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When we first meet him, Chappie is a punked-out teenager living with his mother and abusive stepfather in an upstate New York trailer park. During this time, he slips into drugs and petty crime. Rejected by his parents, out of school and in trouble with the police, he claims for himself a new identity as a permanent outsider; he gets a crossed-bones tattoo on his arm, and takes the name "Bone." He finds dangerous refuge with a group of biker-thieves, and then hides in the boarded-up summer house of a professor and his wife. He finally settles in an abandoned schoolbus with Rose, a child he rescues from a fast-talking pedophile. There Bone meets I-Man, an exiled Rastafarian, and together they begin a second adventure that takes the reader from Middle America to the ganja-growing mountains of Jamaica. It is an amazing journey of self-discovery through a world of magic, violence, betrayal and redemption.… (more)
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The second thing it tells me is that Cornel West thinks that this book "courageously explores the frightening new world of American young people". I think it would be more accurate to say that this books explores what alarmed members of the middle-class in their 40s think "the frightening new world of American young people" is like. Nothing is this book bears any relation to what being a kid is actually like for the majority of people. ("The majority of people" is generally a codeword for "the writer", however, and though that is true in this case, I do not think it stops my larger point from being true.)
The third thing it tells me is that his book initially discusses Chappie's adventures on the streets of upstate New York, and then moves to Jamaica. This is true. It does not mention that the voyage to Jamaica is completely implausible, producing jarring shift in tone for the final third of the novel, nor does it mention the aggravating number of coincidental meetings that the plot hangs on.
What the flap does not even allude to is that it is written a really annoying style that I think is what the author imagines a fifteen-year-old's memoir would be like, but I think that someone who could write this well and this much would actually know what a comma is, yet run-on sentences abound throughout the entire thing and at least carry you along productively when nothing of interest is actually transpiring, which is rather an alarmingly large part of the book, and to be fair it is the same voice everyone adopts when they are trying to imagine how a teenage would write a novel, so at least is sticking to the proper convention even if that convention does annoy me quite a bit.
It also does not mention that the book ends with an obnoxiously pat moral message that I don't think is even born out by the text.
The second half of the novel consists of Bone's adventures with I-Man in Jamaica. Questions of racism and hierarchy are looked at from a different angle. While the plot kind of meanders as Bone drifts from one thing to another, there are definite moments when Bone will come out with something that just strikes me as completely true. Like toward the end when he talks about crime versus sin. Bone is on a quest for personal meaning and out to do the "true" thing , even though it very well may not be what most people would consider the "right" thing. On the one hand, you want for Bone to be saved, but on the other, you think that maybe he really is saving himself by living his life in such an unstructured way. The lack of cohesion in the novel kind of bothered me, but then, I think that the structure suits the narrator- for me, this novel was about breaking artificial boundaries- such as the way I expect a novel to be structured.
Russell Banks has made a living going straight to the heart of characters in
Herein lies part of the book's problem. The first half of the novel--before Bone hooks up with a spliff-smoking Rastafarian named I-Man and they take off for Jamaica--is absolutely riveting. You watch with increasing dread and despair as Bone tries to make a life for himself on the streets. Banks uses no quotation marks; his prose style is intoxicating and dizzying, as if Bone has no time for the delay of punctuation marks. There is an urgency in Bone's narrative voice that will get right under your skin. One particularly gut-wrenching scene has Bone hiding out from security guards in the back corridors of a shopping mall. If those five pages don't break your heart, you've got granite in your veins.
But then, Bone descends into a haze of marijuana and Rastafarian rap as he and I-Man trip on down to Jamaica. I still cared about Bone as his heart was once again broken by his father, but my compassion started to dwindle a little and I found myself getting impatient with Banks. It's like his sharp-focused portrait of an American teenager had suddenly gone soft and blurry.
Still, it's hard to fault Banks for even this because Bone is, without a doubt, one of the best American teens in our nation's literature--right up there with Huck Finn, Holden Caulfield and company.
While this might be the climax of the novel if written by less imaginative authors, Banks takes Bone into more fantastic scenarios, that push the character beyond what a reader might think he would be "capable" of. Bone rescues Rose, a little girl he suspects of being held captive by a child pornographer, and returns to the schoolbus to meet I-Man, a Jamaican Rastafarian who is growing pot and vegetables in and around the bus. I-Man and Rose become Bone's new family, and Bone tries to make Rose's life right by finding her mother and sending her back. He then follows I-Man to Jamaica, meeting his father (Doc) by accident, and living the life of the idle rich with Doc and Doc's girlfriend, Evening Star.
