The Ask and the Answer

The first Chaos Walking book ends with Todd Hewitt carrying a wounded Viola Eade into Haven, the city that was supposed to be safe. The second book opens seconds later, and the safety is already gone. Mayor Prentiss and his army have taken Haven without much of a fight. Todd has been tortured into saying Viola's name. Viola is alive but a prisoner in a healing house. The book that follows is about what people do after the rescue fails, and it is much harder to read than The Knife of Never Letting Go because there is no clear place to stand.

Patrick Ness published The Ask and the Answer in 2009. Walker Books brought out the UK edition in May, and Candlewick Press published the American edition in September. The Candlewick hardcover runs 519 pages and carries the ISBN 9780763644901. It is the second volume of the Chaos Walking trilogy, between The Knife of Never Letting Go and Monsters of Men. The novel won the Costa Children's Book Award and was shortlisted for the Carnegie Medal. It is a middle book, and it has the faults of a middle book: it spends a lot of time moving pieces into position and ends on a cliffhanger. It also has a seriousness that is rare in young adult fiction, and it does not let either of its young protagonists off the hook.

The arrival that is not a rescue

Todd and Viola arrive in Haven expecting to find the cure for the Noise, the germ that makes men's thoughts audible. Instead they find Prentiss already in control. He has renamed the city New Prentisstown and calls himself President. He separates the men and women, confines the women to dormitories, confiscates the cure for his loyalists, and puts the town's domesticated Spackle to forced labour. Haven's former mayor, Con Ledger, is imprisoned in the clock tower with Todd. Ledger explains that Haven had discovered a cure, but Prentiss seized it. The cure becomes the book's central political object: whoever controls it controls who can hear whom, and who can be controlled.

Prentiss is not a simple brute. He is patient, charming when it suits him, and expert at making people complicit. He stages public appearances. He lets Ledger seem to go free. He promises order while dividing families. He tells Todd that he is protecting Viola, and for a long time Todd believes him, because the alternative is to admit that he has no power to protect her at all.

Viola wakes in a House of Healing run by Mistress Coyle and her apprentices, including Maddy Poole and Corinne Wyatt. She is alive, but she is also a hostage. Coyle is a healer with a political past, and she is not a saint. She presses Viola for information about the settler ships and the second wave approaching the planet. When Prentiss begins arresting and torturing women, Coyle and most of the healers leave the city and revive the Answer, a resistance movement from the Spackle War. Before she goes, she tries to recruit Viola. Viola refuses, at first.

Todd in the clock tower

Todd's story in the first half is a study in collaboration. Prentiss assigns him to work under Davy Prentiss, the mayor's cruel and attention-starved son. Their task is to tag the Spackle with numbered metal bands. Todd co-operates because he believes it keeps Viola alive. He tries to make the work less brutal, but Davy kills a Spackle during the banding, and Davy's cruelty later provokes a Spackle attack that injures both boys. Todd saves a Spackle labelled 1017 during an Answer bombing. The Spackle is not grateful. That detail matters. The book refuses the idea that kindness earns forgiveness, or that a single act of mercy cancels a system.

Prentiss uses the bombing to create the Ask, a counter-insurgency and interrogation unit, and promotes Todd and Davy into it. Todd's moral descent is now institutional. He is not just following a bad leader. He is wearing the uniform. The Ask tortures women and tags them like livestock. Todd survives by numbing himself, which is exactly what Prentiss wants. The chant Prentiss teaches him, "I am the Circle and the Circle is me," quietens his Noise and gives him a measure of control. It also gives Prentiss a way into his head.

The best scenes in this section are the quiet ones between Todd and Davy. Davy is a bully, but he is also a boy who has never been loved. He returns the diary stolen from Todd's mother. He wants Todd to be his friend. Todd, who has spent his life being told he is dangerous, recognizes something in him. The bond is not redemption. It is a warning about how ordinary the path into violence can look.

Viola and the education of a terrorist

Viola's story is the mirror image. She tries to reach the communications tower to warn her people about the second wave. A soldier shoots Maddy dead. Prentiss apologizes and uses the death to court Viola's loyalty. Coyle returns to recruit her, and Viola joins the Answer. She is trained to assemble bombs. She sets off bombs during the campaign. At the Answer's camp, hidden in an old mine, she befriends Lee, whose mother and sister have been taken by the Ask, and Wilf, a refugee who helped her and Todd in the first book.

The camp is not a moral sanctuary. Coyle withholds information, runs raids, and treats Viola as a weapon. A later raid frees women from the Ask's prisons, revealing the scale of the torture. Lee's family is not among the rescued, and Corinne is fatally injured. Viola sees that the resistance can be as careless with individual lives as the regime it opposes. The novel does not say that the two sides are the same. Prentiss is worse. But it does say that being on the right side does not make you good.

The middle of the book is a competition for Todd's soul, and Viola's chapters are the counterweight. She is trying to build a self that can act without becoming what she hates. She is also a teenage girl in a war, and Ness lets her be frightened, petty, and brave in the same paragraph. Her narration is less distinctive than Todd's, which is one of the book's weaknesses. Both voices use the same short, fractured sentences, and the visual distinction between them is not always enough to make the reader forget that one author is writing both.

