A Fearsome Thing

“You really aren’t afraid, are you?

‘No,’ Conor said. ‘Not of you, anyway.’”

Patrick Ness, A Monster Calls (2011) ¹

The first chapter of A Monster Calls by Patrick Ness (based on an idea by Siobhan Dowd)² introduces us to two characters: a boy called Conor and the yew tree he can see from his bedroom window – or, more specifically, the monster that the yew tree he can see from his bedroom window becomes.

 

Ness, Patrick, A Monster Calls (London: Walker Books, 2011).

I have come to get you, Conor O’Malley,³ the monster said, pushing against the house, shaking the pictures off Conor’s wall, sending books and electronic gadgets and an old stuffed toy rhino tumbling to the floor.

A monster, Conor thought. A real, honest-to-goodness monster. In real, waking life. Not in a dream, but here, at his window.

Come to get him.

But Conor didn’t run.

In fact, he found he wasn’t even frightened.

All he could feel, all he had felt since the monster revealed itself, was a growing disappointment.

Because this wasn’t the monster he was expecting.

“So come and get me then,” he said.

Conor isn’t scared of the monster that might or might not be a dream. He is, on the other hand, extraordinarily scared of the nightmare he has on a regular basis that’s definitely a dream. This from a bit later on:

“Can’t you just leave me alone?”

The monster shook its head, but not in answer to Conor’s question. It is most unusual, it said. Nothing I do seems to make you frightened of me.

“You’re just a tree,” Conor said, and there was no other way he could think about it…

And you have worse things to be frightened of, said the monster, but not as a question.

Conor looked at the ground, then up at the moon, anywhere but the monster’s eyes. The nightmare feeling was rising in him, turning everything around him to darkness, making everything seem heavy and impossible, like [sic] he’d been asked to lift a mountain with his bare hands and no one would let him leave until he did.

Page after page, chapter after chapter, we’re not told what the nightmare really is. That said, we get hints and beginnings, and, whatever else is going on in the story, it looms ever large in the corner. We can be pretty sure it has something to do with Conor’s mum, who is embroiled in a lengthy and wearisome battle with cancer, and maybe people with more of a knack for these things than I have would consider its more specific contents readily deducible from the concerns and emphases of the plotline – but the narrative is as reluctant as its protagonist to actually acknowledge, confront, and expose the nightmare, even as it is as enslaved as him to its dark and heavy presence. I emphasise this point because I am about to spoil what the nightmare is, and if you haven’t yet read the book, you might like to leave the rest of this post until you have done, so that the ending, when you get to it, might be as compelling for you as it was for me.

In the nightmare, Conor’s mum is pulled over a cliff-edge by ‘a cloud of burning darkness’. Conor grabs hold of her as she falls, becoming her sole anchor to the ground, but finds it impossible to pull her back up and increasingly unbearable to keep holding onto her.

This was the nightmare. This was the nightmare that woke him up screaming every night. This was it happening, right now, right here.

He was on the cliff edge, bracing himself, holding onto his mother’s hands with all his strength, trying to keep her from being pulled down into the blackness, pulled down by the creature below the cliff.

Who [sic] he could see all of now.

The real monster, the one he was properly afraid of, the one he’d expected to see when the yew tree first showed up, the real, nightmare monster, formed of cloud and ash and dark flames, but with real muscle, real strength, real red eyes that glared back at him and flashing teeth that would eat his mother alive. I’ve seen worse, Conor had told the yew tree that first night.

And here was the worse thing.

The worse thing is this: Conor lets his mum go. He tries to tell himself that she fell, that he was physically incapable of holding her any longer, but the yew-tree monster sets him straight, repeating again and again: you let her go. For a good while Conor refuses to admit it, can’t bear even to entertain the merest shadow of the notion that he wanted his mum to fall, but eventually he gives in:

“I can’t stand it any more!” he cried out as the fire raged around him. “I can’t stand knowing that she’ll go! I just want it to be over! I just want it to be finished!”

And then the fire ate the world, wiping away everything, wiping him away with it.

He welcomed it with relief, because it was, at last, the punishment he deserved.

Conor isn’t scared of the yew-tree monster’s threats to eat him alive. He isn’t even scared of the nightmare’s fire that consumes the whole world. What he’s scared of is admitting that there is part of him that wants his mother to die. He’s scared that those secret yearnings harboured by his heart which he deems bad and wrong and shameful will be exposed. He’s scared of the truth about himself, the truth on whose account he understands himself to stand guilty and deserving of punishment, and of that truth becoming known. Only what threatens to expose that truth, consequently, is able to hold real power over him.

 

The monster is, after all, only a yew tree.

