When much is taken, something is returned...
Mau is not a man. Not yet. But his manhood test is almost over, and soon he'll return home.
But on his way home he is caught up in a tsunami, and when he reaches his island Nation he finds that his people have been washed away. He is alone...apart from the ghost girl, and, after a while, the refugees. And over the horizon, the war canoes of the cannibal Raiders are drawing ever closer...
Nation is a very hard book to categorise. It's a coming of age story, it's a survival story, it's a horror and a comedy and a drama. All of these things are true. But it's also a beautiful way of looking at a world so very close to our own. Mau and Daphne, the point of view characters, must learn to change the way they think to deal with their circumstances. And you will find your thinking changing along with theirs. If this book doesn't stay with you after you've read it, I'll be very surprised.
It's also a remarkably hard book to describe, because anyone hearing 'Well, it starts with a tsunami that kills everyone...' immediately puts it back down again. But this is not a book about death; it's about life, and belief, and about how your world can start again even after everything that gave it shape is gone.
"There was a boy called Mau. I see him in my memory, so proud of himself because he was going to be a man. He cried for his family and turned the tears into rage. And if he could, he would say 'Did not happen!' and the wave would roll backwards, and never have been. But there is another boy, and he is called Mau too, and his head is on fire with new things. What does he say? He was born in the wave, and he knows that the world is round, and he met a ghost girl who is sorry she shot at him. He called himself the little blue hermit crab, scuttling across the sand in search of a new shell, but now he looks at the sky and knows that no shell will ever be big enough, ever. Would you ask him not to be? Any answer will be the wrong one. All I can be is who I am. But sometimes I hear the boy inside cry for his family."
"Does he cry now?"
"Every day. But very softly. You won't hear him..."
No comments:
Post a Comment