The Girl With All The Gifts

[sawyl]

Despite being a long-time fan of Mike Carey's comic work — Lucifer is one of my favourite series — I've not read any of his novels, so when I saw The Girl With All The Gifts on offer at the bookshop I decided to take the plunge.

Melanie doesn't think there's anything all that unusual about her life on the corridor. Every weekday Sergeant Parks orders two armed guards come into her cell to strap to a wheelchair and move her to the schoolroom ready for morning lessons where, every day, she hopes against hope that it will be Miss Justineau's day to teach the class. The weekend routine is slightly different. The children spend Saturdays locked in their cells listening to blaring classical music. Then on Sundays the soldiers return, move the children in the shower room where they untie one arm, feed them grubs, and then sluice them down with stinging chemicals.

Clearly there is nothing normal about Melanie's life. It's just that she lacks the experience to know that she's in a hellish military prison guarded by who have been deliberated trained to treat their charges as dangerous animals. She also takes a dangerously long time to realise that when her fellow pupils are taken off through the big metal door at the end of the corridor to help Dr Caldwell with her experiments, they don't come back.

When Melanie's turn to help forward the cause of science comes, a chance event saves her from Caroline Caldwell's scalpel. Together with Helen Justineau, Sergeant Parks, green private Kieran Gallagher, and the sociopathic Caldwell, Melanie finds herself travelling through a desolate post-apocalyptic England. As the journey unfolds and the group find themselves increasingly dependent on each other for survival, their relationships begin to change and grow — with Parks in particular forced to confront his previous view of Melanie as some sort of monster.

Obviously influenced by the Cosy Catastrophe novels of the likes of Wyndham, what makes Carey's take intriguing is his willingness to embrace the other by putting it at the core of the narrative. He also forces his characters to change and adapt in the face of the evidence of Melanie's humanity — or post-humanity — rather than allowing them to continue to treat her as a dangerous menace. The ending is also more optimistic than usual, offering the possibility of a new world rising from the ashes of the old, albeit at great cost to the failed species that is humanity 1.0.

Definitely recommended.