[Review] The Ask and the Answer - Patrick Ness

Title of Book: The Ask and The Answer

Author: Patrick Ness

Series: Chaos Walking #2

Publisher: Walker Books

Publication Year: 2011

Language: English

Format: Paperback

Pages: 517

Fleeing before a relentless army, Todd has carried a desperately wounded Viola right into the hands of their worst enemy, Mayor Prentiss.
Immediately separated from Viola and imprisoned, Todd is forced to learn the ways of the Mayor's new order.
But what secrets are hiding just outside of town? And where is Viola? Is she even still alive? And who are the mysterious Answer?
And then, one day, the bombs begin to explode...
This second thrilling volume in the Chaos Walking trilogy is a tense, shocking and deeply moving novel about resistance under the most extreme pressure.

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The Ask and the Answer is a direct continuation of the Knife of Never Letting Go by Patrick Ness. It’s the second book in the Chaos Walking trilogy. If you haven’t read the first book, I suggest you to stop reading this and read the first book instead because major spoiler alert. I was actually struggling to decide whether to write a review of the second book or not. But after giving much thought of it, I do have something to say about this book.

First of all, the Ask and the Answer starts right off after the ending of the Knife of Never Letting Go. Todd and Viola finally arrived in Haven only to find out that the Mayor and his army has arrived there earlier. Viola was dying so Todd pleaded for her life to the Mayor stating that he would do anything. The Mayor then accepted his offer and separated them. From then on we see the story unfolds from two perspectives, Todd’s and Viola’s.

The focal point of this book is, as the title suggests, the Ask and the Answer. What are those you said? Before we go to that, I have to remind you that this book sets in a whole different planet with a different set of rules, both in how the nature behaves and the social customs including language. You see, what they meant by ‘ask’ here is what we would call a question. So in our language the title actually means the question and the answer. Although, they also mean other things in this book. 

When Viola arrived in Haven with Todd, she was in a bad state that Todd practically begged the Mayor to save her. The Mayor then put Viola in a healing house, which is what they call a hospital specifically with women healers. As it turns out, years ago when the first settlers had a war with the indigenous alien race, there’s an underground organization called the Answer that helped fighting the war. The Answer consists mostly of the healers. The leader of the Answer apparently is the one who treated Viola, who is also the head of the healing house Viola in, Mistress Coyle. Contrary to what people might think, this group of healers is more aggressive than the mayor and his army. They like to use bombs in their attack and they can be stealthy considering they are women and aren’t affected by the noise. They can place the bombs anywhere without being detected.

But why after years this organization became active again? What is the question that they are trying to answer? Well, the Mayor, that Todd’s been running away from the entire first book, has a bad reputation. Not to mention, with his army, he basically tried to invade the new world and make him the only ruler there. To prove his narcissist tendency, he renamed Haven into New Prentisstown. Yes, the Mayor’s real name is Prentiss. While we don’t really know what happened to the women in the original Prentisstown, from the way he treated the women in Haven, I could tell that he’s afraid of women. Mostly because they don’t have noise which make them unreadable and unpredictable to him. The oppression from the Mayor is what triggers the uprising from the Answer.

This book is full of the duality of the ask and the answer. Two sides of the story. If the Answer chose to be aggressive and terrorized the Mayor with explosions, the Mayor picked a more subtle and manipulative approach. The interesting thing is, although there are two sides in this book, one would expect there would be the right side and wrong side. That’s not happening in this book.

Besides the Ask and the Answer, the Spackle or the indigenous alien race also plays a role in this book. They represent the oppressed race that’s being enslaved and being driven out of their own home. To put it bluntly, the collateral damage of the fight between the Ask and the Answer. It’s the saddest thing actually. Anyway, this review becomes more rambly than I intended to. My point is, if you’ve read the Knife of Never Letting Go, please keep on reading the next book. The first book is tough to read for me but the second one is better than the first one. It’s not the best book I’ve read, but I quite enjoyed it.