How not to use your super-powers

Honestly I’m a bit of a snob about books. If it wins some important “grown-up” award then I judge it. I assume it must be pretentious. Like modern art, I often feel that those which get the most attention in newspapers and awards, are lazy and often following a pattern. I’m rarely surprised or engaged by these types of books. Captain Corelli’s Mandolin, for example, was tedious and felt like it was trying too hard. Admittedly my fondness for action and activity throwing a story forward may have something to do with it, but then again I am a man who enjoyed reading Pride and Prejudice!

“Young Adult” (YA) fiction often does several things that avoid this sort of pretentious storytelling. They are marketed to teens. That means adults already check their expectations when they read one, so they can enjoy it without looking for it to be worthy. It still can be, but no one is forcing it to so it can sell well.

This Christmas a friend of mine leant me the first book of three different series: Gone by Michael Grant, The Knife of Never Letting Go by Patrick Ness, and The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins. All of them are YA fiction, so I was immediately interested in what stories they might try to tell. A mild spoiler warning for anyone yet to read any of these three: I will talk a little about the plot of each book, but I will not ruin any big twists.

The best thing about YA fiction is that authors can design their world to tell their story. It can be as grounded or farfetched as the author wants or the story needs. From the “Municipal Darwinism” of the brilliant Mortal Engines, to the gloriously absurd James Bond/leprechaun mash up of Artemis Fowl, anything can happen.

In Gone, The Knife of Never Letting Go, and The Hunger Games that rule holds true. Anything can happen, but it serves a story, and for two out of three of them the authors do it brilliantly. Gone, I’m afraid, is not a great book. I don’t hate it, and it is fun, but it is about to suffer by being held next to two of my new favourite books.

Gone is an example of by-the-numbers YA fiction. The premise is that, suddenly, every person over the age of 15 vanishes from a town. The town, now populated only by the young, is surrounded by an impenetrable barrier. Characters start developing superpowers, there’s a nuclear reactor, a meteorite and a mysterious monster.

That is a setup that could work but it doesn’t feel original. The setting borrows liberally from a lot of sources, such as the X-Men, and the “something happens to everyone who’s not fourteen or younger” setup has been done nearly to death. Shade’s Children by Garth Nix contains a lot of these elements with a much more brutal and chilling execution, but essentially these entire stories boil down to Lord of the Flies, just there are superpowers this time.

None of that matters if the story is well told and the characters well drawn. Unfortunately, in Gone, they’re not. The biggest failing of the book is that there is no real character development, and no subverting of expectations. The story starts at the moment of vanishing adults, and immediately it’s clear who everyone is: the protagonist, the love interest, the second tier protagonist with whom friction will be an important part of the story. Every time you meet a character, their nature and purpose is really obvious and the characters don’t break free of their moulds to develop.

The social order is largely unchanged too. The bullies are still bullies, the popular kids are still popular and the nerdier crowd remains trampled underfoot. None of them switch things up. Sam, the protagonist is established in the first pages as a reluctant hero and leader because of what he did to save his classmates to prevent a bus crash. Everyone knows that already. There is nothing new to discover about him, even for the kids trapped with him.

In this story the opportunity for reversal should be offered by the super powers element. The downtrodden might be given a chance to turn the tables on those who bullied them for years if they could burn them with laser beams or throw bricks at them with telekinesis. They never do. The protagonist and antagonist get the strongest powers; their lieutenants get the next tier down and so on. This is within a social order that largely formed before many of these powers came to light. Just so we’re in no doubt, one character’s power is to rate the powers of others. We always and immediately get to know who is stronger than everyone else, and it feels arbitrary. There are a few exceptions, but even they seem to be “corrected” as the story continues.

One character, a computer whiz called Jack, does get a power that could turn things around for him, at least a little, but he never uses it. So the only result of his power is that he is bullied by someone else.

Characters behave according to their roles rather than an emotional/logical rationale. Sparing the life of a defeated enemy, for example, could have been used to say something about who they are: too noble to take a life, too scared to follow through, too hesitant to act or someone who is planning ahead. When it happens here, it does so for no reason. It’s just how “good guys” behave.

There are lots of reasons specific to this scenario that could have been given, explored or suggested, but at that moment the book completely stops talking about its character’s feelings and motivations and just goes into “setting up for a sequel” territory.

That is the biggest issue with YA fiction. Brevity can be valuable to a story’s momentum, keeping the pace brisk and the events concise. The school-essay obsession with “more words is the same as better,” a big problem for fantasy novels, is near impossible in YA fiction. However, YA stories that should have finished can be strung into long series of books. Many of my complaints about Gone may be the result of Michael Grant saving developments and revelations for the next book. If so, Gone suffered because he did.

Both The Hunger Games and The Knife of Never Letting Go are the first volumes of a trilogy, but you wouldn’t know that by reading the books until the very end. They feel complete, right up until the rug is pulled from under the reader and suddenly there is a lot more still to be told. They could have stood by themselves and they fully explore their themes and characters as the story progresses. Nothing is held back, they reach the end and realise there is more to be told. If you are writing a series, better to discover that your story needs to be continued, than to insist on sequels and so stretch everything out.

Suzanne Collins puts it brilliantly in an interview at the back of The Hunger Games: “…once I’d thought through to the end of the first book, I realised that there was no way that the story was concluded. Katniss [the protagonist] does something that would never go unpunished in her world. There would definitely be repercussions. And so the question of whether or not to continue with a series was answered for me.”

Having reached this point I’ve realised I have too much material, so I’m going to follow my own advice! Further discussion of The Knife of Never Letting Go and The Hunger Games will make up my next “Comment” post.