The Ask and the Answer

In The Knife of Never Letting Go, the first part of Patrick Ness’s ‘Chaos Walking’ trilogy, teenage Todd and Viola are constantly on the run. In this second volume, they are caught and then separated, each to a different unscrupulous movement out for domination over the other. Descriptions of the aggression used by both sides do not make pretty reading and there are an awful lot of them. While the author could fairly claim that torture is sadly a topical issue these days, there is too much of it in this novel. Usually directed against women, it is both sickening and also curiously diminished in its effects, given that some of its victims seem to recover from it more quickly than seems true in real life.

This is just one direction in which this long novel could so easily have been shortened. As it is, repetition also creeps elsewhere. There are too many interviews with the smooth Mayor Prentiss, the villainous leader whose casuistry half converts Todd to the world of realpolitic. Todd himself remains irredeemably tongue-tied, but his dilemma is made convincing enough as he plunges further into the moral mire. Semi-hypnotised by the mayor, who also has powerful psychic powers, Todd finds himself partially won over by his enemy’s phoney arguments. All this is done well, as is Viola’s struggle with trying to square the use of indiscriminate violence to further what she is told is a noble cause. But too many strings of one word sentences eventually begin to pall as a way of injecting a sense of urgency into a flagging narrative, and the whole concept of the Noise, by which what goes on in characters’ minds cannot help but be heard by everyone else, now plays a less interesting part. Over-long and increasingly queasy, this story still manages to end on an excitingly dramatic note. The third and last instalment next year will show whether this promising author is able finally to break away from some of the faults that mar this present volume.