[email protected] reviewed The Chocolate War by Robert Cormier (Laurel leaf library)
The Ugly Truth of a Male World
3 stars
When I first read this book in 1980 I would have given it five stars. I was only months out of a Catholic boys' school, and much of the book felt like it was non-fiction.
In summary, cruelty and bullying are part of the system. The "adults" in charge of us were supposed to be above that, to protect us from the worst excesses of the cruelest of the children. In fact, the priests and brothers, most of whom were themselves ex-students, were just bigger versions of the children. They were older and more powerful members of the clique of bullies. Effectively, there were no adults, no protectors. The entire system was designed to destroy the spirit of any non-conformist. Authority was just another form of bullying.
Only "The Chocolate War" told it like it was. Its opening sentence is not well-known enough to be one of those trivia quiz …
When I first read this book in 1980 I would have given it five stars. I was only months out of a Catholic boys' school, and much of the book felt like it was non-fiction.
In summary, cruelty and bullying are part of the system. The "adults" in charge of us were supposed to be above that, to protect us from the worst excesses of the cruelest of the children. In fact, the priests and brothers, most of whom were themselves ex-students, were just bigger versions of the children. They were older and more powerful members of the clique of bullies. Effectively, there were no adults, no protectors. The entire system was designed to destroy the spirit of any non-conformist. Authority was just another form of bullying.
Only "The Chocolate War" told it like it was. Its opening sentence is not well-known enough to be one of those trivia quiz answers, but it is up there with the best of them: "They murdered him." There is no saviour, no victory of righteousness like the humiliation of the evil Flashman in "Tom Brown's Schooldays". If you stand up against the system, you will be crushed.
The speaking of that truth was exhilarating to me. The more depressing the story, the better it was.
I still hold to that truth (reinforced by later revelations of child sexual abuse). But my later reading of Cormier's best-known novel was not so favourable. Mainly it's the sexism. There are no female characters. Drooling over distant girls as sex objects is presented as protagonist Jerry's fuel, so he can keep on going and be further tormented by the male bullies.
You get the impression that this is a book about boys, for boys, written by a boy. But if the boys involved are so casually indifferent to the horrors of rape, sexual harrassment and gender inequality, its creates structural weaknesses to the moral foundation of the rest of the story. So I knocked off a couple of stars.
Maybe when the perfect novel is written is will keep some of the doomed, maddening fury that is at the heart of "The Chocolate War".