I think we’re all rather like that. Compare, if you will, the following chunk of the book of Isaiah:

In the year that King Uzziah died I saw the Lord sitting upon a throne, high and lifted up; and the train of his robe filled the temple. Above him stood the seraphim. Each had six wings: with two he covered his face, and with two he covered his feet, and with two he flew. And one called to another and said, “Holy, holy, holy is the Lord of hosts; the whole earth is full of his glory!” And the foundations of the thresholds shook at the voice of him who called, and the house was filled with smoke. And I said, “Woe is me! For I am lost; for I am a man of unclean lips, and I dwell in the midst of a people of unclean lips; for my eyes have seen the King, the Lord of hosts!”⁴

The Lord is much – infinitely – bigger and more powerful and more terrifying than any monster, real or dreamt. Nonetheless, note what it is specifically that Isaiah’s distressed about: he is of unclean lips, and yet his eyes have seen the King, the Lord of hosts, who is not just holy, but holy holy holy (a cameo there from our favourite Hebrew poetic technique of repetition for emphasis). He’s in the presence of one who knows the truth about him and all that’s bad and wrong and shameful in him and what he says, and whose moral inscrutability and cosmic sovereignty qualify him to sentence Isaiah to whatever punishment he deems fit. And he is, rightly, terrified: “Woe is me! For I am lost.”

There are some scary things out there. There are all kinds of monsters, most of them not formed from yew trees. But the most fearsome thing of all is to have the truth about oneself, the despicable sentiments one holds and expresses, exposed; and, because it is the truth, to be unable to deny it; and so to stand condemned on its account. Conor and Isaiah both get this.

The yew-tree monster knew the truth about Conor. It could have punished him for it – earlier in the novel it told him a couple of different stories about how it had wrought judgement on the deserving in various ways – and in fact Conor expects it to punish him for it. All through the novel he has been expecting some kind of punishment that never seems to arrive. But what actually happens is that after the firestorm, when Conor wakes up unexpectedly alive, the monster’s first concern is to comfort him: his secret yearning, it reassures him, is only one of a million conflicting desires at the core of his being; it is motivated by nothing other than the natural-as-anything desire for an end to his own pain; and it has absolutely zero to do with what will actually happen to his mum. Conor cannot, in other words, be blamed for what happens to his mum; it is established that he is not guilty of doing her harm.

What happens to Isaiah next is a bit different.

Then one of the seraphim flew to me, having in his hand a burning coal that he had taken with tongs from the altar. And he touched my mouth and said: “Behold, this has touched your lips; your guilt is taken away, and your sin atoned for.”

Both Conor and Isaiah are established as being not guilty, but whereas in Conor’s case it was because he was never really guilty in the first place, Isaiah’s guilt, on the other hand, is acknowledged as very much real – and then dealt with. It is taken away and atoned for. The truth of what Isaiah was like coloured him guilty, and it would have been perfectly fair and right and sensible for God to have condemned him, but instead, he chose to change the truth of what Isaiah was like so that he didn’t have to be condemned.

The same is true of all of us who have placed our trust in Jesus’ atonement for our guilt made at the cross. Sure, we’re still riddled with wrongdoing in our earthly selves, in ‘the flesh’, but the real truth of who we are is no longer that we are guilty, but that we possess Jesus’ own righteousness exactly as if it were our own. And, by way of consequence, we never have to be afraid of standing condemned by the truth about ourselves. No accuser has any truthful evidence to bring against us. The fear that drove Conor’s nightmare, the fear that enslaved him by night and lurked in the shadows of his waking mind, can hold no power over us: there is – not because we are good but because God is merciful – no longer anything wrong in us to be exposed.

Let that sink in a moment. That’s massive.

We’re set free from the most fearsome fear there is, the fear that the truth of who we are will be exposed and we will stand condemned on account of it, the fear, in other words, of God’s righteous judgement on wrongdoers. And consequently, we’re able to exercise a better fear: a right, good, beautiful awe of who God is and what he’s done. Isn’t there, after all, something thoroughly magnificent and awe-inspiring and, yes, fearsome about a love so absolute it would give up everything for the sake of atoning for the guilty?

If you, O Lord, should mark iniquities,

O Lord, who could stand?

But with you there is forgiveness,

that you may be feared.⁵

Footnotes 

¹ A film adaptation was also released last year. I haven’t seen it and so can’t tell you whether it’s any good, but the trailer, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R2Xbo-irtBA, looks fairly promising. 

² I was given the book by a friend some time ago but only got round to reading it recently. Sincere thanks to said friend for the gift: this book is beautiful and well worth getting hold of: http://www.hive.co.uk/Product/Patrick-Ness/A-Monster-Calls/16537257. 

³ In the text of the novel, the monster’s words are italicised rather than emboldened, but because I put the entire quotation in italics, I thought bold would be better than a reversion to normal type (for so blatantly abnormal a character). These kinds of decisions occupy far too much of my brain… 

⁴ Whole chapter for you: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=isaiah+6&version=ESVUK. 

⁵ This is a brief and exquisite psalm that is really, really worth the very little time it will take you to read it: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=psalm+130&version=ESVUK.