Rating: WORTHY!
I would gladly (well, maybe not gladly - try) willingly well, maybe not willingly try: just) suffer through four examples of Charlaine Harris's inane drivel if I could be guaranteed a gem like The Secret Under My Skin at the end of it. I was drawn into this from the beginning and grew ever more fond of it as I read. The main character, Lobelia September, more properly known as Blay Raytee (which itself is only a poor approximation of her real name: Blake Raintree) is a real charmer and sets the standard for how such a character in such a novel should be IMO.
I started reading this Sunday night in bed; I was almost ninety pages in before I knew it, and it was nearly midnight! I resented having to stop reading to get to sleep since I had to work the next day! If I had started it Sunday morning, I don’t doubt for a minute that I would have read it straight through non-stop! Now I'm frustrated by everything which pulls me away from pursuing further reading! Yes, my name is Ian Wood and I am a good fiction addict! It’s been way too long since my last read!
This 2368 world in which Blake lives is a horrible one, where global warming and pollution have trashed Earth, but unlike so many novels of this type, this Earth is slowly recovering. The problem in this novel is that the authoritarian governments who seized power when the environment and lifestyles deteriorated, do not want to relinquish that power now. They therefore perpetuate the myth that Earth is highly dangerous, in order to retain control.
They have Bio-Indicators (BI). These are people who are especially sensitive to certain aspects of the environment, and whose job it is to issue warnings when conditions are bad. Such people are held in high regard and lead a pampered lifestyle, but they're slowly going out of business. Contrast this with the pervasive hatred of scientists and technology. Indeed, the hatred became so bad that not long before the novel starts, there was a brutal purge of such people and their children, referred to as the 'technocaust'.
This scenario is very familiar territory to me, having covered it in my own Godstruck but my novel takes a completely different tack to McNaughton's. In mine, the ruling power is the church, and the main character is an older guy rather than a girl in her mid teens. I have to give major props to McNaughton for bringing an intelligent treatment of scientific subjects to her material. Yes, the novel is fiction, but it’s evidently strongly grounded in reality, and I can find no fault in her scientific presentation at all. It’s really refreshing to read something so solid and honest.
Blake is an inmate in a work camp, where she has to go out each day in the baking summer, with her anti-UV clothing and goggles, along with her fellow internees, to scavenge scrap from an ancient trash tip. The scrap is sold to fund the work camp. There's some cruelty and bullying, but nothing extreme. McNaughton's representation of the work camp seems realistic and not a caricature. Blake tries to keep herself to herself and is a decent person. One day she's selected in a group of about fifteen similar internees. She's told that a BI is visiting to find an assistant, and the BI picks Blake because she seems like someone who will not overshadow the BI. Blake can't believe she was chosen for this honor, and suddenly finds herself in a completely different world - one she could never have dreamed of.
The BI's name is Marella (after a fossil found in the famous Burgess Shale formation). Again props to McNaughton for bringing in ideas and topics which may seem obscure to someone who isn't quite as obsessed with science as I am(!), yet even as she does this, she makes it interesting and accessible, touching on the topics without lecturing at all. The two people Marella is staying with, and with whom Blake now resides, are Erica and William, an older couple who are very much in love and have some secrets which are only slowly revealed to Blake. Whereas the couple is quite easy-going, Marella is spoiled and petulant and very difficult to get along with.
Blake is resolved to help her despite her attitude, and as they spend time together, and even while Blake is appalled and distressed at how lazy Marella is, she begins to understand her. One night Marella asks Blake to wash her hair, and Blake discovers that her hair is almost non-existent. Her scalp is roseate, and cracked and scaling, as though she has suffered radiation poisoning. Given the tenuous state of the ozone layer, she may well have been poisoned by excess ultra violet light, or perhaps she's highly allergic to something.
Marella is required to undertake educational reading in order to prepare for her initiation as a full BI, but she doesn't apply herself to this material. She's lazy, but Blake is thrilled with the chance to learn more, and it’s her dedication, intelligence, and loyalty to Marella which saves her partner on more than one occasion, from William's annoyance and even wrath. As Blake settles in to her new home and the relative luxury it offers, she realizes increasingly that she has been lied to by the people at the government-run work camp. The ozone layer is healing, and she doesn't need quite so much protection when going outside as the work camp people had convinced her she did, for one thing. On a trip to the village, one which the workhouse children would never be allowed to make, Blake learns more secrets about her world, what the government is up to, and how much resistance is stirring against this draconian rule.
There are other things she has also been lied to about. "Lem Howl", a guy who lives up the hill from Blake's new home, has been deliberately represented to her as a horrible, fearful figure who made his wife drink poison and who will eat children who stray from the work camp, but when Blake properly meets him, she realizes how misled she's been. Lem Howell is a scientist and inventor who works closely with Erica and William, and he even agrees to see if he can make a device to read Blake's "object" - an obsolete cassette tape. He discovers that Blake has an ID chip embedded in her arm which, if he can create a device to read it, will revel her true age and identity. She begins to entertain faint hopes that she will discover who her real parents were, but all she learns from her chip is her real name and age.
With regard to the mechanics of writing of this novel, the first remarkable thing didn’t show up until page ninety six, where I read, "The Bay is perhaps twenty meters across, reaching out of sight in each direction" I have no solid idea what that really means! If it’s out of sight it can’t be twenty meters wide, but if McNaughton means the distance from the shore to where the bay opens to the ocean proper, then twenty meters doesn’t really make a bay! She could have described it as twenty meters deep, but this is ambiguous since it could also refer to the depth of the water! What's a writer to do?! Perhaps, "The bay is hardly a bay at all; it’s only twenty meters from the shore to the point where it opens into the endless blue ocean." That would cover most bases. But this is just taking arms against a sea of what is otherwise wonderful writing, so let me clarify that McNaughton is an excellent writer, both technically and entertainingly, and let's press on.
The final stage of Marella's initiation is for her to take a trip to 'the badlands' where she's supposed to undergo some sort of vision or revelation, which will fully bring her into her role as a BI. Blake accompanies Marella on this trip, a journey over which Marella is morose and whiny. She's so worried about it that she even reads the material on this occasion, which she has never done before. Blake has begun to become resentful of Marella's frequent tantrums and the fact that Blake was picked because she was considered to be stupid and incompetent. And now the two of them are alone in the wilds with no company or help but each other.
The problem is that Blake is the one who experiences the vision. Marella does not, but Blake has no designs on being a BI. Instead, she shares her vision with Marella, helping her to remember it, so she can pass it off as her own, and she appears to do this successfully, but when the party returns to its home, things have changed somewhat. The Commission - the government - has put some harsh measures into place, taking all male children over the age of fifteen in a round-up. Clearly they fear something, and if Marella no longer needs Blake's tutoring to become a BI, then what future can remain for Blake?
I will not reveal any more, but instead recommend you read this one. You may find the ending is a bit of a let down. I didn't. I liked the way it was done. It fitted what came before. Just because it's a YA novel doesn't mean there has to be magic and mayhem. All there has to be is a good story and that's exactly what Janet McNaughton delivers.
