Release by Patrick Ness review a gay teenagers quest for freedom | Children and teenagers
Children and teenagers This article is more than 6 years oldReviewRelease by Patrick Ness review – a gay teenager’s quest for freedom
This article is more than 6 years oldThemes of sex, shame and sexuality are explored in this coming-of-age novel with echoes of Mrs Dalloway
Patrick Ness is known for taking the staple themes of young adult literature – coming of age, feeling at ease in your own skin – and interweaving them with supernatural elements. More Than This (2013) features a teenage cast in an ambiguous limbo, which may or may not be the afterlife; The Rest of Us Just Live Here (2015) foregrounds characters experiencing ordinary happiness and heartbreak, while “Chosen” adolescent heroes, with names such as Indigo, battle monsters in the background. Release is written in the same vein, and is probably his most heartfelt novel to date.
He comments in the endnote on his debt to Mrs Dalloway, and the Woolfian echoes begin with the opening line: “Adam would have to get the flowers himself.” The blooms in question are not to deck a high-society party, however, but to keep the drive turned out as befits the pastor of the House on the Rock, a second-string evangelical church in small-town Washington state. Ness’s protagonist, Adam Thorn, is the preacher’s disappointing gay second son, weighed down by his father’s “Yoke” until he can achieve the release of the title: independence, adulthood, sex without secrecy or shame. On the Saturday during which the book’s action takes place, Adam, crossing paths and swords with friends, employers, family and lovers, will experience revelations, attend a farewell party, and reshape his life.
“Blanched blond, tall, bulky in a way that might be handsome” (but already aware of the “pale belly” that will be the bane of his life), Adam is instantly appealing. He is fallible, funny, full of generosity, indignation, loyalty and doubt. Imprisoned in a world even his parents know is well behind the times, he holds himself to higher standards than they do, generously giving and accepting love where they dole it out with conditions attached. His father lands a killer line with the force of a gut punch: “You have no idea how hard I work to love you.”
Release is explicit without being X-rated: it celebrates sex as the funnest, funniest thing two people could do togetherNess’s other acknowledged debt is to Judy Blume’s Forever, frequently challenged even 40 years after its first publication for its frank portrayal of teenage sex. Like Blume’s book, Release is explicit without being X-rated; it celebrates the ideal of sex as “the funnest, funniest thing two people could do together” It also emphasises the difference between the sexual harassment Adam experiences from his noxious boss and the mutual, delighted desire he enjoys with his beloved.
As in The Rest of Us Just Live Here, the real world and the supernatural touch only lightly, the link between them distilled in a single drop of blood. In the interleaved story, an otherworldly Queen becomes entwined with the soul of a murdered girl, and moves through our reality, seeking answers and revenge, with a naked 7ft faun as her companion. (This rude creature, almost arrested for indecent exposure, is a homage to the Pan of Tom Robbins’s Jitterbug Perfume.) The threads of magical realism are likely to polarise readers – for some, they will impart a sense of the extraordinary forces that might underlie the everyday; for others, they will distract from the “real” story of Adam, and the defences he builds against the parental dogma depicting his true self as flawed, and his love as false and disgusting.
Ness’s great achievement in Release is to acknowledge the weight, worth and agony of first love, and to show the richer blooming of a second, still prone to pain and error, irrevocably shaped by earlier experience, but knowing and expecting more, now, from both parties. It’s a book that will speak, with passionate warmth, to anyone who has ever been made to feel “less than”.
To order Release for £9.74 (RRP £12.99) go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99.
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