Knife of Never Letting Go by Patrick Ness

 

 “Without a filter, a man is just chaos walking.” 

Title: Knife of Never Letting Go

Author: Patrick Ness

Publication Date: 2008

ISBN #: 0763645761

Number of Pages: 496 

Trend: Science Fiction, Dystopian 

Publisher: Candlewick Press

Ness, P. (2012).Knife of Never Letting Go. Massachusetts: Candlewick Press. 

Summary:

Set in the future, the book follows Todd, who is in the second generation of settlers on a new planet. He lives in a settlement called Prentistown, of only men because, for all he knows, the native life forms who live there, the creatures called Spackles, launched a war on the settlers and used chemical warfare that killed all the women and half the men, leaving a daunting side effect: all the males on the planet can hear each others thoughts. This means Todd is almost never alone in his thoughts. One day, he and his dog (all male life forms hear other male life form’s thoughts, so Manchee, his dog, and Todd are able to communicate) come across a silence, an eerie break in the constant noise inside his head. Scared that it might mean a Spackle survived the war he runs back to his house and tells his adoptive parents. They become terrified but are obviously hiding something. They tell Todd he must leave immediately, and as they are getting Todd ready to leave they begin to hear a mob of the townsmen outside their house. Todd rushes out the back with a backpack that contains a map of how to get out of the swamp, his mother’s old diary and a knife from Ben. Todd is chased by a man named Aaron, the town preacher who has been harassing Todd lately, even getting violent with him. Todd runs threw the swamp with Aaron chasing him and sees Aaron getting attacked by crocodiles. Todd believed Aaron to be dead.

When Todd and Manchee come across the same place where they “heard” the silence they find a girl. She is frightened of them, and she is confused since she can hear Todd’s thoughts, but Todd cannot hear hers. She takes him to the crashed scout ship where the bodies of her two dead parents lay. Todd takes her with him. 

 After traveling for about a day, they are found by another woman, and are taken to another settlement where there are both men and women living and thriving. Todd is very confused, for his whole life he was told that he could not leave the swamp because it was not safe, that woman could not live on the planet because of the “noise-germ,” and that the Spackles were the cause of all of it. He was astonished and appalled that he had been lied to his whole life.  The girl, Viola, wants to contact the rest of her space crew, so they want to head for the most technologically advanced settlement on the New World, Haven. Before they can leave though, the men from Prentistown attack the settlement and burn it down, killing everyone who will not join them. Todd, Manchee, and Viola escape. They run and come across a Spackle, after hearing horrible stories about them his whole life, Todd attacks and kills it, but is deeply effected by the fear the Spackle seems to extrude while it is being killed.

Soon Aaron catches up to them and attacks Todd, stabbing him in the shoulder, and kidnaps Viola. Todd chases after them, and is able to save Viola but Manchee dies in the process. Distraught and in shock, Todd and Viola begins walking toward Haven again when Todd hears a song that his adoptive father Ben always sang in their house. At first he thinks he is imagining it, but he hears it louder and realizes it has to be Ben. He runs and finds Ben, who has followed after Todd when Cillian was killed back in Prentistown. Ben reveals to Todd that there was no “noise-germ” and that the ability to hear the thoughts of males was a natural impact of the planet, and furthermore there was no war with the Spackle. The men of Prentistown went mad from all the noise and resented and even blamed woman for it, so they killed all the women in town and any of the men who stood in their way. Todd’s mother gave Todd to Ben and Cillian and asked them to keep Todd safe. The men from Prentistown have since been forever exiled from all other colonies on the New World for their horrendous acts. Prentistown, furthermore, instituted an initiation ritual for boys on their 14^th birthday, that they must kill a man before they can then consider themselves men. Aaron and more of the men from Prentistown catch up to them, and Ben tries to distract them while Todd and Viola escape. Aaron chases them into a cathedral built into a cavern behind a waterfall, where Viola finally kills Aaron so that Todd will never be initiated into Prentistown by spilling the blood of another man. Ben is presumed dead.

They continue on to New Haven to only realizes that it has already been taken over my the men of Prentistown. The book ends with Viola being shot in the stomach in the process of getting to Haven.

The main elements of Science Fiction that this novel processed is the environment on an alien world, native life forms other than humans, biological alteration (although natural), and future technology (Viola’s scout ship, and he trying to contact the main ship before it lands).

Ness writes in a unique and suspenseful way. He leaves you gripping the pages of the book in panic for the character's lives more than just a couple of times. I have read other works by him and the same reads true. The unique thing about this book is the input of information that Todd receives from the other men on the planet, and how he can never be truely at peace because of the risk it poses for others to read his thoughts.

Curricular connections: This book would work well when dealing with discussions on human nature, and what it means to be human (man).  I have used this book before in connection to a program in the library. I have booktalked it to some teens who come in after school for what our library calls "Study with friends." I believe the response was positive, but it is always hard to tell with teenagers. 

Review Sources:

Michael Cart of Booklist gives this book a very positve review stating that, "Ness is a great believer in the possibility of redemption" and "[Ness's] trilogy is also concerned with the fundamental dialectic between good and evil...One can, of course, only hope that one makes the right choice, yet sometimes one doesn't: Todd and Viola both make wrong choices that have serious consequences. But both learn from them and continue to hope...Just like Ness' magnificent trilogy!" 

Sue Cirbert of Publisher's weekly also had great things to say regarding Ness's first book and the entire trilogy. Many people who now consider themselves evangelists for Patrick Ness's Chaos Walking trilogy initially resisted the first book, The Knife of Never Letting Go, which is narrated by the illiterate but lovable Todd Hewitt, the last boy in a frontier town on a colonized planet, and features a talking dog. Grammar is incorrect, spellings are phonetic, and there are intermittent passages of scrawled gibberish in various typefaces meant to convey the town's "Noise." A virus on Todd's planet has made everyone's thoughts (including the animals') audible to everyone else--except the women. They are all dead.

Ness, an American living in London, had published an adult novel and a short story collection when his agent, Michelle Kass, approached Denise Johnstone-Burt, publisher of Walker Books, in 2007 with the beginning of what would become Knife.

"I read just the first 40 pages or so, up the point where [Todd] says, 'It's a girl,' and I just thought it was brilliant. It was a unique voice, and so imaginative," Johnstone-Burt recalls. "I rang up the agent, but there was no more to read. That was all he had written at the time. I bought the trilogy on the strength of that." 

Personal response: One of my favorite young adult books. This book ripped my heart out of my chest and stuffed in back in again about four or five times throughout the story. This was one of the most mature teen books that I have ever read. The themes are very deep, I think that any adult would get intellectual satisfaction from reading this book as would any teen.