Chronicles of a Lizard Nobody

With each Patrick Ness I read, my admiration grows.  Leaving his usual hangout on the young adult corner, he turns up with a school story for slightly younger readers. And yes, it’s the familiar story of school survival, friendship and bullying, but with the twist that all the classmates and their teachers are animals, mixed up with some haphazard references to their size and characteristics, as the source of some clever jokes and situations. The mood is set in the first chapter. We meet our hero Zeke when he and his friend Daniel are being made school hall monitors. Is it, Zeke wonders aloud, because he and Daniel are monitor lizards, just like their friend Alicia, who is already a hall monitor? Well no, says Principal Wombat, that’s just coincidence. Given the opportunity to ask a question, impetuous Daniel uses the opportunity to sort out something that’s obviously been troubling him. ‘Is it true’, he asks the Principal, ‘You can use your butt as armour?’ ‘Yes,’ she replies, dismissively, ‘It’s a wombat thing. Any other questions?’ Principal Wombat’s butt will indeed play a crucial role but not until we have reached pretty much the end of a tale in which Ness expertly mixes perceptive observation of the pressures of school and home life, and the compensations of friendship, with some situations and characters that are so way out that it is a wonder he can get away with it. Why and how does Zeke have the whole of France on his knee, so that chief bully Pelicarnassus (he is a pelican) can send a small flight of aircraft on a night bombing raid? Can the friendship of the new cool blind kid, a hawk who shouts in capital letters, boost Zeke’s self-confidence? Will Zeke face down Mrs Pfister, the pony in charge of the stationery cupboard and come back with craft supplies? And what is this black dog who has come to live in Zeke’s home and who won’t let him near his mother? It’s a tale that is beyond unpredictable: crazy, funny, and tender. Running through the laughter and bravura invention, there is an uplifting faith in our capacity to understand, love and support one another. Sheer unmissable brilliance. A word of admiration, too, for illustrator Tim Miller, who is happy to rise to the challenge of showing us a monitor lizard wrestling a yak to the ground. You will see it nowhere else.