Voice in the wilderness

WOLFSTONG, by Sam Thompson. Illustrated by Anna Tromop.

Silas, the hero of acclaimed British novelist Sam Thompson’s first children’s book, ‘Wolfstongue’, cannot speak. Or at least he doesn’t talk often, or very well. “People spoke to him and waited for an answer, but the words he wanted to say stuck.” Maybe he stutters, maybe it’s a deeper speech disorder – we don’t know for sure. The kids at school laugh at him. They call him Silence.

But you know who can talk? foxes. They will do it all day long. They talk you out of your freedom, your family, your identity, even your life. There are plenty of books out there that rehabilitate foxes and free them from their reputation as scheming schemers from the Aesop era. “Wolfstongue” takes them back to their grievous roots. These foxes are not fantastic.

The story of Silas does not begin with a fox but with a wolf. They meet unexpectedly after school on a bike path. Silas, as usual, is alone, and he is terrified of this large, ferocious beast, but the wolf only needs him to remove a (quite Aesopian) pin from his paw. He leads Silas to a forest that is somehow all around them, magically woven through the city where Silas lives. Silas thinks he is being taken to another world. The wolf corrects him: “There is only one world,” he says. “Your kind lives here too. Most of the time you just don’t notice.”

The wolf’s name is Isengrim. It was a fox who gave him that name, and that’s where all his troubles started.

One of the themes of the novel is the power – in every sense of the word – of speech. For the foxes, language is a means to manipulate other animals, to impose their fox will on them. When the foxes called Isengrim, they gained power over him.

The wolves, on the other hand, are not meant to talk. Language undermines their power. “Until the foxes taught them the words for sadness and fear, they didn’t know what it was to be sad and afraid. But now they knew, and because of that, they began to lose their strength.”

The foxes enslaved the wolves and put them to work building a huge underground city. Isengrim has escaped with his pregnant partner, Hersent, and the foxes are hunting them. The wolves are looking for a human child they call Wolfstongue: “The child would be our voice, so we don’t have to talk anymore. So that we could live as wolves should live. Free from words.” Silas, the only human child on the scene, is the obvious candidate, and talking isn’t his forte. To save the wolves he will have to find his voice.

“Wolfstongue” unfolds from Silas’s perspective, which gives the book an inner feeling. He’s not the bubbly, jesting kind of point-of-view character (the book’s gloomy, old-fashioned black-and-white drawings, by Norwegian illustrator Anna Tromop, heighten the mood). There are some difficult choices in his story, and Thompson’s writing vividly conveys the power with which nature and wildness strike an introverted city boy: duster.… Swaying shadows and leaves made droplets of brightness and an endless whisper that wove with the twitter of birds into an immense silence, a sound greater and deeper than silence.”

But “Wolfstongue” isn’t just about nature. As in George Orwell’s Animal Farm, the dynamics of oppression and resistance that take place between animals mirrors those between humans. When Silas goes to the forest, he sees the same things he struggles with in the schoolyard, written in large, in the war of wolves and foxes. As Isengrim so wisely put it, there is only one world.

Lev Grossman’s latest novel is “The Golden Swift,” a sequel to “The Silver Arrow.”