It is a testament to a great author when you finish a book and immediately want to write an honours thesis about it. This is how I feel after finishing Patrick Ness' amazing YA dystopia novel The Knife of Never Letting Go. Surely, this is one of the finest YA novels I have ever read, and possibly one of my favourite dystopic ones as well. This book just begs to be analyzed and discussed, and so while I still have a year until I'll be writing my honours thesis, this review will have to do for now (although I promise it will be significantly shorter than a 50 page thesis). I'm sure that at some point in our lives, we've wished to have the ability to know other's thoughts. To be able to look past a person's outer shell and understand what was truly happening inside their mind. This is the world in which Todd Hewitt, a 12 year (and 12 month) old boy is growing up. The inhabitants of Prentisstown, a settlement on the newly colonized planet of 'New World' can all hear each other's thoughts (and the thoughts of all of the animals) due to a germ which was released by the planet's alien inhabitants during initial struggles with the humans, killing all of the women and leaving only the men. Or so Todd has been told since he was a child.
This is the brilliance of Ness's world. In a world where everyone can hear each other's thoughts, there is a dark secret in Prentisstown, one which has been kept from Todd since he was born-- and which he happens to stumble upon one day when he is walking his dog Manchee through the swamp around Prentisstown. Growing up in this noisy world, Todd grows accustomed to the white 'Noise' of men's and animal's thoughts all around him, and is shocked when he comes across a portion of the swamp in which he suddenly can't hear a thing. There is a gap in the Noise.
This simple discovery is the catalyst for a series of events which will change Todd's life forever, as his adoptive parents, Ben and Cillian, force him to leave Prentisstown as the townsmen he has spent his entire life growing up around suddenly take up arms against him. He is handed a map of New World, and a journal with his mother's last words--both of which he can't read--and told to run for his life.
Thus begins a profound exploration into what it means to be human, about history and hope, and how our thoughts and actions both reveal and hide who we really are. The story is essentially a coming-of-age tale, but one that critically examines what it means to 'become' a man, and complicates traditional meanings of masculinity (and by extension femininity). And (most poignantly, in my opinion), it highlights the struggle we all face between hatred and empathy, and how it is often far easier to hate something you don't understand than to imagine the world from another perspective. As Todd says, just because something's silent, doesn't mean it's empty.
My only possible critique of the book (which seems to be echoed by other reviewers on GoodReads) is that the constant action of the book can become a bit fatiguing. Like Suzanne Collins' The Hunger Games, the pace of this novel is breathless, without a lot of time to stop and process what is happening. Often, Todd doesn't have time to comprehend a situation until two or three chapters after it has happened, and this can become a little confusing. The relentlessness of the novel's villain's could also be read as tiring (see: Aaron), and at times, I too felt like crying, "Just die already, will you?!" but I think this just made Todd's struggle more realistic. It takes time to deal with your demons, and just as safety seems increasingly unreachable, so does hope become even more crucial.
In the back of the book, Ness states that the inspiration for the book came from thinking about the recent swell of advancements in communication technology, and how our access to information (at any time, in any place) has increased exponentially. Information really is all around us, but how do we sort through the Noise and find the truth? What is being hidden behind the stories, the histories that we are being told on a daily basis, and how do we determine what to believe? In a way, we can read each other's thoughts, but that doesn't mean that those thoughts aren't lies, either to us, or even worse, to their owner. In a novel told from the first person perspective, you'd expect that Todd would tell you everything, that in the relationship between narrator and reader, there would be no secrets--just like there aren't supposed to be any secrets between the men in Prentisstown. But I was wrong: there are things Todd keeps from the reader and from himself, making him an unreliable narrator of the first degree, as he slowly struggles to process and accept the true history of Prentisstown and see through the lies that have completely shaped his perception of the world.
In short, I was intrigued, and inspired and challenged by The Knife of Never Letting Go. I have a few other books to read before I get to the sequel, The Ask and the Answer, but I will be waiting with baited breath until I can begin reading about Todd Hewitt's adventures again.
Genre: YA Fantasy/Dystopia
Recommended To: Fans of Cormac McCarthy The Road, The Hunger Games or other dystopic novels; everyone.
Rating: 10/10
Favourite Quote: "Hope may be the thing that pulls you forward, may be the thing that keeps you going, but that it's dangerous, that it's painful and risky, that it's making a dare in the world and when has the world ever let us win a dare?"
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