I am the circle and the circle is me: The Chaos Walking trilogy by Patrick Ness

To my pride, and slightly to my annoyance, my SWM privilige post is the most popular thing I have written on my blog, even months after it has been written. I imagine there are still people out there wondering why privilige is a bad thing, or even whether it exists. They need something to trigger their understanding, something to illuminate the point. They need a catalyst, a perspective change.

So what do I recommend? Simple: read these books. The Knife of Never Letting Go, The Ask and the Answer, and Monsters of Men by Patrick Ness.

Set on the unoriginally named planet New World, there exists a world of only men. A war with the native inhabitants of the planet, the Spackle, has left the survivors telepathetic (and apparently unable to think of more original names to places). In this world lives teenager Todd Hewitt, unwillingly saddled with his dog Mackee. All the women are dead, the result of a plague unleashed during the Spackle war. The town of New Prentisstown is under the strict thumb of Mayor Prentiss and the local dingbat preacher (seriously, the Joker would think this guy is nuts) Aaron.

Then a girl falls from the sky: Viola, daughter of a survey party for the second wave of colonists. The two team up, eager to stay ahead of Mayor Prentiss who is up to no good, and reluctantly into the arms of Mistress Coyne, who is no better. On top of this the restive Spackle are returning, and the humans and Spackle find themselves in a deep conflict that will be very difficult to resolve, putting it mildly.

These are really deep books, dealing not only with the nature of masculinity and gender roles but violence in general, especially terrorism and warfare. If I had to sum up The Ask and the Answer in a sentence it would be what would happen if the unstoppable force of self righteousness hit the immovable object of tyrannt? Answer: nothing positive. Warfare comes across a necessary evil that needs to be balanced and restrained: the point of warfare, and too many are too willing to overlook this fact, is to compel your enemy to do what you want them to do. Unlike Starship Troopers, which makes the same point, the Chaos Walking novels are under no illusion about what warfare does to people, psychologically and emotionally.

We live in a complicated world. I don't think that we can go back to, say, the Nineties culturally: a time without some external threat or interal division. Thanks to September 11, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and the Great Recession my generation, and the younger one following it for whom these books are intended, are scared. Books like The Hunger Games are unafraid to examine things like the use of propaganda and covert operations such as false flag operations.

Culturally attitudes towards gender are changing too. We're at a point where traditional masculinity, with all its violence and iron clad restrictions, is waning but not fully lost. If more people read these books, we'd be there a lot faster. Because if Chaos Walking does one thing right, its showing the toll of SWM privilige not just on those who are not SWM, but on those who are. The Knife of never letting go cuts both ways.

And that I should write more. That too.