The Crane Wife: An Interview with Patrick Ness

Christopher Bryant talks to Patrick Ness about his new novel The Crane Wife and how there’s a danger that social media can silence all but the loudest voices.

Patrick Ness is the author of six novels, and one collection of short stories. His remarkable Young Adult series, the Chaos Walking trilogy, has won a litany of prizes. His latest novel, The Crane Wife, tells the story of what happens to George, a man adrift in his 40s, after he saves the life of a crane shot through the wing with an arrow. The following day a mysterious woman, Kumiko, enters his life and she changes it, as she changes the lives of his daughter Amanda, and his employee Mehmet. It is a book about how we communicate, as well as how we fail to communicate, and how art can articulate our dreams about what is possible. I talked to Patrick about the folk tale that inspired The Crane Wife, the plans to film the Chaos Walking trilogy, his opinions on the good and the bad of social media, and his upcoming Young Adult novel More Than This.

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Patrick Ness: a Page in the Life

Patrick Ness

Helen Brown talks to the award-winning children’s writer Patrick Ness about his exceptional new novel for adults, The Crane Wife.

The sound that wakes George Duncan is “a mournful shatter of frozen midnight falling to earth to pierce his heart and lodge there forever, never to move, never to melt”, but, being the kind of man he is, the hero of Patrick Ness’s new novel assumes it’s his bladder. In fact, it’s a dazzling white crane, brought down in George’s suburban garden by “some kind of terrifyingly proper arrow”. Stepping forward to help the bird, George finds himself in “one of those special corners of what’s real, one of those moments, only a handful of which he could recall throughout his lifetime, where the world dwindled down to almost no one, where it seemed to pause just for him so that he could, for a moment, be seized into life”. The next day a mysterious woman called Kumiko walks into George’s London print shop, and changes everything.

The Crane Wife is a special novel: a perfect fusion of surreal imagery and beautifully crafted internal logic. Turning it over in my hands once I’d finished, I began to think of it as the literary equivalent of a Japanese puzzle box with poetry, ideas and jokes twisting and sliding out of it at surprising angles.

“It’s based, of course, on the Japanese folk tale, which I first heard at kindergarten in Hawaii,” says Ness, leaning intently over a glass of pineapple juice (another Hawaiian hangover) in the café at Waterstones. Although he’s written for adults before, Ness is best known for his award-winning teen fiction. Now in his early forties, there’s still the intensity of adolescence in his speech, which punctuates passion with the odd, self-effacing: “Yeah, whaddever.”

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Double win with A Monster Calls

Patrick Ness

| By Ed Wood

A Monster Calls (Walker Books) written by Patrick Ness and illustrated by Jim Kay, has become the first book ever to win both the CILIP Carnegie and CILIP Kate Greenaway Medals.

Ness is also only the second author to win the award in consecutive years (the first being Peter Dickinson in 1979 and 1980), having won in 2011 for Monsters of Men.

Ness, whose book explores the feelings of grief and anger of a boy with a terminally ill mother, used his acceptance speech to condemn the prevailing view of today’s teenagers: “The worst thing our current government and, in fact, we as a culture do about teenagers is that we only seem to discuss them in negative terms. What they can’t do, what they aren’t achieving.  Why have we allowed that to happen?”

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The Red House book award shortlists are out – vote now

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The award that launched JK Rowling to fame and glory is back – and you can join in the voting for this year’s winner.

By Charlotte Jones

The Red House children’s book award – the only one chosen and voted for entirely by children – has announced the shortlists for this year’s award. It includes some of the biggest names in children’s fiction as well as outstanding debut authors.

In the older reader category, Patrick Ness is back after his 2011 Carnegie Medal triumph, with A Monster Calls making the final list, along with Australian author Morris Gleitzman and his book about a girl struggling with the extreme religious beliefs of her family, Grace. It also features the arrival of Annabel Pitcher with My Sister Lives on the Mantelpiece, the story of 10-year-old Jamie and his battle to cope with family life and a new school after the death of his sister.

There are also shortlists for younger children, which includes picture books by Mick Inkpen and Chris Wormell, and a younger readers category, featuring a posthumous publication from the much-loved author of Journey to the River Sea, Eva Ibbotson, another debut in Sky Hawk by Gill Lewis, and Liz Pichon’s The Brilliant World of Tom Gates.

