Monsters and More Monsters

I've always been happy to abandon a book after 50 pages (or less) if I'm not enjoying it.  Occasionally the first page is enough. Then, in March 2020, just before the first lockdown, I decided to read all the Carnegie winners in order, and write about the experience here. I don't think I realised how long it was going to take (maths was never my strongest subject) and here I am, starting on my fifth year of reading. 

There have been 84 winners of the Carnegie Medal so far and it was too much to hope that I would like all of them. When I haven't enjoyed a book I've found myself quite reluctant to write about it, but I'm interested in describing the experience of reading all these books as well as in saying a bit about the books themselves, and that means that occasionally I need to find ways of saying what I didn't like, or felt didn't work. And that, of course, is as much about me as about the book.  

Patrick Ness won the Carnegie twice in 2011 and 2012, both times with books that have monsters in their titles. I want to start with A Monster Calls, the 2012 winner based on an original idea by Siobhan Dowd. I was curious to know just how much of that original idea made it into the book which Ness wrote, and the answer turns out to be, not very much. (I've put a link at the end of this piece to an interview that goes into detail about this). Siobhan Dowd had sketched the characters of Mum, Conor and Lily, and a talking yew tree which was to have been a grandmother figure, but which Ness made into the monster of the title. Then there was the idea of the yew tree telling three stories, though the intended  nature and content of those stories was unknown, as was the ending of the book. A Monster Calls is very definitely Patrick Ness's book.

I found this novel much more engaging and powerful than Monsters of Men, and it also throws some interesting light on the earlier winner. That's one reason I wanted to take this one first. The other reason is that this book deals with a situation I know intimately—the early death of a mother with a thirteen-year-old son. And it was perhaps because of my special interest that I found the behaviour of the adults in the story incredibly frustrating. Conor's parents and grandmother never tell him that his mother is dying, but instead collude with his belief that the treatment she is receiving is working. As a result, rage and confusion are constantly building inside him.

This is not to say that anger and confusion won't happen if you know the truth. When we found out that my wife's illness was terminal, six months before she died, we told my son that she was going to die. We didn't realize that it still hadn't properly registered in his mind. It didn't do so until an afternoon in the hospice shortly before she died, when she told us tearfully, 'I don't want to leave you.' 

So, I spent most of the book saying to myself, 'Please, just tell him!' But they never did, not in so many words. Even when Conor did find out that his mum was going to die, the words 'death' and 'dying' never got a mention. I'd add here that Conor's mum is really hardly a character at all. We know only three things about her: she loves Conor, she loves her own mother, and she is dying.

Everything that Patrick Ness does in this book is done very well, and the final scene is very moving but I can't say that I felt, in the end, completely convinced by the story. Reviewers describe it as 'low fantasy' which is I guess, realism with a bit of fantasy thrown in. In this sense it's a bit like Margaret Mahy's two Carnegie winners, The Haunting and The Changeover, or like Skellig or River Boy, but with all those books I was completely engaged and I've been trying to work out why that didn't quite happen with A Monster Calls.

Partly it's that annoyance about the way the adults behave, but it's more than that: it's that I feel I'm being required to learn something. And that happens because Conor is very definitely being required by the monster to learn something. That's where the stories come in.

The yew-tree monster is a strange, wild, fierce creature of Conor's imagination which at times seems to leave behind evidence—berries, leaves—of his real physical presence, and at others appears to be a metaphor or proxy for Conor's anger. The monster wants to free Conor by getting him to tell his own truth, and that truth (spoiler alert) turns out to be that Conor wishes it was all over, and the implication is that, deep down, Conor knows the only way it will end is with his mother's death. While he's waiting for Conor to come clean, the monster tells him stories in which characters and events turn out to be not what they seem. But Ness does this in a way that exactly mirrors, in miniature, what he has done at far greater length in Monsters of Men.

Here's the heart of it: Conor says: 

'So the good prince was a murderer and the evil queen wasn't a witch after all? Is that supposed to be the lesson of all this?'

The tree tells Conor there is no lesson. A few moments later Conor says: 'I don't understand. Who's the good guy here?'

There's not always a good guy. Nor is there always a bad one. Most people are somewhere in between.

Conor shook his head. 'That's a terrible story. And a cheat.'

It's a true story, the monster said.

As soon as characters start to have this kind of explicit conversation I start to feel uneasy. The tree may be speaking to Conor, but I can't help feeling that the author is speaking to me, and if I'm reading a novel then that is exactly the kind of thing I want to be shown, not told.

