invisible Man and The Grapes of Wrath. But as a child I read none of these. I really don’t know why. But what a wonderful context in which to discover such books, and what a resource this is for young readers wanting to move into grown-up literature. Indeed, what a wonderful resource this is for a sometime book blogger like me who has only read five of the fourteen books listed! It appears I have some reading to do…

But before then, I must go back and read The New York Trilogy.

10 out of 10