Response to Skellig

I’m going to tell you the truth: I did not like this book at all. Oddly, though, I did not like it because I wanted it to be longer. I just didn’t feel like much of anything happened, and the book is not even 200 pages. Turn this book into about 500 pages and then you might have something. As it is, I had so many questions I wanted the book to explain and it didn’t explain any of them. I understand I may be in the minority here, as the book did win the Printz award and seems to be fairly well regarded in young adult literature circles, but I can’t go against my personal reaction. There was so much I wanted to know, the first being, of course, what is Skellig? Is he a man? A carryover of a race long gone or a futuristic man that we haven’t seen yet? Is he an angel? Is he part man, part bird? Is he none of these things and he is just simply some other type of being that nobody knows about? I had no idea. And by the time the book was over, I still had not the faintest idea of what he was. I think some people would probably say, “That’s part of the beauty, that we don’t know what he is, he’s just a magical creature, etc.” but I really don’t see that here because the story centers on Skellig and who he is. What type of creature he is, I think, is extremely important to the other events in the story, and without knowing what he is the other events sort of fall apart.
Certain events of the book, which I found very predictable, had everything to do with Skellig and who or what he is, yet we never find out. When the owl calling started, I knew that would become a connection Skellig had, but why? What about him makes him connected to owls? Why not a different bird? Maybe I would know if I knew what Skellig was supposed to be, but I don’t. The visit that Skellig pays to the hospital to make the baby healthy was also very predictable in my mind, but once again, what happens there has everything to do with who or what Skellig is. If he is an angel, there is some sort of spiritual power or divine intervention going on. If he is a holdover from an ancient type of human, there is some sort of power that has left our current race of humans, and why did it leave? If he is an advanced type of being, there is some sort of power that perhaps humans can gain, and if so then how can we gain it and where is it coming from? If he is something that’s not even connected to humans then I don’t know what’s going on. And while some may like the fact that the reader doesn’t know exactly what’s going on, I did not.
So I suppose the charge, then, with a book you don’t like, is to attempt to figure out why the author made the decisions they did. I don’t think the author sucks. clearly, Almond is a good author, he’s written a lot of highly-acclaimed books, so that’s not it. One professor I had sophomore year of college, Quadry Ismail (not the former Viking) would say, “It doesn’t matter at all what the author is trying to do, the only thing that matters is your response to the text.” I’m not sure I agree with that reasoning, so as I read I did try to put aside my dislike for the book and attempt to figure out what the author was trying to do. I think Almond was attempting to create a magical situation and that the mystery of who or what Skellig is adds to the mystery and wonder of the story. Perhaps Almond wanted to create a character that was something different to each reader, or maybe he wanted a universal message of hope and love and he was afraid that nailing down too much in the story would cause that message to become too confined and fewer readers would connect to the story.
One thing I didn’t like that probably was not Almond’s fault was the fact that Skellig doesn’t tell his name until page 87. The reason this bothered me was because Skellig is obviously the guy in the garage, why wait until page 87 to bring that up? However, the part that is probably not Almond’s fault is that the inside flap tells us that the guy is Skellig. I very much doubt Almond wrote that inside flap, and without it perhaps there would have been more mystique around the word “skellig,” but there wasn’t and so it just felt strange that the name didn’t come up in the book until halfway through.