The Power of One

First of all, a caveat: I wrote this for my book club, so it is a book review that presumes that you have read the book. So, while I often talk in generalities, I do not avoid all spoilers. You have been warned.


I was almost finished with The Girl with All the Gifts, (the cheaper Hachette link is not working right now) by M. R. Carey and truly enjoying it when it occurred to me to look him up online. Then I discovered that M. R, Carey was the pen name of Mike Carey, the author of the 11-volume Lucifer graphic novel series, which I highly recommend, as well as the Unwritten graphic novels, which I started but lost interest in (they weren't bad, though - check the first volume out, and make up your own mind), and the Felix Castor supernatural mystery series, which I have not read. Carey's origins as a comics writer and a screenplay writer are important influences in the strengths and weaknesses of The Girl with All the Gifts.

At first glance, The Girl with All the Gifts has two strikes against it: it is a zombie book (herein called "hungries") and its protagonist is a precocious girl. Either of these, if done less than well, could have ruined the book. The protagonist, Melanie, is a hungry who has maintained her intelligence. Melanie's character is fleshed out (so to speak), and her mentor/schoolgirl crush, Miss Justineau, recieves some character development, but the other characters who round out the principal quartet, Sargeant Parks and Doctor Caldwell, are shallow. The characterization of Parks improves as that of Justineau goes fallow. Melanie is a strong enough character on her own, but the plot demands interaction (it's a zombie book, after all, not a "last man in the world" book), so there is a lot of Justineau in the beginning. Justineau is the force that explains why Melanie is "alive", rather than cannon fodder for Parks' men, and a quite different novel could have been written about Justineau's project. Justineau, however, is fundamentally a plot device in Melanie's world, so once the quartet leaves Justineau's natural domain, her characterization withers and dies on the vine as she persistently engages in mind-numbingly stupid objections given the post-apocalyptic world she lives in. Sympathy for the devil is one thing, giving him your credit card is quite another.

To make a long story short, bad things happen (because of course they do, because it's a zombie book), and the merry band hit the road. Justineau becomes baggage, and Melanie and Parks become the important duo. Parks' changing attitude to Melanie is not really character development as much as revelation of a constant character in differing circumstances. He does not learn as much as one might think, but to say more about that would spoil the ending. Melanie's relationship with Caldwell remains (justifiably) hostile.

The limited sociological detail in the novel is reasonable, since this book is not about the society, but rather about the coming of age (in a strange way) of a little undead girl. The scantiness of the personal relationship is more troubling. The Girl with All the Gifts is not only a novel, but also a screen play, written simultaneously; apparently, the novel's multiple viewpoints are collapsed into the single viewpoint of Melanie in the script. The paucity of description of characters in the book is probably interference from the script process, as are some of the graphic scenes that only touch lightly on the plot. Both movies and comics are collaborative art forms, which means that they are both more than the sum of their parts and divided in complimentary tasks. Some of the details absent from the book would be filled in by the illustrator in a comic or the set designer in a movie.

The scientific explanation of the apocalypse makes a fair amount of sense - at least, it explains how the walking corpses are walking. The explanation of Melanie's functionality is good, as far as it goes. It does answer how a ten-year-old hungry can maintain intelligence, but there are some confusing and inexplicable things about her existence to the ten year mark - human babies don't map perfectly onto animal babies. Only Melanie's total lack of knowledge of her life before captivity excuses the lack of an explanation. The complexities of Carey's other plots makes it probable that he does have one. The resolution of the plot, which is closely tied to Melanie's nature and others like her, is cold and logical, yet hopeful. It would be nice if the movie does not have an artificially happy ending, but Hollywood is rather hopeless in that regard. As in all zombie books, the solution is (or seems to be) a temporary solution, but it does further the standard "future history" of the zombie apocalypse from one generation to two generations. If The Girl with All the Gifts catches the imagination of the zombie-mad masses, I expect that there will be further exploration of undead incubation, child care, and post-human civilization.