YOUNG ADULT FICTION: Monsters of MenBy Patrick Ness Walker, 603pp. £10.99 A Web of AirBy Philip Reeve Scholastic, 281pp. £8.99
THE TWO PREVIOUS volumes of Patrick Ness's Chaos Walking trilogy, The Knife of Never Letting Goand The Ask and the Answer, have between them won seven of the most prestigious awards of children's literature; there may well be more to come, for we await the announcement on June 24th of the winner of this year's Carnegie Medal, for which The Ask and the Answerhas been shortlisted. Meanwhile, here comes the final title of the trilogy, Monsters of Men, a novel that triumphantly concludes what will almost certainly come to be seen as one of the outstanding literary achievements of the present century, whether viewed as fiction for the young or for a wider readership.
To say that this is a book about war may seem an unfairly reductive interpretation of something stretching to 600 pages even if, in essence, this is what it amounts to. And what a dissection of conflict it turns out to be as it demonstrates some of the ways in which “war makes monsters of men”: its gaze is unremittingly on the tragic consequences of humanity’s killing instinct and its apparent inability to secure truce and, eventually, live in peace. Set, like its predecessors, on the dystopian planet known as New World, its focus is once again on the trials of teenagers Todd and Viola, confronting on this occasion the triple machinations of Mayor (“President”) Prentiss, the formidable Mistress Coyle and the indigenous peoples known as the Spackle. Some of these confrontations are violent in the extreme: as Todd at one point observes, “There’s bodies around us everywhere, burning in heaps, some of ’em still screaming.”
This emphasis on the horrors of war permeates the narrative, skilfully accentuated by its structure, typographical experimentation and frequent fondness for stream-of-consciousness outpourings. But Ness’s main genius is to avoid both sentimentality and simplification: his world is one of complex and shifting moralities where no easy assumptions about good and evil are warranted and where notions of redemption are sharply scrutinised. His concluding pages are poetic and poignant, adding up to something that, like the now-complete trilogy, is quite magical.
The novels of Philip Reeve have, like those of Patrick Ness, been the recipients of many significant awards, his Mortal Enginesquartet having earned special praise and recognition. A prequel to these, Fever Crumb, was published last year and now features on the 2010 Carnegie shortlist, but already we have a follow-up in the form of A Web of Air. Set in a future many centuries ahead, though one where details of yesterday's past and today's present are often mischievously combined, the narrative finds Fever, now 16 years of age, based in the seaside city of Mayda-at-the- World's End, where she hopes "to make her own life and her own discoveries". Her London background as an apprentice engineer is put to good use when she encounters Arlo Thursday, a young man determined to conquer the air and unlock the secrets of flight. (There are interesting parallels here with Eoin Colfer's Airman.)
Their progress towards attaining their shared aspiration and their first experiences of young love provide the material for a richly textured and highly entertaining novel, populated by a cast of characters positively Dickensian in their grotesque vigour and variety: all this and angels (of a sort) too. But beneath the colourful surface important themes are being explored, principally to do with the polarities of contrasting responses to life, the rational and the imaginative, and with the degrees of societal freedom required for the full expression of artistic endeavour and scientific advance. As Fever provocatively expresses it, in a passionate cri de coeur to her mother: “If you really want to stop people thinking, you don’t use guns or bombs. You use religion.” For many young readers, however, the book’s primary interest may well be in the evolution of the relationship between Fever and Arlo; its final pages, with their echoes of Tennyson’s Ulysses, will cast a special spell.
Fans of Ness and Reeve will find plenty in these novels to maintain their enthusiasm; new readers will quickly succumb to the challenge and the entertainment provided by two of the most talented and inventive of contemporary writers. What they have in common is a remarkable ability to combine a strong, engaging and beautifully paced storyline with a passion for argument and ideas: they make much of what passes for young adult fiction seem very thin indeed.
Robert Dunbar is a commentator on children’s books and reading
