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Control work V-VIII
James Herbert MOON
I. Give the plot of the set-book (3 pages): The novel called “Moon” issued from James Herbert's pen. James Herbert is a real master of horror, his books are not books to read the last thing at night. The author knows how to keep a story moving, action-packed; his narrative always has a grip of steel and a stunning finale. The main character of this book is Jonathan Childes, an ordinary man of thirty-four, a school teacher, who had a family but divorced who fell in love with a pretty young girl, but had got a lot of problems with her father and his job and et cetera. He was an ordinary man with extraordinary abilities, and he was involved in a kind of nightmare, which abruptly changed him and his life. We meet Jonathan Childes in his hard time. Scuttling for cover from importunate press and curious neighbours, he is sheltered on a quiet island, where became a teacher of information technologies at La Roche school for girls. Because of his dealings with the police in the past, he was forced to divorce; his family needed a quiet life without any attention of the media. Thanks to his extraordinary “visions” Childes helped solve a whole series of three murders, and the penalty he paid was false accusations and relentless hounding by the media, even long afterwards. But it was in the past. And for a time he lived in peace. But his “visions” returned over. Something cruel and violent, a monster in human being’s clothing, kills peoples and mutilates their bodies. And Childes is a witness of that horror in his “visions”, in his mind. His “visions” caused dangerous and troublesome situations. When his first “vision” overtook him, he nearly drowned and was rescued by Amy, his girl-friend. He nearly lost his job as a teacher because of his chief’s assurance of an uncommon and dangerous sickness he had, that he was suffering from epileptic fits of some kind or even was heading for a mental breakdown. Childes refused to admit that his nightmare returned, that his living in peace was over, that he must make his choice again. He could lose his love, his job, his life, but he couldn’t be cool and indifferent when the new murderer was free to kill the innocents. After long deliberations he decided to resort to the police help. There was a problem: policemen strongly but mistakenly believed him a madman. There was the only policeman Overoy by name, who knew that Childes wasn’t wrong in his “visions”, that there was some kind of supernatural connection between Childes and the murderer. And Overoy tried to help Childes in his search of the maniac. They knew little about him, but the maniac had a characteristic feature – he always left a small moonstone near bodies he mutilated. And the murderer felt Childes’ presence. The maniac began to find “a spy” to kill him. He set fire to the school Childes worked. Childes at the risk of his life rescued children from a fire and had a narrow escape from the burning school. The maniac kidnapped a little girl, thinking that she was Childes’ daughter Gabby (fortunately, he had made a mistake) and killed her. Hi did everything to attract Childes’ attention to him, to decoy Childes in a trap. And finally Childes and the murderer met. The murderer turned out to be a mad woman who had extraordinary abilities too. Their mental opposition finished with Childes’ hard-won victory. Childes forced himself to be firmer, more courageous than his enemy. Only all good qualities of his nature allowed him to gain a victory over the exotic bloody maniac. The sources of Childes’ exotic gift come to light at the end of the book - his strange visions in childhood overwhelmed by the ruthless father. However hid father’s pressure and the cheerless childhood has not made him be rough and severe. It is impossible to say, that the writer managed to create authentic natures, whose actions would be natural in invented, mystical and supernatural situation. Maybe, the inconsistency of human nature is conditioned by a genre of the book (mystical thriller), and it superimposes a peculiar impress on the characters of the heroes and their behaviour.
II. Do a complete interpretation of a chapter (a passage) from the book (pp 38-43): To begin with I’d like to say that it is very difficult to interpret only a small part of the book because too many things stay out of the selected episode. So, let me introduce the personages, involved in the extract under analyses. There is the protagonist of the novel, Jonathan Childes. He is an ordinary man of thirty-four, a school teacher, who had a family in his past but divorced; who fell in love with a pretty young girl, Amy by name, but had got a lot of problems with her father and et cetera. He is an ordinary man with extraordinary abilities – he has “visions’ which make him a witness of murders. And there is another personage – Amy, Childes’ girl-friend. This extract I chose for the interpretation is about one evening in Childes’ life. The scene is laid in Childes’ cottage. Jonathan Childes returns home and tries to put to rights his feelings after his dinner with Amy. Shortly after his returning home Amy calls him, they have a talk about Childes’ problem and their mutual feelings. And then Childes remains alone with his thoughts and feelings. I find this episode very psychological and involving. This episode lets us see the inner world of Childes, his problems and fears; it lets us understand him better. And the very end of this episode promises us new breathtaking adventures. I can divide the extract into three parts. Let me enumerate them. The first one, when Childes returns home and thinks over his meeting with Amy and his feelings towards her, the second one – the dialog between Childes and Amy, and the last one, and, I should say, the most interesting one – when Childes remains alone with his sensations, feelings, and thoughts. This episode is a very good combination of dialogue, reflection, meditation and description. There is an inner monologue of the protagonist. Using of so many styles in this short episode testifies incomparable Herbert’s skills as a talented writer. The author’s language is expressive and colourful, when he gives descriptions