The winner is voted for entirely by children. Last year’s overall winner was Shadow by Michael Morpurgo, the story of a boy from Afghanistan who is befriended by a dog as he flees the horror of war. Previous winners of the award include JK Rowling, Andy Stanton, Roald Dahl, Malorie Blackman and Anthony Horowitz.

This year’s winners will be announced at an awards ceremony in London on 18 February.

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Great House by Nicole Krauss – review

Nicole Krauss’s new novel is a smart and serious meditation on loss and memory. By Patrick Ness

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It is difficult to find a profile of Nicole Krauss that doesn’t mention 1) her beauty, 2) her youth or 3) her marriage to Jonathan Safran Foer (even younger, slightly less beautiful). There’s an inevitable air of complaint about these facts, however sympathetically presented, the implication being that her ability to get books published has less to do with talent than with a particularly irritating streak of good luck. ‘Twas ever thus, though the internet has upped the ease of sniping. There are, of course, smart and passionate sites out there by booklovers of all stripes, but there’s also that strangely hostile army of folks who seem to wake up every morning with no other aim than to tell you, as loudly as possible, how much they hate everything you’ve ever loved, especially if it’s written by someone who, to take a random example, is young, beautiful and married to a famous novelist.

I’m reminded of EM Forster’s quote about happiness. Do we find it so often that we “turn it off the box when it happens to sit there”? Are good books likewise so common that we can afford to dismiss them if their writers aren’t at least polite enough to be older than we are? If the book is good, so what? Krauss’s last novel, The History of Love, was very good indeed. Great House, its serious, downbeat follow-up, is even better. And that, really, should be the end of the discussion.

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Ness, Baker-Smith Win Carnegie, Greenaway in U.K.

By Julia Eccleshare

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In a ceremony on Thursday, Patrick Ness was presented with the 2011 CILIP Carnegie Medal for Monsters of Men (Walker Books), the final volume of his Chaos Walking trilogy.

His first two novels, The Knife of Never Letting Go and The Ask and the Answer, were runners-up for the award in 2009 and 2010 – the first time three novels in a trilogy have been shortlisted for the same award.

Excitement over Ness’s writing began with the publication of The Knife of Never Letting Go, his first children’s book. The story of Todd, 13 and fleeing towards adulthood through a desolate dystopia, won both the Guardian Children’s Book Award and the Book Trust Teenage Award.

Ferelith Hordon, chair of the 2011 judging panel for the Carnegie Medal, praised Ness for creating a “complex other world, giving himself and the reader great scope to consider big questions about life, love and how we communicate, as well as the horrors of war, and the good and evil that mankind is capable of.”

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Patrick Ness’s top 10 ‘unsuitable’ books for teenagers

From Stephen King to George Eliot, the author of The Knife of Never Letting Go recommends books that are best read when people tell you you’re too young for them.

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Patrick Ness was born and grew up in the US, and moved to London in 1999, where he’s lived ever since. He’s written two books for adults (a novel called The Crash of Hennington and a short story collection called Topics About Which I Know Nothing), and published The Knife of Never Letting Go, his first young adult book, in 2008. It won the Guardian Children’s Fiction Prize and the Booktrust Teenage Prize. The sequel, The Ask and the Answer, won the Costa children’s fiction prize, and the final book in the trilogy, Monsters of Men, came out last year. His new novel, A Monster Calls, will be published next month.

“My childhood reading was blissfully unchaperoned. My parents were just happy I liked to read, and so I – in utter innocence – would wander into the public library and pick up any old thing. I read Harold Robbins’ Celebrity when I was 13, for example. It was VERY educational.

“I survived, though. When I asked on Twitter for other “inappropriate” books people had read way too young, the list included Jilly Cooper, Irvine Welsh, Flowers in the Attic (by practically everyone) and lots and lots of Stephen King. All bookish young readers over-reach occasionally, and if they discover they like it, they keep on doing it. What a great way to establish reading as exciting and maybe even dangerous, eh?

“But there’s more to adult books than adult material. There are a number of books that are actually rather better if read when you’re a teen, some because they’re entertaining contraband, some because it can never be too early to read something so wonderful, and some because, if you wait, you might have missed your chance forever.”

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