Nightmare world of thinking out loud

Young people have very little privacy, says Patrick Ness. Photo / Supplied

If we could read each other's minds, we would all be in a lot of trouble. That's the premise of Patrick Ness' young adult trilogy Chaos Walking, set in an alien world where the thoughts of the male population coalesce into an overwhelming cacophony known as "Noise".

The bestselling series began in 2008 with The Knife of Letting Go before continuing last year with The Ask and the Answer, both of which have won several awards including the Guardian and the Costa prizes for children's fiction.

"The world is already so noisy," says Ness, who is visiting New Zealand next week.

"You sit on a train, you hear people's iPods and people talking into their phones. You hear things you don't want to hear, private details and conversations. My idea was, 'What if you really couldn't get away from that? What if you could hear what everybody was thinking all the time?' It would be dreadful, a nightmare."

Ness believes such a scenario would be even worse for a teenager.

"Privacy is so important at that age because that's when you're making all the important decisions," he says.

"Privacy is something that is slipping away from young people these days because of things like Facebook and YouTube. You do something stupid, somebody's always got their phone and suddenly it's on the internet for everybody to see."

The series' concept is reminiscent of Ricky Gervais' film The Invention of Lying, where everyone speaks their minds because of an inability to tell fibs.

"You would find ways to hide things and people do that in the books," he says.

"The title Chaos Walking comes from the idea of a man unfiltered. My brain is constantly filled with flotsam and jetsam like snippets of songs, things I don't believe and things I want to be true. So if you could hear people's thoughts, you wouldn'tget the truth, you'd get this mish-mash of what's true and what's fantasised, all coming out at once."

The son of an American Army sergeant, Ness, 38, was born in Virginia but spent part of his childhood in Hawaii. Ness, who lives outside London these days, says of Hawaii: "It's a terrific place to be a kid. When you're young, you take the world as it comes and when it comes as beaches, pineapple and tropical rain forests that's just great."

Ness lived in Waikiki in the middle of the island of Oahu, which was "about as far away from the beach as you can get and still be in Hawaii". He believes growing up in such idyllic surroundings has influenced his fiction, including his two adult novels The Crash of Hennington and Topics About Which I Know Nothing.

"Living in a small town in the middle of a small island in the middle of a huge ocean gives you a feeling of a contained community," he says. "That comes up a lot in the stuff I write, that idea of living in a place that has a circular border with nowhere else to go."

It is especially apparent in how the colonists fight not just among themselves but also with the strange planet's native species, the Spackle. "As well as a Polynesian population, Hawaii also has a very large immigrant Japanese-American population so it's the only state where Caucasians are the minority," says Ness.

At 6, he moved to Washington State on America's West Coast.

"The town where we lived is called Puyallup, which is the name of the local Indian tribe. We would buy fireworks on Indian land. Americans who live in the West are more aware of Native Americans than those who live in the East, as there are still reservations and casinos. Immigrant populations and clashing populations are something that show up a lot in my work."

Ness' military background is also reflected in the battle that comes to a head in his concluding third volume, Monsters and Men, due in May.

"It explores the issue of the right and wrong sides of war," he says. "Take the Spackle, who morally seem to be completely in the right. They've been enslaved and they've suffered genocide but they're also trying to kill our hero. Each side always thinks they are right and you have to convince yourself that the other side is monstrous, that they are less than human, so you can kill them. But they are doing the same thing and the consequences of that are disastrous."

Patrick Ness appears at Scots College, Wellington, next Thursday at 1.30pm and St Cuthbert's College, Epsom, Auckland, on Friday at 7pm.