Pelorus
[The Chocolate War] will surely be one of those books that sweep through teenage readers with the fervent interest that Catcher in the Rye roused in its day….
I've … spoken to adult readers whom it worries…. Their charge against it has nothing to do with the book's compulsion. On the contrary. They say it is too attractive, too compelling, too persuasive. They say that such a hopeless ending—hopeless, not (colloquially) unsuccessful—should not be presented to young people.
But to say that is to argue that books form ideas and behaviour according to the conclusions of their stories. In other words a novel's happy ending helps towards happy endings for people. Christian novelists make Christian readers. And I doubt that anyone actually holds such a literary philosophy to be true.
Robert Cormier obviously doesn't believe it. He dedicates the book to his son: which indicates that he's understood entirely what literature is about. It presents an image for us to contemplate. It says—in the case of his book—let's follow to their logical conclusion certain facets of society as you and I see them (remembering that The Chocolate War was written during the Watergate/Nixon debacle) and let's take that image to its logical conclusion and see what happens.
The idea is to ask the question, Do you want a world like this? The answer has to be, No. In which case I would argue, and I fancy Cormier would too, that the real point of his book is to cause young readers to see the result of certain kinds of human behaviour and to opt not for the hopeless end that the logically worked-out image presents, but for just the opposite.
It seems to me that too many children's book "professionals"—commentators, teachers, librarians, even writers—still work on the assumption that literature makes people better only so long as the books themselves show a life, however unreal, which is the "better" they want children and young people to be.
However, whether they like it or not—and I like it—The Chocolate War is well on its way to becoming one of those books every young person will have to read. (p. 146)
Pelorus, in Signal (copyright © 1975 Pelorus; reprinted by permission of the author and The Thimble Press, Lockwood Station Road, South Woodchester, Glos. GL5 5EQ, England), September, 1975.
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