But the novel doesn't rest here either; Bone surprises I-Man having sex with Evening Star, and confesses the scene to Doc, who is high on speedballs and swears to kill I-Man. Bone and I-Man flee, returning to I-Man's village and harvesting a crop of pot for smuggling out of Jamaica. When I-Man is shot by drug runners, Bone is spared, being Doc's (white) son; he returns to Evening Star's home, wreaks havoc on Doc, and then flees to serve as part of a private yacht's crew to Dominica.
It's not just the plot that's unpredictable -- it's Bone's own emotional growth that is a surprise. He realizes the importance of love and responsibility, the implications of race, and the reality that trying to do the 'right thing' does not make things right. In many ways, the book is all about accountability; Bone repeatedly comes face to face with the people affected by his actions. His mother, whom he knows loves him intensely, rejects him for her husband, and his father, whom he doesn't know, accepts him without taking parental responsibility for his son. Bone has a series of realizations about race and class privilege, about how we affect one another, and about the unthinking way many people live. There is no great redemption and no justice in this book; but by the end, I had a strong sense of optimism for Bone's future, and felt sure he would continue to learn and be able to find his way towards living a responsible, moral life.
There are some interesting details about Rastafarian life-style, Jamaican history and the slave trade, and modern Jamaica. It had me pulling out my old Reggae music.
A caution that some readers may find the passages describing marijuana use somewhat romanticized. Recommended for older-teen to adult readers, due to passages describing drug use, violence and sex.
When we first meet Chappie, he's the ultimate lost boy. At just fourteen years old, he is on the verge of being disowned by his mother and
After fleeing a burning squat, he and his friend Russ part ways for a while. Chappie finds himself returning to an abandoned school bus on some waste ground where he'd sought refuge once before. Only this time, the bus has a new inhabitant - a middle-aged Jamaican who goes by the name of I-Man, and who becomes a huge influence on Chappie's transition to Bone, his new persona.
While the first few chapters of the book may not elicit much sympathy from the reader, it soon becomes apparent that this could be the author's intention. Punk Chappie appears to be a selfish and thoughtless boy, though what we're really seeing is naivete and immaturity from a kind enough but rudderless child.
As Chappie grows into Bone - the man he wants to become - we see evidence of his innate kindness as well as learning more about the complete unreliability of the adults in his life. I-Man is an anchor for him, a moral and spiritual guide if that doesn't sound too cheesy, and Bone latches on to him as one of the few positive influences he's had in his life.
Bone is ultimately a young, naive and misguided soul, but he's had very little help, to be fair, and the turn of events in the middle of the book take his life in a very new direction that is just as challenging as everything he's faced so far.
This was quite a sweet book really, even if it makes you feel sad about the inadequacies of people who have children then treat them as nuisances for the rest of their lives. Bone becomes a survivor, and you have to give him credit for that.
Bone's story is that of a lost teenage boy of fourteen who leaves his broken and dysfunctional home after enduring years of abuse at the hands of his Stepfather. He drifts and gets by as well as possible, selling weed to a group of unruly and violent Bikers with whom he and his friend crash with in a rundown apartment. As he drifts through his homelessness, spending his days in a mall the next town over, he begins to question what it means to live as a criminal, all the while trying to maintain a sense of right from wrong. As time passes, he finds himself in a position to rescue a young girl around six-years-old who was sold by her mother to a sceevy and dangerous pedophile. The two find refuge in an abondoned bus in the middle a field, inhabited by I-Man, a Jamaican Rastafarian and illegal immigrant homesick for his own country. And so begins the second stage in Bone's journey to himself, which takes him to Jamaica and onward.
This book was incredibly hard to put down, and I found myself reading well past my bedtime. Bone's narrative is authentic and at times soars. His voice was well developed, as were the characters he described. It was an honor to watch Bone evolve from a scared fourteen-year-old boy unsure of himself and the future, into a young man who was ready to embrace his true self and the journey that lies ahead of him. Highly recommended.
I would definitely recommend this book to anyone looking to expand their reading list in an unconventional way.