Conor's reaction to that story pretty much sums up how I felt about Monsters of Men, Ness's sci-fi epic that won the Carnegie in 2011. In Monsters of Men you can be fairly sure that if a character does something good they'll probably do something bad a few minutes later. I exaggerate slightly, but only slightly, and that makes it very hard to really like anyone. The characters all feel terribly slippery. So you'd think I'd be happy because I am being shown, at very great length, that people can be both good and bad. Well... 

By a clear 200 pages, Monsters of Men, is the longest winner of the Carnegie Medal. It is also, and by some distance, the most violent. It is the third volume of a trilogy entitled Chaos Walking. The first two volumes, The Knife of Never Letting Go and The Ask and the Answer weigh in at 474 and 517 pages respectively. I decided that I couldn't really read the final volume without reading the other two first, and for the first few hundred pages I thought I'd made a good decision. I enjoyed quite a lot of that first book, but then the book's best character—a little dog called Manchee—was killed, and shortly after that I realised I wasn't enjoying Chaos Walking any more. The same things seemed to keep happening over and over again. Violence, betrayal, violence, more violence, war, anger, rage...

Nevertheless, I persisted. I read fifty pages at a sitting and eventually I reached the end. Given the huge numbers of glowing reviews printed on the opening pages of the books, and the thousands of five-star reviews on the internet I can see that I'm in a minority. This isn't the first Carnegie winner I've had trouble finishing but it's definitely the longest.

I wonder if it's possible to detect the influence of computer games here. I remember how children I was teaching would produce incredibly long stories and I'd start to read them thinking how great it was that they'd written so much, only to discover that what they were describing was a protagonist (themselves) fighting and defeating an endless sequence of enemies. Clearly, there's a lot more than that going on in Chaos Walking, but I think that I would have reacted very differently to the trilogy if it had been about 1000 pages shorter.

This is a book about war, and it invites the reader to consider, along with its protagonists, when, and if, killing and war can be justified. It contains genocide, murder, and misogyny. It describes the enslavement and branding of aliens and women, bombings and shootings and eye-gouging. There is hardly a second of light relief, with the exception of that little dog. I think it was Erich Segal who once said 'If you want to make them cry, kill a dog,' but maybe that's an apocryphal story. I didn't cry when the dog died but he made sense as a character in a way that none of the others did to me, and I missed him when he was gone. And I have to say that when that yew-tree monster said 'there is no lesson', I think he was lying. When the kind of dilemma that haunts this book is repeated over and over, as in: 'Is it OK to kill a thousand people to save the one you love?' it can't help but feel like a lesson, in the sense that you are being asked to learn something, even if that something is that there are no right answers.

There is a whole universe of science fiction out there which is published without any kind of age categorisation and is perfectly accessible to young people without being marketed to 'young adults'. An odd thing about this book is that the two young protagonists are 13 years old, or 14 in the years of the planet they're on, which is how old you'd probably make the protagonists in a 'middle grade' book. I was always told by publishers that you want the characters to be at the upper end of the age-range because kids don't really want to read about people younger than them. I was reading recently about how many younger children will 'read-up' as the industry has it. Maybe that's what happens here.

Nothing quite like Monsters of Men had won the Carnegie before. For the precursors of this kind of dark-tinted dystopian SF I'm looking back to someone like John Christopher (All Flesh is Grass, Tripods), who, like Patrick Ness, enjoyed presenting moral dilemmas to his readers and wrote for children as well as adults. Moral dilemmas were also meat and drink to early series of Star Trek, in episodes often written by top SF writers. Before YA was a glint in the eyes of its publisher parents, Science Fiction was acting as a first stepping stone away from children's books as is brilliantly described in Francis Spufford's memoir The Child that Books Built. If I recommended Chaos Walking to a young person I'd certainly suggest that they also read Ray Bradbury, Ursula Le Guin, Iain M Banks and Theodore Sturgeon, to name just a few, and there's no shortage of contemporary SF either. I  hope this book will give young readers a taste for SF that leads them to seek out those writers. 

If you have a different perspective on Chaos Walking I'd love to hear from you in the comments. This was the book that nearly torpedoed my project to read all the Carnegie winners, and I was very close indeed to giving up. Only the fact that I'm so close to the end kept me going. Luckily for me, none of the others are as long as this one.

Finally, here are a couple of links to info/discussions about how Patrick Ness came to write A Monster Calls.  Firstly, a Q and A from Publishers' Weekly from 2011 with Patrick Ness and Denise Johnstone-Burt, the editor Ness shared with Siobhan Dowd. Secondly an interview with Patrick Ness from 2016.

Originally published on ABBA April 2024