#manchee!

The Knife of Never Letting Go, by Patrick Ness, I think will remain one of my all-time favourite books (subsequently, the series it belongs to, the Chaos Walking Trilogy, is just as treasured).  Further reading Patrick Ness’ other works has put him as one of my favourite authors (I was not ready for More Than This, omg). He was also (co?) author of the book A Monster Calls, which was released as a film in 2016, which I haven’t yet got round to seeing unfortunately.

In simplest terms The Knife of Never Letting Go is about Todd Hewitt, his dog, and a girl he finds. They must cross New World (yep, this is set on an alien planet) to get to safety from the army of Prentisstown men following them. It would be described as a young adult, dystopian novel, but before you groan about “not another one” there are a few elements that make this world alien that are characterised beautifully in the writing style. 

If you ever wanted describe a writing style as a “stream of consciousness”, this is the book that I’d point you to, because I absolutely love the way Ness writes (it ruined me for writing fiction, because I can’t pull it off). It’s first person POV, but the writing literally feels like thoughts, and it’s so fast and well-paced. This lends itself to describe Ness’ invention of the “Noise” in every moment of the book. The Noise, representative of information overload, means that the thoughts of every man and animal on New World is broadcast for everyone to hear. It’s weird, just go with it. (Curious to see how it’s translated to film - where I think a comic-book format would lend itself very well to it). 

Tom Holland was cast to play Todd Hewitt and Daisy Ridley is co-starring, and while she looks like a really fake blonde, I still have tentative hopes for the film. I’m also very excited because the second and third books of Chaos Walking are where Ness really hits his stride, and the mentor/captor (uh, yeah, it gets real complex) relationship between Todd and Mayor Prentiss is, like, holy grail stuff. And they’ve cast Mads Mikkelsen for the role of Mayor, and please read the books to find out what potential that has for the big screen because I have watched two episodes of Hannibal, and that is exactly what I need for Chaos Walking (not the cannibalism, the uh, the charisma and the creepiness). 

I did not realise I would go on that long. Look. I haven’t even reread the book (I think if I do I may see a lot of flaws with it), but I don’t care. I love it. Highly recommend, even listening to it, because Nick Podehl, who narrates it, is brilliant. 

I tried to capture some of Holland’s likeness in my picture, and, I’m not sure if I did? I like Manchee though, that’s my first serious attempt at a dog - you do not want to see the creatures I created back when I was first obsessed with this series in 2013? 2014?