![\"chaoswalking\"](\"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/\/wp-content\/uploads\/2010\/04\/chaoswalking.jpg\")
<\/p>\nBy Max Dunbar.<\/p>\n
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Monsters of Men (Chaos Walking: Book Three)<\/em><\/a>, Patrick Ness<\/a>, Walker 2010<\/p>\n ‘The first thing you find out when yer dog learns to talk is that dogs don’t got nothing much to say.’ A lot of people have commented on this \u00a0ingenious opening line of The Knife of Never Letting Go, <\/em>the beginning of a three-book adventure that ends next month when Monsters and Men <\/em>is published. I finished the novel today with tears in my eyes. I’m not even embarrassed. The book is that good.<\/p>\n Chaos Walking begins with Todd Hewitt walking a dog that he doesn’t want. He lives in a small town on a planet recently colonised by space-travelling humans. Go back and read from the beginning, if you haven’t done so. \u00a0There’s something in the planet’s atmosphere that makes thoughts visible. Walking back into town, Todd is engulfed by the maelstrom of Noise: dreams, memories, fantasies, plans, the whisper and babble of id and subconscious all around him in a great formless mess. The typography of it splatters across the page.<\/p>\n The Noise concept brings an added element of drama to a story that already hums with tension. Soon Todd’s on the run from an army led by the Mayor of his home town. Somehow he has to outpace an enemy that can not only track him but also hear his thoughts. He’s headed for a town called Haven where there’s rumoured to be a cure for Noise. Book one ends with the exhausted and battle-hardened narrator staggering into town, a dying girl in his arms, only to find that Mayor Prentiss has got there first and enslaved \u00a0the city. \u00a0He rations the Noise cure, believing that privacy is a privilege to be earned. In Monsters of Men, <\/em>the Noise goes from a fun and inventive plot device to a way of exploring in detail how people communicate and process information.<\/p>\n It’s \u00a0said \u00a0that \u00a0a writer has to have a splinter of ice in his heart, and children’s writers \u00a0are crueller than most. \u00a0The Knife of Never Letting Go<\/em> is grim to the point of reckless. Good people go to the wall, \u00a0every break comes at a price, \u00a0and the novel ends with evil triumphant. Ness knows how to break your heart. In New Prentisstown Todd is put to work alongside his nemesis Davy Prentiss, the Mayor’s son and a spoilt, loudmouthed bully. As Todd’s reputation rises in the view of the Mayor, we come to realise that Davy’s arrogance is just a defence, that all he wants is his father’s love and validation. It doesn’t happen. Instead the Mayor kills him with a casual blast of his shotgun. Having learned to turn off his Noise, Mayor Prentiss is a truly unknowable villain whose malevolence is a mystery until the very final chapters.<\/p>\n By the opening of Monsters and Men, \u00a0<\/em>Haven is at war with the Spackle, an indigenous species that has no spoken language and has been exploited by the human conquerors. \u00a0The Noise is a disturbing \u00a0cacophony even in small, quiet communities: on a battlefield it is like opening a door into hell. \u00a0Book three is full of explosions, blood and death. There is an additional separatist group of renegade doctors that fights the Mayor’s dictatorship. But its leaders are happy to sacrifice innocents for the sake of the cause. Ness is a tough-minded \u00a0author who doesn’t give his readers comforting choices.<\/p>\n The novels would seem sledgehammer-bleak if not for the narrative drive and \u00a0uncompromising \u00a0humanity that underpins every word in every line. Chaos Walking is too good \u00a0for the Young Adult strapline. \u00a0Like Philip Pullman, Robert Cormier and Paul Zindel, Ness has written the best kind of children’s book – the kind that teaches you how to grow up.<\/p>\n![\"max-photo-41\"](\"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/\/wp-content\/uploads\/2009\/04\/max-photo-41-150x150.jpg\")
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