Archives for February 2006

Jeanne DuPrau

Corgi

0552552399

Feb 2006

The sequel to The City of Ember, which I haven’t read, this book does a fair job of standing by itself as a single story.
We’re in post-apocalypse mode here. Sometime in the distant future four hundred inhabitants of an underground city have managed to find their way to a surface that they didn’t even know existed. Their city, Ember, is ‘dying’ thanks to lack of power for the lights and shortages of various essentials, but here in the great outdoors they are as infants without knowledge of stars or seasons or weather. Luckily for them they happen upon one of the very few post-disaster villages, Sparks, a place where years of hardship and toil have finally resulted in quite a thriving and self-sufficient little community. Needless to say, the people of Sparks are a little nonplussed to have a population greater than their own suddenly descend upon them. Nevertheless they agree that aid must be given, and as a short-term measure they house the newcomers in the decrepit old Pioneer Hotel, offering to feed them and teach them survival skills in exchange for hard work: strictly a six-month arrangement.
Yet in time the strain of having these two groups living side by side, draining the resources of a single village, begins to cause friction: friction which is exploited and egged on by individuals on either side in whom the alienating concept of ‘us’ and ‘them’ runs deepest. Thus Sparks teeters towards its own mini apocalypse, a war that may destroy this village just as completely as the larger version did with the great cities of the past.
Who, we wonder, in this atmosphere of distrust and anger, can lead the way to a different more loving path?
Jeanne DuPrau writes very naturally and without visible effort. She depicts a highly believable, warts-and-all series of characters thrown together by circumstances and it is to her credit that the reader is not drawn to favour either ‘side’. She keeps her post-apocalyptic vision simple and convincing (the story might almost have been set in the pioneering days of the American west) and although such scenarios have been explored many times, we do care about this world she’s made, and the characters that must struggle through it.
Despite a little heavy-handedness in some of the moral content, the anti-war message of The People of Sparks is more valid now than ever before. All you leaders out there intent on demonising fellow human beings for your own paranoid reasons, do please have a read.

Brian Keaney

Orchard Books

1843627213

Feb 06

A teenage boy wakes up in a strange field and remembers nothing other than his name. Not where he came from, nor his parents’ faces: not even the words home or parents. In a little while a man comes to collect him and takes him by boat across a wide river to a grey settlement called Locus. Here he is allocated a uniform and a bed in a dormitory: one of hundreds of dormitories full of teenage boys and girls, all of whom have woken up in the field and come to make their lives in Locus. The days are spent picking rocks off the ground where new dormitories are to be built, the nights are for playing the ‘memory game’, when inmates share any little tiny snatches that return to them from the lives they lived before. Such nuggets are priceless, spiritual food to the inmates.
Imagine something with a sixties feel: Holes done in the style of The Prisoner. Imagine it written with an appealing Magnus Mills sort of simplicity, the strong emotions delivered with a muted touch. This is how Jacob’s Ladder begins, and like Jacob himself we cannot avoid the conclusion that there is something afoot, a conspiracy perhaps, to explain why all these teenagers are being kept in this soulless place, fed never-changing tasteless food, robbed of memory and purpose and the will to rebel. Like Jacob we are determined that we would not be such pushover victims to the routine of Locus. Without any guards openly in attendance, why stay? Why do the daily work?
Yet as Jacob desperately fans his own small spark of rebellion ‘ and finds one or two others in whom it still lives ‘ he starts to discover that the bonds of Locus are much deeper and more permanent than he could have realised. And when he does eventually break free with two friends, they embark on a spiritual journey, a series of weird meetings and endless walking that has something of The Little Prince or Richard Bach about it.
What Jacob finds out, and whether his bid for freedom and a return to ‘before’ is successful should not be revealed here. I read this one in a day, however, and if you’re looking for a book to make huge questions and unknowns accessible to 10-14-year-olds in a compelling story, then this is for you.
My only slight doubt was to do with the importance given in the book to holding on’ to the past, to people, to situations. Much of the damage done in our world comes from too much ‘holding on’. Letting go is something that our children could learn more of from us.