At 14, Hamish Graham is a genius, a sociopath, a brilliant strategist, and a murderer. Hamish has recently been transferred into another facility for criminal youth, and the staff doesn’t really know how to approach his rehabilitation. The director of the New Horizons Boys’ Home in New Zealand decides Hamish should keep a journal in the hopes of both providing an outlet for Hamish to reflect on himself and for the staff to get a handle on what he thinks and how he feels.
Denis Wright’s Violence 101is Hamish’s first person journal alternating with 3rd person narrative of the staff’s reaction to the journal and the narrative delivery of the action of the novel. When Hamish arrives, we learn he’s been transferred from another facility for having violently assaulted his therapist. The first interaction he has with the other boys at the New Horizon’s Home involves him stabbing a youth in the face with a fork and brawling with the boys until staff can separate them. As we learn from Hamish, the stabbing and brawl were the best strategic move he could make, since it proved to the other boys that he could defend himself and it set the groundwork for an understanding with the boy he stabbed, Victor, the defacto leader of the group. Through Hamish’s other entries we learn about the violent acts he committed that led him to his present incarceration, as well as both his mystified reaction as to why he’s treated the way he is and his overwhelming obsession with great military “heroes” of the past, including Alexander the Great. Repeatedly Hamish tells the reader that he knows he was born in the wrong era: in some cultures his willingness to embrace violence, his strategic mind, and his lack of remorse would have made him a hero, not a person to be reviled like he is today. After getting to know (and respect) some of the staff at the Home, events propel Hamish to escape and challenge himself to an ultimate life-or-death challenge.
Hamish is a terrifying, riveting, charesmatic character and it’s easy to fall under his influence and see the world exactly as he wants you to see it. Wright creates a 3 dimensional character whose self-awareness is so real it’s easy to examine the seeds of violence in Hamish’s mind and watch in horror as they bloom into the terrible things he’s done. While Hamish’s journal entries are so strong and well done, I felt the alternating chapters with the staff’s reaction and the narrator taking us along with the plot were unnecessary. Most of the staff come off as characatures and I would have been so much more completely under Hamish’s spell and swept up in the story if we’d had only Hamish’s journal as the means by which to know him.
- Posted by Cori