One of the many reasons I love independent bookstores is personalised recommendations from staff members who know my reading tastes. Johanna at Gallery Bookshop suggested I might like the Chaos Walking series, and I was so confident in her recommendation that I picked up all three books. ‘Because,’ as I explained, ‘I hate it when you finish the first book in a series and want to read more and the bookstore is closed.’
Chaos Walking is a dystopian series set in a world where human colonists have settled on a distant planet with a strange quirk. A virus causes animals, and male humans, to broadcast their thoughts. Known as Noise, these thoughts are expressed in speech and images, making it very difficult to hide anything in the recesses of your mind, because your mind is an open book for anyone who cares to read it.
Or who doesn’t care to read it. Human populations struggle with Noise because it becomes overwhelming in crowded environments where the internal voices of men are constantly broadcasting. People can’t turn their noise off, can’t prevent themselves from responding to the situations around them, and create a constant roar in cities and public spaces.
We’re introduced to our hero, Todd, in the small settlement where he lives before his world starts to collapse in on him and he learns that everything he thought was true was a lie. Noise, while a broadcasting medium, can also be used to hide things, and the truth of his environment is very, very different than what he’s been sold. He sets off on a series of adventures, and because I don’t want to spoil readers, I don’t want to provide too many details about the specifics of the plot beyond that.
One aspect of Chaos Walking is about growing up, and what it means specifically to grow from a boy into a man. Todd’s journey as he learns about the world around him is also a journey where he learns about himself, finding out who he is and what kind of man he wants to be. He’s influenced by the people he meets along his travels and the people he travels with, but ultimately, it comes down to Todd. He’s faced with difficult decisions in situations where all decisions could turn out badly and has to live with the consequences of his choices over and over again.
It’s also a series about atrocity and how easy it is to cross lines, often without even being aware of the crossing. Todd participates in some ugly things, both directly as a perpetrator and indirectly as a bystander and one who does nothing. He struggles with these things ethically, wonders whether he’s really worthy of the love of the people around them, even as he’s committing these acts to survive. In a harsh world sometimes people end up doing unspeakable things and those things become very complicated because it’s hard to condemn people for trying, very hard, to avoid dying.
Todd’s counterpart is Viola, a girl from a group of new colonists preparing to settle on the planet. She has to adjust to a world that is very, very alien and make her own way as she navigates her relationship with Todd and the people of the planet. Trained to be a settler since birth, she’s familiar with all the mechanics of creating a new place to live, but she has a harder time with navigating the human drama, and strain, of living in a harsh environment. She’s never been faced with the kinds of choices the people in her new world make and while she wants to hate them for doing hateful things, those things aren’t always simple and she knows this. She also learns it as she is faced with equally difficult choices through the progression of the series.
Chaos Walking probes at ideas of colonisation and first contact and settlement. It also explores race and subjugation and slavery and resistance to oppression. The third book is where things really start to shine, as a new viewpoint is integrated into the storyline. As the story unfolds, you start to see how hatred and the desire for revenge and in some cases the need to dominate are warping and twisting the characters, forcing them to make horrible decisions because they don’t understand how far they may have strayed from their original goals.
There are a lot of very unpleasant and sometimes despicable characters in Chaos Walking, as well as characters who are extremely charismatic and clever when it comes to manipulating the people around them. These are often the same characters. They know how to control people, how to get what they want, how to make themselves look like they are the ones in the right. As a reader, I found myself wanting to take some of the young, naive characters by the hand and guide them out of the forest of confusion they found themselves in, but they seemed to do all right without my help.
Chaos Walking isn’t a moralising series where readers are beaten over the head repeatedly with insightful points. It’s a story about growing up and danger and a frightening world and lies, and it’s a story about how people navigate that and decide what kind of people they want to be. Readers are invited to ask themselves how they would handle the situations the characters encounter, and the outcomes of those decisions are a reminder that it’s hard to make good choices, especially under emotional stress or in situations where time is of the essence and there’s no time to wait for sound, thoughtful judgement.
I’m loving where Ness took dystopian themes in this series, and it makes for a very juicy read.
