Few books grabbed me as instantly as this post-apocalyptic thriller. It doesn’t quite live up to the promise of its striking opening and strays into over-familiar genre territory, but it remains a riveting read and, like all good science fiction, raises some intriguing moral conundrums.
Melanie is a bright and imaginative ten-year-old girl who adores books and Miss Justineau, her favourite teacher. Her world is very small indeed: her cell, the corridor outside the cell, the classroom and the shower room. Every morning, Melanie is strapped into the wheelchair, then taken to her lessons along with other children in her class who are likewise restrained. Melanie is curious and wistful about the outside world, but she’s also glad she’s living behind a big steel door keeping everybody safe.
The opening is dynamite: gripping, disorienting and disturbing, leaving the reader unsure what on earth is going on. Soon, we discover that Melanie and other children are kept at an army base, guarded from the ‘hungries’, former humans turned into mindless bloodthirsty killing machines by a parasitic fungus. Almost equally dangerous are ‘junkers’, non-infected humans who made a choice to take their chances in the wild after the near-total societal breakdown caused by the fungus a few decades ago.
I really loved the first hundred pages or so of this book, and Melanie’s point of view especially. As a protagonist, she’s instantly sympathetic and endearing, even as the breadcrumb trail of unsettling details warns the reader that Melanie is not a normal little girl she innocently believes herself to be. You’re also introduced to the perspectives of other major characters: Helen Justineau, a psychologist and teacher conflicted about her role at the base; rough and tough Sergeant Parks, the man in charge; and Caroline Caldwell, the scientist determined to solve the mystery of the fungus by any means possible – even if it means cutting into small children’s skulls.
Every day follows the same routine for Melanie, until one day when disaster strikes and everything changes. From then on, the novel turns into a road trip, with a small group of survivors including Melanie, Justineau, Caldwell, Parks and young private Gallagher making their way to Beacon, one of the last remaining human strongholds. They only need to make it through the miles of urban desolation, with hordes of hungries waiting to catch their delicious human scent… and even worse things than that.
Carey’s writing is vivid, fast-paced and action-packed. I still couldn’t help feeling that, after the early slow-burn intrigue, it did slip into some very familiar zombie apocalypse survival territory: 28 Days Later, The Last of Us, take your pick. It is also disappointing that Melanie’s unique perspective gets lost in the shuffle. There’s still some wonderful stuff as Melanie finally finds herself outside the base, slowly comes to understand and accept her true nature, and grapples with her place in the world, but she’s somewhat overshadowed by the adults who become more prominent and make most of the important decisions.
Which is not to say that any of this stopped me from devouring the book like a hungry. The tension never lets up and as the journey progresses, you end up learning more about the hungries and the pesky Cordyceps fungus; the various stages of the latter are especially fascinating, painstakingly detailed and offer some truly grotesque imagery. While I’m rarely affected by gory and gruesome scenes in books, there’s one particular sequence in The Girl with All the Gifts that genuinely creeped me out and made my skin crawl.
You also learn more about the other lead characters, who in the end are essentially stock figures, but stock figures with conflicting goals and clashing interests, especially where Melanie is concerned. In particular, the moral quandary is explored through the opposing views of Helen Justineau and Dr Caldwell: one empathetic and deeply invested in Melanie’s well-being, another entirely cold and stripped of emotion, focused only on the big picture and the possibility of saving the entire humankind.
There was a point when it became obvious what kind of story this was going to be; without spoiling anything let’s just say that the novel goes out with a bang and blaze, even if I wasn’t sold on all of the details of the ending. I had other nitpicks concerning characters’ actions that on a couple of occasions come off as implausible and poorly motivated, but overall this book was a fast, exciting and thought-provoking read.
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