Monster fears and death

It’s arresting and tender, but what really sets apart Patrick Ness’ A Monster Calls as a young adult novel is that it occupies one of those unhappy spaces that our hearts lurch through on the journey to adulthood. Conor O’Malley, the 13-year-old protagonist, is in just such a forlorn place: His mother is dying of cancer, his school, the only other world he knows outside of home, is engulfing him with kind authority (which he’d rather do without), and his father left years ago and now lives in America with his new wife and their baby. Outwardly resilient, Conor gets through each day with his share of household chores (so that his weakening mother is saved doing them) as well as insults and blows from the school star pupil-cum-bully. He has built a wall between himself and his only friend, Lily, unable to forgive her for telling a few friends about his mother’s illness, who then told a few friends... until the entire school knew. But the big-hearted Lily refuses to be beaten back by his sullen behaviour. Coming to his aid during another episode of bullying, she gets punished by a teacher because Conor lies about the incident. Lily is hurt but doesn’t give up, making yet another overture of friendship which helps soothe the ravaged Conor. But Conor adds to his own anguish by keeping a secret fear deep inside, never letting it out to anyone. It’s a horrific thing, gnawing at his innards incessantly, but he cannot and will not, ever, tell anyone. In his waking hours, he goes along with his mother’s statements that she will recover, even believing her. Yet, even at 13, wisdom, sadly, is dormant in the germ of our being. In sleep, wisdom rears itself from deep within Conor and he knows his mother will die. Every night he is tormented by a recurrent nightmare in which his mother is hanging over a cliff, her hands in his. Though he is desperately trying to hold on to her, her hands slip and she is gone. Just as, in the cold hard light of day, his subconscious senses she will go. On the cusp of adulthood, poised to step forward, we still retain a foot in the past, in childhood. And often, in times of deep crisis, it is comforting to step back into childhood, into a time when life was simpler and involved dealing with the known. Patrick Ness takes this aspect of early teenage and turns it into one of the novel’s fantastical yet engaging threads. Conor takes recourse in a monster. A huge, ugly monster born of the old yew tree on the hill behind his house. Its “compost-smelling breath” and “raggedy teeth made of hard, knotted wood” are delightful touches amid Conor’s pain that floods the writing. Yet, the monster is a friendly one — a sage from ages past, who bores, chides and teaches the boy, as a good monster must. Feeling burdened by a school assignment to write “life-stories” from an English teacher who tells the class, “Don’t think you haven’t lived long enough to have a story to tell,” Conor learns from the monster that “stories chase and bite and hunt” — which is also a kindly aside from Ness to his young readers. The monster tells him stories, and, slowly, Conor learns some noble and simple truths — “sometimes people need to lie to themselves most of all” and that there is not always a good or bad guy because “most people are somewhere in between” and, most uncomfortable of all, “many things that are true feel like a cheat.” As we go along with Conor on his journey, the monster’s nightly visitations (it comes at 12.07 am sharp) seem to strengthen him, to the extent that he even tells his mother she can let him know if the doctors have exhausted all options to rein in the cancer. To his relief — though we are left shaking our head — she seems to genuinely believe that all is not lost yet. Though the novel’s voice is Conor’s, it is heartbreaking for the reader to see that his grandmother is right in blaming Conor’s mother for letting him harbour a false belief that she will recover. Her death stares the reader in the face. When, finally, it does Conor too, he feels a “feverish blur of the world slipping off its axis” as he gives vent to the anguish within and tears like a tornado into his grandmother’s well-kept living room with its heirloom clock. Ness’ novel is so powerful because it engages with that one nightmare that is present in every childhood. Early in life we become aware of the most inevitable and overpowering loss that we are doomed to face — the death of a beloved parent. Conor finally admits to wanting the worst to happen quickly so that his ordeal ends, and is consumed by guilt. The monster’s parables, rich in wisdom and insight, help to shore him up and, in a cathartic ending, the tales of the prince who was both murderer and saviour, the apothecary who was evil-tempered but right-thinking and the parson who was wrong-thinking but good-hearted coalesce into that other universal truth that we must learn as we pass into adulthood — that “humans are complicated beasts.” All stories don’t have happy endings, Conor’s father tells him, and Ness’ tale draws to its inevitable conclusion. Yet, for all its poignancy, the book closes with a sense of relief at Conor’s coming of age. “How do you fight all the different stuff inside ” he asks, but it is hardly a piteous query. “By speaking the truth,” the monster responds warmly to the courageous boy. And to us.

Yana Banerjee-Bey writes for children and her work has been published in Cricket, the American literary magazine for children