Gone

When I made my qualifications of what makes a "Great Book" in my mind (to recap-- it must be both original and well-written), I had a hard time coming up with an example of a novel that had original ideas and themes but was staggeringly badly written. Michael Grant's Gone has fortunately provided me with a prime example.

I'm not sure where to start on this book. It has good intentions. Grant throws a whole bunch of strange and surreal things at the reader, creating a unique world, and ultimately ties them together with some satisfying anti-violence and growing up themes. It resonated with me, anyway, because I'm about to go on to the stage where I'm coping without parents.

But let me say a word on pulp fiction. I've just about beaten that horse to death here, but I want to mention one more kind of novel that gets my goat. It's the kind where every scene is artificially lengthened, to the point where, when you open the novel to any page, it's unrecognizable from another section. A good book has climaxes and lulls in both the writing AND the plot, and while Gone has a decently varied plot, it struggles to rise above one samey level of writing.

(I will give Grant credit for trying to emulate the colloquialisms of the modern American teenager. It just got monotonous after a while.)

On the plus side, I was all set to be upset about this book because it's the first in a series of SIX novels. Nobody is allowed to do that, I thought. Unless you're Tolkien, you need some sort of closure after the first book. Even Star Wars had a little bit of closure, though it let the villain get away in the end. But Gone really went for a Star Wars ending, leaving villains and world intact and ready for another installment, and letting the reader put down the series if he so chooses.

The plot of Gone (for those who have gotten this far) is that the kids of Perdido Beach suddenly find themselves without any companions over the age of fifteen. Bullies start to take over, kids develop powers, and animals mutate in a newly born civilization run amok. The plot has some decent twists and the characters are decently developed -- Grant switches points of view in a manner that is almost ADD (show us what the autistic kid's thinking next time, though). The novel starts to lose some focus because of this, because it's hard to follow the character that becomes the obvious protagonist halfway through - Sam Temple. Yes, I admire Grant's intentions to keep this as an ensemble cast in the first half of the book, but by the end this is really Sam's story, and the writing should reflect that.

This was a good exercise in making a novel. Hopefully the second one could be even better, because there's some good stuff here. But the overlong scenes, the relentless good-guys-walk-into-traps gimmick, and the way the writing style never seems to follow the way the story goes are definitely negatives that keep the book from becoming great. I'm probably a little bit spoiled because the last two books I read (Mimus and Point Blank) were so good, and granted that this book is written for an audience younger than I, but I think Michael Grant should push himself on the next few. Maybe then the Fallout Alley Youth Zone will become a classic.