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By Rhys Pierce, The Youth Outlook Staff Writer
The first thing that happened after I first finished Sarah Pennypacker`s “Pax” was that my
battered copy hit the floor. Despite the twist ending, I didn`t drop it out of shock. I threw it.
Enraged. You see, up until the very last page, Pax had, for me at least, been a book about a boy and his fox. The boy becomes separated from his fox due to complications that have arisen from war. It is also true that on his journey to rescue his fox, he is aided by a woman who was left damaged, mentally, and physically, due to her actions as a soldier. And of course, the name of the eponymous fox, “Pax,” is Latin for “peace.” But what 12-year-old me liked best were animal stories, and so to me, it was, above all else, an animal story. An animal story about a boy who loses his best friend, and when given the opportunity to get him back, he takes it. A story that really appealed to me as someone who had just lost the dog I had had for the majority of my life. But at the very end of the book, the boy, Peter, betrays everyone that was rooting for him. For reasons that I could never understand, the boy doesn’t take the fox home. The boy and the fox go separate ways, even though neither wants to, even though the three hundred miles that the boy traveled - and so the reader their three hundred pages - were all leading to this moment. And that was the point where the story died, where the vibrant heart of the book, beating and pounding, decomposed. That was the moment when the themes killed the plot.
I would realize when reading it a few years later, Pax is most definitely a novel about the human cost of war. Although the central plot contains no great battles, it is made most evident in ways previously mentioned (Pennypacker literally has a character state that “Pax” is Latin for peace, in case we missed the million other giant glowing signposts throughout the book delivering the message “war=bad,” although canonically his name is short for “Paxton” because Pennypacker thought she could pull a fast one on us, I guess). Or that’s how the author intended it to be read: a nice little allegory to teach kids that peace is the only option. But in gearing her novel towards adolescents, Pennypacker doesn’t seem to have factored in what happens when the kids “don’t get it.” After all, if I had a pound for every time I`ve heard someone ask an English teacher “Are you sure that the author meant this?” when being taught analysis on Jane Eyre. For example, I`d be a very rich man. And the answer, in my experience at least, is always the same: “it doesn’t matter what the author meant.” While this might seem at first to be an argument in the same vein as “because I said so” (i.e. holding less water than a sieve) it actually has backing in the literary criticism world.
The Death of the author, as this idea is properly known, was first introduced by French literary critic Roland Barthes in his 1967 essay of the same name. At the time, the theory was ground-breakingly unorthodox, flying in the face of the established rules of novel interpretation. Since then though, the theory has gained support, not just from English teachers looking for the politely academic term for “shut up and stop questioning me,” (although I imagine that is a large part of it) but from literary minds in general, looking for an answer to the age-old question, “if two interpretations of a text differ, how do we decide which is right?” Previously, there had been a large emphasis on trying to establish the author`s intentions, often related to their life experiences, and biases. This then formed a basis for interpreting the text. However, Barthes asserted an entirely new way of thinking. His theory states that once the work has been read, the author loses control over its meaning, and it is then entirely up to the reader to decide. In other words, the author is no longer an author, because they have no authority. They are simply what Barthes called the “scritor. ”In this way, the author “dies.”
A few years ago, I went to see the “author” Michael Grant at the Edinburgh Book Festival. At the end of his talk, he answered some questions, and one, in particular, has stuck with me. Someone asked him whether he writes plot-driven or character-driven novels.
“Character-driven,” he said. “It always has to be character-driven, in my opinion. Because a good character – a well-written character – is like a real person, and the reader knows how they should act in any given situation. My plots can get a little crazy sometimes, but I always make sure that they bend and shape around my characters, not the other way around. Because the plot can bend. Characters can`t. If your plot requires a character to decide something that doesn`t fit them, they break. They stop being a real person.”
And coming back to Pax, that`s exactly what happened on the very last page of the book. No matter what the author’s intentions were, I had decided that the book was first and foremost about its characters: a fox who falls victim to a mistake and a boy who sets out to correct it. Because that`s what I wanted the book to be about. Not war, or peace, or a sermon about the mixture of the two, but the two friends at the heart of the novel who won’t let any of it come between them. Characters should be the heart of the novel, the body to which plot and themes are attached like limbs. But in that decision to part ways on the very last page, Pennypacker broke this basic rule of writing. She sacrificed the happy ending the characters would have chosen for themselves, to have a sad ending. I know why she did it – she wanted to show the cost of war in an impactful way – but the reasons don’t matter. Because that was the moment the novel fell apart. That was the last straw, that rather than breaking the camel’s back, it unwove the whole haybale. That was the page that erased the book. That was the moment that the themes killed the plot, and the book died as collateral.
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