Every zombie franchise wants a juicy new slant to stagger you.
The Girl With All The Gifts by M.R.Carey takes a good crack at biting a new kind of life into zombie horror with its own brand of the living dead. Set in the cold and drizzly South of England, the majority of the population has been bumped off with a new strain of the cordyceps fungus, a parasite famous for zombifying ants and compelling them up trees to spread their spores before bursting horribly through their heads, into the sky.
For me, the best new twist on the tale was the lead character, Melanie, a tiny ten-year-old genius who has never been allowed outside the army base where she lives. Every adult around her is cruel, or incompetent, or otherwise screwed. Melanie loves stories, maths and nature, and there is something terribly, horribly wrong with her.
Not nearly as wrong as the world outside the army-base she lives in, however, where the living want you dead, the dead certainly want you dead, and, to be honest, everyone in the army base wants you dead, too. It’s a person-eat-person world out there, and plucky young Melanie and a ragtag bunch of teachers, scientists and army dudebros need to figure out new ways to survive the carnage.
Melanie’s bright young narrative flare keeps the events happening around her as bleak as a grey English day.
The other characters keep up the desolation. Oh, boy. How I hated them. It was frustrating as hell to watch a gang of people I actively loathed running around making God-awful decisions and I wholly wished every single one of them would die hideously; the stroke of genius came in rooting for them to mess up and hurt themselves, and then feeling guilty and sad when they did.
When push came to shove and karma came back to bite them on the butt, I still found myself feeling miserable and wishing it hadn’t happened. Melanie is the only character who remains an adorable little ray of sunshine throughout the whole novel. Except for when she isn’t.
The short, first-person chapters give the story a nail-biting pace. Getting inside each ghastly character’s head allows for a smooth balance of the simple, the salubrious and the silly that world-shaking scenarios tend to bring out in people.
The metaphors in particular managed a genius balance of sad, striking and silly, my favourite being when a character is described as acting ‘like an entire sackful of pissed off cats.’ Melanie’s descriptions are especially poignant, detailing a clever child learning concepts such as ‘trees’ for the first time in a well-considered and genuinely lovely fashion. There were also many gloriously described and often very awesome death scenes, including one of the most humanly depressing deaths I have read in a long time.
The problem with The Girl With All The Gifts arises in its believability. Some of the scenes and emotions are frankly authentic – a primary school teacher’s post-apocalyptic blu-tac hoarding, for instance. At many other times the plot and the actions of the characters are so unbelievable that, by the end of the book, my disbelief had dropped through the floor.
For example, nobody seems to be that bothered about zombies unless they’re confronted by hundreds of them. There are inconsistencies, too, such as characters claiming they’ve never worn shoes before when they were shown putting them on in the first chapter, and characters with hair plastered to their cheeks when they’ve just had their hair shaved off.
The romance subplot was the awful, preposterous platitude where the male character pervs on the female character and touches her without her permission, but they still end up together. Also, the cantankerous, torture-happy soldiers say ‘frigging’ a lot. What kind of soldier says ‘frigging’?
The thing that pissed me off most thoroughly, however, was when a trained solider takes off into the wilderness alone with no food, no water, no ammunition, no extra clothes and absolutely no idea where he is. He then pauses, in the midst of terrifying and profound danger, to look at porn.
Even when the plot is spurious and predictable it is easy to keep chugging quickly through pages. When the story seems most saturated in cliché there are sometimes powerful, surprising moments – often it is the small things in the novel that banged me like a gong, so quiet and powerful that to tell you would be almost worse than spoiling the ending. The ending itself managed to balance both feelings – I thoroughly expected it, but it still managed to be shocking. It is the kind of ending you think about for months after you’ve finished reading. And it is worth reading, despite its faults, for that reason – The Girl With All The Gifts sets out to surprise you with something new and, even at its stodgiest, there’s always something there to take your breath away.
