Sci-fi meets coming of age

Photos / Supplied

The Knife Of Never Letting Go
The Ask And The Answer
By Patrick Ness Walker
(Chaos Walking, Books One & Two, $27.99 each)

The phrase "page-turner" is much abused in book publicity circles, as is the dubious compound adjective "unputdownable". But there you go.

Patrick Ness appeared out of nowhere last year with an unputdownable page-turner. The Knife of Never Letting Go has one of my favourite first sentences - "The first thing you find out when yer dog learns to talk is that dogs don't got nothing much to say" - and it quickly becomes apparent that Ness, having grabbed your attention, knows how to keep it.

Todd Hewitt, our very likeable narrator, has grown up as the youngest boy in Prentisstown, the last surviving human settlement on a planet where a strange virus has infected all the men and boys with involuntary telepathic broadcasting, and killed all the women and girls. Everyone always knows what everyone else is thinking.

Which turns out to mean, as Todd discovers early on in the book, that some thoughts can be kept secret, buried in the general hubbub. The men around him have been lying to him, and to all the other boys.

It wasn't the virus that killed his mother and all the other women, and Prentisstown is not the last human place on the planet. Todd is forced to run for his life, with the strangest of strangers for company: a girl.

This is what science fiction can do that realist fiction can't: create a world in which a teenage boy's discovery of the existence of girls is a literal one. The core of The Knife of Never Letting Go is Todd's evolving friendship with Viola, a new arrival on the planet who knows as little as he does about what happens to relationships between the sexes when men can't keep their thoughts to themselves... and women can. It's a sweet, strangely believeable maybe-love story.

But the book is also a road story, and a horror story, in which the fearsome Mayor of Prentisstown pursues the pair relentlessly, and for reasons unclear. This is at once the engine which drives Ness's plot and its least satisfactory aspect: it's easy to create a bogeyman if you keep him off-stage, but I was never entirely convinced that the Mayor was anything more than an excuse for the pair to keep moving.

Until, that is, I read The Ask and the Answer, the second book of Ness's projected trilogy, in which the Mayor catches up with our heroes, imprisons them, and makes a determined attempt at winning their loyalty. This requires Ness to pay off the overdraft he took out by using the Mayor as a distant threat all through the first book, and pay it off he does, magnificently, fleshing the Mayor out into a complex, subtle, overpoweringly forceful personality.

This risks unbalancing the book - in much the way Paradise Lost is unbalanced by the charisma of Milton's Lucifer - but Ness has the wit to give the Mayor an equally potent enemy, as well as bringing in an alien species and a raft of political complications... and stranding Todd and Viola in the middle.

The effect of this, and it's a compelling one, is to widen the scope of the story while simultaneously narrowing its focus. Todd and Viola have far less freedom in this book, and have to make some appalling choices.

My biggest question was whether Ness was using brutal violence as a cheap intensifier for no better reason than to purchase himself an emotional response. What he's actually done is create a full blown dystopian epic, centered on characters we care about.

This is one of the most interesting novel series now in progress, rich, morally sophisticated, and beautifully written. I'm deeply nervous about the likely contents of the third volume, due out next year. But I'll be lining up to read it.

David Larsen is an Auckland reviewer.