Secular shelf life

THE FAULT IN OUR STARS
By John Green
Penguin. 336 pages. £7.99
ISBN 978 0 141 345 659

Ask a teenager what they are reading and, if they are, it will no doubt be something online.

A strange kind of internet-word-of-mouth now exists which creates self-sustaining international crazes. The Fault in our Stars is a book which was bound to succeed, written as it was by John Green, a Twitter–user who has over one million followers and whose weekly video-blogs on YouTube are watched by loads more. He’s also a New York Times book reviewer and has written other very successful teen (Young Adult?) books.

Young cancer sufferer

The Fault in our Stars is narrated by a 16-year-old cancer sufferer named Hazel Grace. Her illness has been with her for years and is now kept at bay by a new wonder drug, but she knows that she will not live for very much longer. Hazel meets Gus, whose leg has been amputated because of cancer, at a support group, and they fall in love. And that combination of love and mortality is the centre of the story. The characters and the experience of falling in love are powerfully and accurately drawn: Hazel is clever and defensive, scared of hurting others; Gus is full of bravado and romance. At times the pretentiousness of their conversation was overbearing, but then I remembered myself at 17.

Obsessed with oblivion

A central idea of the book is oblivion: Hazel is a materialist, convinced that when she dies, she dies. Her passion, however, is to know what happens to the characters of her favourite book, a book about which she speaks with ‘evangelical zeal’. And so she still yearns for a something more, which will make sense of a story, if not her story. With Gus, she travels to Amsterdam to meet the author. I can’t tell you any more without spoiling the plot, nevertheless we are left with an unrelentingly bleak ending. The mess of human death and grief are displayed, alongside the beauty which is in love and loyalty.

Read blog posts about this book and they are full of teenagers’ identification with the characters and how much they cried. Some parents will no doubt be wary of this and might decide that this is a book to be avoided; the book certainly is no friend to Christian hope and may well promote a mawkish fascination with death.

I wouldn’t write it off altogether, however, because it raises questions which are so often ignored in our culture, and which teens want to discuss. Read it with your child, or take passages to youth group to provoke a conversation.