A Monster Calls, Patrick Ness (From an original idea by Siobhan Dowd) – 2011
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| Copyright Jim Kay & Walker Books, 2011 |
TRIGGER WARNING: References to cancer treatment, death from cancer and grief.
Our second Carnegie Medal winning book in two weeks, A Monster Calls is in itself the product of two previous Carnegie Medal winners; Patrick Ness, who wrote the book, and Siobhan Dowd, who had the initial idea, and had been planning to write it, before her death from breast cancer in 2007, at the age of 43. Her death, and more importantly, her knowledge of her impending death lie at the deepest heart of this book, a book that is all about hiding, withdrawing and denial.
Conor is having nightmares, and when he wakes from them, the old yew tree outside his window comes alive and becomes a monster, that says it has come to get him. Conor however is unafraid. He has seen worse and cannot be frightened by so simple a threat as a monster. The monster, bemused, states that it shall return four times; on the first three occasions it will tell him a story, and on the last, he must tell it one. The next morning, we see Conor suffer through school and return home, to find his grandma there again, talking with his mother about Conor coming to live with her, and, to Conor, intruding on the fragile world he and his mum have together. Fragile, because, thanks to references to medication and chemo, we realise very quickly that Conor's mum is seriously ill. The monster returns that night, and tells Connor a fairy-tale in which nothing is as it seems at first. During his stay with his grandma in her pristine house, while his mum goes back into hospital, the monster appears again with a second slippery tale, which ends in the monster, with Conor's assistance, destroying a bad man's house, and when the vision of the monster fades, he has destroyed his grandma's sitting room. The last story comes at school, as Conor's feelings of isolation and invisibility peak and he, with the help of the monster behind him, violently confronts his playground tormentor. Finally, however, the last medicine his mum was to be tried on fails, and the monster appears demanding Conor's own story, his own, deeply buried truth: not just that his mum is dying, but his own, conflicted reactions to it and the far more terrible monster that his denial has formed in his nightmares.
Like The Amazing Maurice last week, A Monster Calls is deeply concerned with the importance of story. Unlike The Amazing Maurice, A Monster Calls also bears the burden, though it wears it as lightly as it can, that it may be functioning in children's lives in a similar way to the monster's stories in Conor's. Although the stories that the monster tells contain parallels to Conor's life, when, after the first story featuring a not-so-wicked stepmother, in whom Conor sees a link to his grandma, Conor angrily questions 'Is that supposed to be the lesson of all this? That I should be nice to her'1, he monster laughs at him and demands 'You think I tell you stories to teach you lessons?'2. It is a brilliant touch on Ness' part, and an important point to make, particularly for all those children reading the book who may be in a similar situation to Conor: this book is not an instruction manual on how to cope with grief. However, just because the monster's stories, and indeed A Monster Calls itself, are not in any way didactic, does not mean that nothing can be learned from them, and the basic, underlying message, as within all great stories, is that life is, by its very nature, complicated. In telling simple stories that highlight the difficulty and the complexity of life, what the monster does is make Conor, who is withdrawing and beginning to shut down emotionally, think more empathetically, to care and to feel again. In giving Conor a way to grasp the complexity, it allows him to question all the things he has assumed and internalised; his anger, his grief and his guilt.
Of course, there is the question of whether the monster is really there. There is, obviously, the interpretation that the monster is Conor's subconscious externalising the part of him that allows him to work though what is happening with his mum, although one wonders how a young child would know all of the references to furnish his subconscious with when the monster claims 'I have as many names as there are years to time itself! I am Herne the Hunter! I am Cernunnos! I am the eternal Green Man!'3. It is to Patrick Ness' credit that he walks a line perfectly between making it almost obvious that the monster is Conor's way of processing what is happening and injecting the text with just enough other-worldliness to suggest that just maybe, something ancient and powerful really is there to help Conor. However, his greatest achievement in A Monster Calls, is to ensure that we very quickly become uninterested in the monster's origins, and aware that they do not matter; what matters is Conor's path from denial to acceptance. A book so directly about powerful, primal emotions could easily slip into sentimentality, and it is to Ness' credit that he keeps all of the character's emotions and interactions achingly raw and believable. Take, for instance, the moment where, having fought for most of the story, Conor and his grandma agree to make peace. It, like much of the book, is awkward and uncomfortable, and we are left in no doubt that there will be many more clashes in the future, but it is finally acknowledged that although they are 'not the most natural fit'4 'we are going to have to learn'5. Whether the monster is real or not is ultimately unimportant, because what overwhelms the book is the reality of Conor's emotions.
Copyright Jim Kay & Walker Books, 2011
The other element of the book that must be mentioned is Jim Kay's phenomenal artwork. Jim Kay won the Greenway Medal, the companion to the Carnegie Medal which is awarded for illustration, for A Monster Calls, the very first time that both awards have been won by the same book, and Kay's win is as richly deserved as Ness'. These are not simple illustrations, adding some nice, but unessential, emphasis to the text, and done away with in later editions. No, these are the soul of the book, establishing and maintaining the raw, gut-wrenching tone in a far more instant, visceral way than even the best writer can. Over half the pages have some detailing on them, and there are nearly fifteen double page drawings, where Jim Kay's magnificent work can take centre stage. I could not imagine the story without them, and I really wouldn't want to try.
Copyright Jim Kay & Walker Books, 2011
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