250 pages or less
Worthwhile reads to fit busy student schedules

-- Kristin Johnson, Literary Critic

Others explores choice, existence and meaning in a thrill ride of epic proportions
Fiction
The Society of Others
By: William Nicholson
Publisher: Nan A. Talese, an imprint of Doubleday, a Division of Random House, Inc., 224 pages, hardcover $23.95, February 2005.
First Thoughts: An existential journey for one man who needs escape, but discovers connecting with others defines the meaning of life.

The Society of Others is a philosophical thriller and first novel by one of the screenwriters of Shadowlands and Gladiator. The latter won William Nicholson an Oscar in 2000.

The journey in Others actually begins in chapter three. The first two chapters describe the dilemma of a nameless narrator who thinks there is no need to ever leave his room in his parents’ house. He has just completed college and would be content with his father footing the bill for all of his expenses, except that his father continually pesters him about what he wants to do with his life.

He explores the notion of lack of responsibility and the desire to remain blameless as he tries to decide where he would go if he were to travel: “Macchu Pichu, Goa, Bali, Kathmandu: how do you choose? Anyway I have a problem with choice. I’m better at having to put up with situations I haven’t chosen. Once you choose, it’s like if you don’t like it, it’s your own fault.” After this, he makes a spur of the moment decision to embark on a journey to nowhere in particular: “You’re thinking, how can you go away and not go somewhere? The answer is you go, but you don’t know where. That way when you don’t get somewhere, it’s not your fault. If you don’t like it, that’s no big surprise, because why should you like it?”

The narrator leaves his home in England, but gets more than the blameless trip to nowhere he bargained for. While hitchhiking, he is picked up all too easily by a trucker and ends up as a pawn in a cat and mouse game for his identity in an unnamed East bloc country. The journey quickly turns dangerous when he discovers the trucker is hauling illegal cargo, the worst of which is books for a resistance movement. The narrator is plunged into a situation where he is mistaken for a member of the insurgency and must choose between uncertain safety with the group of rebels, or a life on the run in an unknown country.

The contraband books, written by the leader of the resistance movement, Leon Vicino, haunt him throughout the story. The trucker and a schoolteacher, who also gives our main character a ride later in the story, both use the books to challenge his philosophical beliefs about life.

Nicholson’s talent as a screenwriter shows throughout in vivid images like this: “They dance with a funny little bouncing gait, like cock pheasants squaring up for a fight, though this dance ends with arms linked and a swirling spin. Now other guests are dancing, step up, step back, in and out, over and under.”

The Society of Others has been compared to Kafka’s Metamorphosis. But I drew my own parallel to a more basic, favorite childhood book called Pierre, a cautionary tale, by Maurice Sendak. Similarly, by the end of The Society of Others, the boy who cares for no one and nothing finds himself, and ends up learning to care for the others in his society.

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