Helen Brown talks to the award-winning children’s writer Patrick Ness about his exceptional new novel for adults, The Crane Wife.
Patrick
Ness
The sound that wakes George Duncan is “a mournful shatter of frozen midnight
falling to earth to pierce his heart and lodge there forever, never to move,
never to melt”, but, being the kind of man he is, the hero of Patrick Ness’s new
novel assumes it’s his bladder. In fact, it’s a dazzling white crane, brought
down in George’s suburban garden by “some kind of terrifyingly proper arrow”.
Stepping forward to help the bird, George finds himself in “one of those special
corners of what's real, one of those moments, only a handful of which he could
recall throughout his lifetime, where the world dwindled down to almost no one,
where it seemed to pause just for him so that he could, for a moment, be seized
into life”. The next day a mysterious woman called Kumiko walks into George’s
London print shop, and changes everything.
The Crane Wife is a special novel: a perfect fusion of surreal imagery
and beautifully crafted internal logic. Turning it over in my hands once I’d
finished, I began to think of it as the literary equivalent of a Japanese puzzle
box with poetry, ideas and jokes twisting and sliding out of it at surprising
angles.
“It’s based, of course, on the Japanese folk tale, which I first heard at
kindergarten in Hawaii,” says Ness, leaning intently over a glass of pineapple
juice (another Hawaiian hangover) in the café at Waterstones. Although he’s
written for adults before, Ness is best known for his award-winning teen
fiction. Now in his early forties, there’s still the intensity of adolescence in
his speech, which punctuates passion with the odd, self-effacing: “Yeah,
whaddever.”
In the traditional story, a sailmaker meets his wife after pulling an arrow
from a crane’s wing. She begins to weave beautiful sails for him and they become
rich. Her only condition is that he does not watch her work. But he grows greedy
and – forcing her to weave faster – bursts down her door to see the crane,
making sails from its silken feathers. This breaks the spell and she flies away,
leaving him bereft.
What grabbed Ness was that, “It starts with an act of kindness and most folk
tales start with acts of cruelty. It’s about human weakness. The sailmaker isn’t
a bad man, he just becomes a greedy man and it ruins the thing he loves most…
People say happiness writes white and there’s a point to that. But kindness,
decency and doing your best are still part of the human condition and should be
depicted in fiction.”
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