When I first read the blurb, I thought this would be your usual coming of age story. Boy meets girl and discovers love and life for the first time through the mediums of sex, drink and drugs. But I needed something to read so I gave it a go. And “Looking for Alaska” couldn’t have been further from my expectations.
The beauty of this book is in the believability of not only the plot but the characters also, the idea that you’ve read this story a thousand times over in the news paper but never gotten past the superficial. Each of Green richly described and intensely likable characters begin to feel like old friends as the novel progresses and you share there highs and lows. Although this may sound simple and hardy note worthy, I seems that a lot of books aimed at young adults are full of superficial teenagers who are completely removed from young people and how they act and feel and express themselves. They place said characters in stories about with plots that are transparent and ill thought out. A big trap that authors writing fiction for young adults fall into is creating characters based on stereo types that are more embarrassing than anything. But with “Looking for Alaska”, Green has avoided all this.Each character is unique and as I read the book I didn’t feel, as I have with many other writers that I have seen these characters before. Alaska who the novel gains it title from is every cliché about turned on its head. She’s beautiful, exuding sexuality and lives life to fullest. And yet she’s intelligent, a lover of great literature and much more mysterious than your usual female lead. She champions the over throwing of patriarchy but still wears a push up bra. She’s not cute and giggly and dumb. She embodies everything today’s young women wish to emulate.
The book is spilt into two sections, simply titled Before and After. There are also no chapters, just headings informing the reader how many days before or after it is. Although this is an unusual writing style, it helps to drag the reader further into the minds of the characters and serves two distinctly separate yet equality important functions in the first and second half. In the first half the count down gives a strong sense of suspense and an air of anticipation. Were as in the second half it serves to show that whilst time will always carry on passing, some times you can’t keep it with it.
The first half has a much lighter feel to it and is much more how I expected the book to be. It shows the events of Culvers Creek through the naive protagonist Pudge who has just started in his sophomore year. It shows how relationships between Pudge, Alaska, The Colonel, Lara and Takumi develop and deepen as life at the Creek follows the usual pattern of high school days. There’s sneaking of campus to smoke, drink and pull pranks on the rich kids. There’s over bearing teachers and inspirational lessons. And there’s the last words of Simon Bolivar, “How will I ever get out of this labyrinth of suffering?”, the question that Alaska wants the answer to. Green conveys the sense of camaraderie amongst the young beautifully in the working class hero The Colonel who is fiercely loyal to anyone who isn’t the authorities. The point of this first section is to build up the image of an idealized adolescence that might have it’s problems but is still over all pretty much perfect. The first section is entertaining, humours and at occasions quite moving, but ultimately forgettable. If the story had carried on in this same fashion, the book would have become just another teen boy meets girl love story that would have faded into obscurity. But it didn’t.
The event which the before and after is about remains un guessable right up until your reading it. Green leads the reader on, letting them believe that the before and after is concerning Pudge and Alaska becoming an item. So when Alaska death is revealed, the reader feels the same sense of shock and loss as the characters. When Pudge and The Colonel hear the news, I was moved to tears by the intensity of emotion that Green manages to get across to the reader.
Alaska’s death sparks the two friends and later both Lara and Takumi to relive the night over and over again in search for an explanation. Why did Alaska drive drunk in the middle of the night? Was her death a tragic accident or a way to get out of the labyrinth “straight and fast” as she had written down? Green draws the reader into this search, making them as desperate for answers as the characters. I found myself laying awake at night, going over and over the evidence in my head, trying to piece together her last night as if she had been my friend. But as the pieces fall into place and it is clear that we will never know why Alaska died, it almost seems to become unimportant. This is were the real beauty lies, in the way you learn to accept her death as natural and what becomes more important is learning to live with yourself and finding a way out of the labyrinth that seems so much more real now she’s not there. The boys have to find a way to both forgive her for leaving and forgive themselves and each other for letting her.
The book concludes with Pudge’s answer to how he personally will get out of the labyrinth. In that last page Green manages to say more about life and death than most writers do in an entire novel. Written in Pudge’s trade mark clumsy style, it shows how no one ever stops being, even after death, our energy just moves from one place to the next with out ever being destroyed. It shows how accepting she’s gone doesn’t mean forgetting, it means learning to live with her mistake and your mistake. It shows that we all need to forgive to survive the labyrinth.
The reason “Looking for Alaska” will continue to make you think for weeks after you’ve finished it is the fact that it makes you question how you will get out of the labyrinth of suffering. It makes you go over and over in your head the implications of going out straight and fast like Alaska or trying to find your way through it in the best way you can like Pudge and The Colonel. You find your self sat for hours trying to understand how you could ever get out, if it’s worth trying to get out. And any book that provokes that level of thought is defiantly worth reading.