The Wind Singer

This morning, I got around to finishing William Nicholson’s The Wind Singer. Sadly, it didn’t quite fulfil its early promise, and while it was good enough for me to want to read the two sequels I’ve already bought, it’s a shame that it didn’t live up to expectations. It starts off very enjoyable, a fast-paced and funny little satire about the education system: the population of the city of Amaranth is constantly examined, and their privileges and jobs within a caste system are decided wholly by these exams, in spite of any natural intelligence or propensity to manual work. The Hath family rebel against this, each in their own way, until Kestrel, the rebellious daughter of the family, is going to be locked away in a hidden chamber full of strange, aged children rather like those in Akira, only far more sinister. Learning she will become like them, she escapes with her twin brother Bowman and their classmate, Mumpo, a mentally retarded boy who has always been a repulsive outcast, and yet has a good heart. After meeting the imprisoned emperor, Kestrel has been given a mission: to find the Wind Singer.

Unfortunately, this is where it all goes rather wrong. Nicholson, a man who didn’t WRITE Gladiator but tightened it up and made it streamlined enough for Hollywood, writes in a perfunctory style perfectly suited to the early satire of the book. Like Dahl or Lemony Snicket, the world works because it is too grotesque to be quite believable, funny and bizarre. The characters are all extreme: the authority figures simple and easily mocked, the Emperor himself imprisoned by an addiction to chocolate buttons, the children rebelling by yelling made-up swearwords like ‘pompaprune’ and expressing encouragement to others by going ‘hubba hubba’. It works in the satirical city, and it works with the rather dull episode involving mud-people, but when Nicholson tries to make the story epic and even chilling, it just falls flat.

Kestrel and Bowman, even Mumpo, are good characters, even if the twins’ psychic link is rather cheesy and unnecessary, and Mumpo’s strange ability to be Mumpo even when he should be brainwashed makes little sense. Their emotions are extreme and superficial because of Nicholson’s style, but they are certainly likeable. But Nicholson soon puts them in situations that just do not work. It seems that he has had half a dozen exciting ideas, and crammed them all in, one after another. There’s nothing wrong with episodic quest stories, but with all the ideas left half-developed, and most questions left unanswered, the whole thing seems unfinished and unsatisfying, and the conundrums we’re left are ones that are unlikely to ever be answered: is being descended from a prophet the only reason Bowman has psychic powers? How do the children recognise things that they can never have seen in a life spent in Amaranth? If the people of the city do not TRULY believe in the system they live under (since the spell will be broken by the Wind Singer), why are the Hath family not also bewitched?

Nicholson’s narrative style is also rather dubious. The Hollywood cinematic rush leaves me constantly wondering what the characters THINK about their circumstances, but this is not what I have issues with – rather, I am concerned with pacing. He intersperses the scenes of an epic quest with rather uninteresting snippets of the Hath parents back in Amaranth, and while this line from Kestrel and Bowman’s mother was one of the book’s funniest moments:

‘O, unhappy people!’ cried the prophetess. ‘The time has come to sit and eat buns!’

That alone did not make the tedious chapters worthwhile: which surely is something a Hollywood writer should spot!

The kids’ return trip is nearly a Tolkien cliché (Eagles carry them at least SOME of the way), but then, as though just to avoid that particular pitfall, the rest of the journey is hurriedly described and feels like a mere inconvenience.

I’ll read the other two books, but it’s a shame that something potentially so good turned out to be mediocre.

Here’s Nicholson’s writing in his own words:

‘For a writer reared on English Literature at Cambridge, Hollywood is as far away as you can go. No one in Hollywood cares about your voice, or your sensibility. What they want is big characters, big stories, big audiences. Very smart people there do nothing all day but beat writers into shape. I was duly beaten into shape. As a result I now understand that I am not writing to reveal my own mysteriously-fascinating self to others – no one’s listening, no one cares – but to explore the world we all share.’

It’s sad, but he’s right. But to extract one’s own voice as much as he has only removes all sense of continuous identity.