The Ask, the Answer, and the names

The title is a political joke with a knife in it. The Ask is the regime's interrogation unit. The Answer is the resistance. Each side describes itself as responding to the other. Prentiss says he is restoring order after the Answer's bombs. Coyle says she is fighting an occupation that tortures women. The names make the cycle sound natural, as if violence were a conversation rather than a choice.

Ness has said the second volume is about the control of information. That theme runs through everything. Prentiss frames the Answer as the killers of the Spackle. The Answer runs its own narratives. The cure suppresses Spackle speech. The Noise makes thoughts audible but does not make truth transparent. Characters constantly hear what others are thinking and still misunderstand them. Information is not the same as understanding, and the book is smart about the difference.

The Spackle are the novel's moral test. They are branded, enslaved, and massacred. The Answer's bombing campaign devastates their reserve. Todd finds the bodies, and the narrative initially leads him to believe the Answer is responsible. The framing is later undermined. The Spackle are not simply victims in the background. They have their own claims, and the ending makes clear that their patience has limits.

The bomb in the bag

Viola learns that the Answer is planning a major attack on New Prentisstown. She and Lee enter the city to rescue Todd, but Todd refuses to leave. He believes he is beyond saving and that Viola has chosen the other side. Their quarrel is interrupted by Con Ledger, who reveals that he has been Prentiss's spy all along. Searching Viola's bag, Ledger finds a self-arming bomb that Viola did not know was there. He tries to throw it clear. It explodes, killing him and injuring Todd, Viola, and Lee.

The bomb is the novel's cruellest irony. Viola realizes that Coyle may have planted it, sacrificing her to kill Prentiss. The resistance leader has been using her all along. Prentiss captures the survivors and interrogates Viola in the Office of the Ask, subjecting her to water torture while Todd watches through a soundproof window. Unable to endure it, Todd breaks and tells Prentiss where the Answer will attack. It is the central betrayal, and Todd knows it. He has finally become useful to Prentiss in the way Prentiss always wanted.

The scene is difficult to read, and Ness does not soften it. The torture is not a plot device that produces information and then goes away. It changes the people in the room. Todd's betrayal is not a momentary weakness. It is the logical result of weeks of small compromises, and it lands with the weight of something that cannot be undone.

The cathedral and the horn

With Prentiss's army leaving to meet the Answer, Todd makes his last attempt at repair. He persuades Ivan and a group of dissenting soldiers and guards to help him. They rescue Viola and Lee. Lee runs to warn the Answer, while Todd and his small group go to the cathedral to stop Prentiss. But Prentiss is stronger than they know. He has never taken the cure. He has trained his Noise through the chant until he can silence it and use it to control others. He disables Todd's group and takes Viola hostage.

Davy arrives with news that the Answer's army is coming and asks his father for orders. Then a second scout ship, like the one Viola crashed in, appears above the city. The climax is a battle of fathers, sons, and Noise. Todd holds Davy at gunpoint and demands Viola's release. Prentiss shoots his own son. Dying, Davy confesses that he accidentally shot Ben, Todd's guardian, and begs Todd's forgiveness. Todd cannot answer before Davy dies. Enraged, Todd uses his own Noise as a weapon, concentrating on Viola's name, and overwhelms Prentiss. He ties the President up in the cathedral.

For a moment it seems the adolescents have won. Viola rides out to meet the scout ship. Then a horn sounds. An army of Spackle is marching on New Prentisstown, seeking revenge for the genocide. Todd has no army and no way to defend the city. He releases Prentiss, the man who manipulated and tortured them both, because only Prentiss can organize a defence. Prentiss's last line, that war is what men are born for, turns the rescue into a fresh moral defeat.

The ending is deliberately unresolved. The second scout ship is the first sign of the approaching second wave of settlers. The Spackle army, the Answer's army, and Prentiss's regime are all converging on the same city. Todd saves Viola by making a deal with the villain, and the cost is both personal and political. The book hands the war to Monsters of Men and refuses to pretend that a single brave act has fixed anything.

What the middle book is doing

The Ask and the Answer is slower and more cerebral than its predecessor. It spends much of its length positioning Todd and Viola for the finale. Some readers will find the dual narration repetitive, and the pacing sags in the middle. The violence is unsparing to the point of exhaustion. Books for Keeps argued that there is too much torture and that the novel is over-long. Those criticisms are fair. They are also criticisms of a book that is trying to show how ordinary people become complicit in atrocities, and that subject does not lend itself to a fast plot.

What the novel gets right is the texture of occupation. The curfews, the checkpoints, the informers, the way a neighbour becomes a threat, the way a child learns to keep his head down. Todd's collaboration is not a sudden fall. It is a series of decisions that each seem necessary at the time. Viola's radicalization is the same. She does not become a bomber because she loves violence. She becomes one because the people she trusts tell her it is the only answer, and because she wants to matter.

The book also understands that political language is a weapon. Prentiss calls torture interrogation. Coyle calls bombings actions. The Ask and the Answer are both euphemisms. By the time the Spackle army arrives, the human characters have spent an entire novel arguing about which form of violence is justified, and the people they have both harmed have stopped waiting for permission.

Ness has said he wanted to show how a person can start out benevolent and end up doing something terrible. That is the book's real subject, and it is why the ending is not a triumph. Todd saves the girl and frees the villain. Viola survives and loses her cause. The Spackle are coming. Nobody has clean hands. The Ask and the Answer is a difficult, uneven, occasionally repetitive novel, but it is honest about the cost of occupation in a way that most young adult fiction is not.