and colloquial when his characters have a talk on the telephone. So, Childes enters home. His feelings are complex. The author presents it directly: Childes stops in the hallway to collect his feelings and catch his breath. We see that he is after something pleasant and exiting, and the next passage testifies it. From the very beginning we understand that he is in love with Amy and this love is clear and high – the author uses the metaphor “Amy’s presence, floating intangibly in the air”. We learn from this part that Childes is aware that their relationship is more than friendship. We can see that Childes’ feeling is mature; he held it in check before because “wounds of his broken marriage were not entirely healed”, he was afraid of any declaration of love before, but at that moment he realizes that he doesn’t want to hide his feelings and emotions even from himself. But, in spite of exalted emotional state he is nervous. He feels as if he were “zapped by some invisible force”. He cannot explain this tension in the plain terms but it is so strong, that the ringing phone makes him start. And the author shows it explicitly: Childes is unreasonably nervous. The detail description of usual Childes’ actions contributes to increasing tension. I can compare it with Hitchcock’s creations – we see only simple actions of Hitchcock’s heroes and nothing special, but we feel tingles down our spines. And in this extract we watch Childes changing his eye-lenses to ordinary spectacles and feel that something dangerous and wicked is coming. In this part of the story the author uses an interesting method – he binds a description of the row of events with reflections and thoughts of his characters. And Childes, manipulating his eye-lenses, tries to find the explanation for his “visions”, he hops that “visions” have nothing in common with the previous ones and tries to calm himself. He prays that he is wrong. “The nightmare later was… was just a nightmare, with no particular significance”. But due to the author’s talent for creating a true-to-life and absorbing atmosphere we remain with a certain feeling of vainness of these attempts. Common things and events awake irrational fear in Childes. “He was about to go through into the kitchen …when a soft thud from upstairs stopped him. He held his breath and gazed up …” Speaking about the sound, the author uses a row of adjectives to reinforce its influence on Childs – this sound is “a mysterious, intrusive noise” – and to emphasize how scared and uneasy Childes is. (I can guess that Childes frightened to death when he saw that his bedroom door was open. But “nothing wrong in that: he had left it open that morning – he always did.” So, we can see that common things scare him). The vision of the distant school through the window is the last straw for him. The white building is merely reflecting the setting sun’s rays but Childes’ “heart stopped momentarily and his hands gripped the sill when he saw the fiery glow”. To reinforce the impression the author uses the hyperbola - “His heart stopped momentarily”. Now let me return to Childes and Amy’s conversation. From it we learn about the relationships between Amy and Childes. Amy is very afraid for him, she wants to know about his state, about his feelings. Amy knows about his “visions” there are no dark secrets between them as the author puts it. During their conversation Childes tries to calm her and reassures her of his safety, knowing that he (and, maybe, she too) is in danger. It is not easy; we can see his inner fight with himself not to trouble her. He doesn’t want to lose Amy like it happened with his previous family (ex-family). He loves her. He doesn’t want his “visions” to hurt Amy. And Amy is afraid of Childes’ going away. She sounds breathless, miserably and her voice is uncertain, she asks him not to leave her and regrets that their conversation turns into some kind of a squabble. But Childes finds a way to change the situation. The author resorts to the irony to show that the tenseness of the conversation looses: “Hey, c’mon. Don’t mind an old man’s self-pity. So you missed me? I only left you ten minutes ago. …sounds like a bad case.” But as I can see, Amy doesn’t believe that everything is all right. I can see it from her last word: “Jon…” She leaves her phrase unfinished as if she wants to say something else but doesn’t dare. And her voice is hushed. During this conversation Amy is doing a very important thing – she is breaching the final barrier between them with an admission of they both feel. As I can understand, in this extract the author touches upon the problem of the relationships between two people – an experienced in family life man and a young girl. Childes is very careful. Amy is very frank. And her openness safes their love, as I can see. Next problem the author focuses our attention on is the problem of Childes’ inner disagreement. It is a common knowledge that very often people don’t want to call a spade a spade. And Childes tries to find some kind of a convenient explanation for his returned “visions”, he is not ready to accept the fact that his extraordinary abilities can ruin his love and his happiness once more. Speaking in the plain terms of good and bad I’d like to say that the impression this extract produced on me is rather good. On the one hand the feeling aroused is romantic. It is very pleasant to see the relationships between Childes and Amy. On the other hand there is the feeling of hidden danger, something exiting and frightening at the same time. And all was mentioned above makes this short extract very involving, not only the plot of the extract, which is rather simple and traditional. As I can see, the main idea of this extract is that people faced the real catastrophe, knowing about its inevitability, always try not to believe in it; they try to convince themselves that this catastrophe is unreal, and that everything will turn out all right, especially if they came across it before. After reading this extract any reader is left with a sensation that something danger is waiting for Childes, something mysterious and evil. And there is strong desire to keep reading to learn about further events.
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