Rating: 4/5
**October 2020 review**
So dreams can come true! (I started rereading the Chaos Walking Trilogy.)
Noise is a man unfiltered, and without a filter, a man is just chaos walking.
The Knife of Never Letting Go, The Ask and the Answer and
Monsters of Men have been my three favourite books since I first read them a couple of years ago. I was desperately excited when I started
The Knife of Never Letting Go again, and though I can’t say I’ve been let down, I think that it was probably originally aimed at an audience younger than me. I’m still itching to move onto the next two though, as I do remember those to be better than the first.
Ten years before our thirteen-year-old protagonist Todd Hewitt was born, a group of people from Earth were sent out on a reconnaissance mission to another planet, in an attempt to start a new way of life far from the desperation and (metaphorical!) darkness that has clouded the Earth. One character, a woman named Hildy, describes “Old World”—Earth—as “mucky, violent, and crowded … a-splitting right into bits with people a-hating each other and a-killing each other, no one happy till everyone’s miserable.”
The reconnaissance party arrived at a planet they deemed appropriate, which they creatively named New World. They reported back to the Old World, informing them that this planet seemed safe and suitable for the circumstances. But then, eager to live the simplest lives on New World, the settlers destroyed the generators that were relaying their messages, thus cutting off any future communication with the Old World.
Soon after they did this, the settlers discovered that they were not alone on New World after all: a species of alien, which they named the Spackle, had hidden so well on their first reconnaissance mission that they hadn’t noticed them at all, and, inevitably, hadn’t told Old World of their presence. Having heard nothing from the New World settlers in many months—due to their having destroyed the communication generators—the Old World decided to send out another mission. It would take many decades for the spaceship to eventually reach the New World. During the voyage, a girl called Viola Eade is born on the ship.
It turned out that the Spackle (the native inhabitants of New World) had been living on the planet alongside a disease that infected all animals and males, making it so that their every thought can be heard loud and clear all the time in a constant barrage of information overload—what became known as “the Noise”. The colonists from Old World believed that the Spackle had caused this germ, and so began a long war between the native alien inhabitants and the new settlers, which resulted in the deaths of many of the Spackle. Todd himself describes the Noise as “the germ that spelled the end for all Spackle once men’s madness picked up a gun.”
Todd has been told by the inhabitants of Prentisstown—the New World settlement in which Todd lives—that the Noise germ killed all the women on the planet. So naturally, when he discovers a “silent” girl (women were always immune to the Noise) in the swamp one day, Todd realises that much of what he has been told was just a constant fuelling of lies to keep his innocent mind protected from the dark truth: it wasn’t the Noise germ that killed the women after all.
Noise ain’t truth, Noise is what men want to be true, and there’s a different twixt those two things so big that it could ruddy well kill you if you don’t watch out.
The girl in the swamp was Viola Eade, whose scout ship crashed, tragically killing her parents and leaving her alone on a planet confusingly infected with Noise. She and Todd explore the thin line separating truth from lies and sanity from madness as they run from the army that are ruthlessly following them and leaving destruction and death in their wake.
A brilliant concept with some interesting themes of hope, manipulation, lies and trust and the individual against society. At times it could have been written better, but I’m still looking forward to reading the second in the trilogy,
The Ask and the Answer.
*September 2019 review*
This book is, in short, really really bizarre. Which isn’t a bad thing. But it has lots of confusing plots from different time periods that all intermix into a great big blob of confusing oddness. It’s supposedly written by a twelve-year-old boy called Todd who can’t spell, which explains the strange opening line:
“The first thing yer find out when yer dog learns to talk is that dogs don’t got nothing much to say.”
I will try to explain what I think is the main storyline.
In Todd Hewitt’s (strange) world, there are no women. At first, Todd believes what he is told: that when they invaded the native Spackle aliens (a few years before he was born) to conquer the new world, the germ that the Spackle fought with killed all the women and nearly all the men, leaving them with the unwanted side effect of being able to hear every human’s and animal’s thoughts (known as their “Noise”).
One day, in the marshes away from his town, rebellious young Todd and his dog Manchee hear something that has never been heard before: a gap of silence in the Noise. On telling his guardians, Ben and Cillian, he is suddenly rushed out of the town by them, in as secret a way as possible. His bag has been packed and hidden under floorboards, dusty from years of sitting there, and Ben and Cillian keep talking like this has been planned since he was born. They’re whispering, and trying to cover it all up with their Noise, so no one else in the town will hear them. But they’re too late. As Todd confusedly rushes out the back of the house, he hears gunshots and knows that the chase is on.
Follow Todd through his exciting, scary and tragic journey as he runs from the men who want to kill him.