‘You won’t believe this but it’s true.’ The Savage opens with a kind of challenge, an underlining of the credible incredibility of the story the narrator is about to tell,and it is this challenge which ironically gives permission to both the narator and the reader to believe. To have faith. And this faith involves an apparently faithless place, a place where faith has fallen into seeming disrepair, the ‘ruined chapel’ where the narrator Blue places his character The Savage, living as he does in this separate world from school and rules and home. For the Savage as his name suggests lives outside the conventional world of routine and domestic relationships. He is Blue’s powerfully realised ‘alternative’ response to the death of his father after his school counsellor Mrs Molloy, advocates writing down his feelings so he can ‘start to move forward’ and he finds such a quasi-direct approach ‘stupid’ or even ‘made me feel worse’. Instead of his feeling diary, Blue takes a new approach, ‘ripped up all that stuff about myself, got a new notebook and started scribbling.’ Such decisive physically vital actions seem energising, rather than laboured and self consciously formulated. ‘Scribbling’ is anarchic as it takes neglects the serious, it embraces flow and spontaneity. Rejecting the words ‘about myself’ the act of ‘scribbling’ belongs to another activity where what appears, appears. Words are found ‘outside’ the parameters of the grief stricken, ‘fixed’ devastated self, and these words take on an animated character, a shape, a story. They have flesh and the distortion of this flesh voices that which couldn’t be spoken before. I wonder whether in creating the figure of the Savage, Almond’s Blue, creates new parameters for the ‘real’ through which Blue’s perceptual bewilderment at the death of his father, can explore a physical response to the world whose power is instinctive and primal.
For the ‘Savage’ is a ‘wild kid’ whose isolation and mutism liberates him from regulation and lawfulness. All the commitments and relationships which would link the Savage directly to Blue’s suffering are removed. ‘He had no family and had no pals’ and such a removal of intimates converts the uncontrollable aspects of loss into some antisocial , aggressively solitary condition, where loneliness is self-chosen, rather than precipitated by events beyond human control-specifically in Blue’s case, the sudden arbitrary death of his father. The extremity of the Savage’s intense physicality gives violent freedom to feelings which Blue finds cannot be represented or acknowledged through conventional representation. Trapped inside one suffering fixed body, Blue finds the creation of his Savage character a form of violently rapturous embodiment where even emotions can have new shapes and new behaviours.
This Savage is mute too, so his language cannot deceive and dencounce him, as Blue’s language does when he tries to write directly about his grief. The platitudinous promise of moving forward through such expression reads hollowly and is set against the antisocial behaviours of the Savage,accentuated still further through his rough spelling, his illegible grunts, which give a rawness and kinaesthetic reality to the experience of the Savage. The binary divisions of the world embraced by the Savage are reempowering for Blue. Disorientation is impossible is the world is either this or that.
The Savage communicates too, a sense of the beyondness of grief, where loss makes us want to clamber out of any place where we have to be irrevocably ourselves and to feel, again and again, the impossibility of the beloved’s return. And as if Blue’s father’s death wasn’t enough for the narrator to deal with, then there is also Hopper, the local bully whose taunting of Blue has been a source of pain . The cruelty of Hopper’s declaration that Blue’s father died as a result of Hopper’s dark prediction is again something the school counsellor suggests can be converted into some cathartic healing narrative. However this subject matter, like Blue’s grief for his father, seems ‘no b****help at all. ‘ For how can any perspective be gained so proximate to devastating loss? The disorientation of losing someone so close, dismantles our co-ordinates of the ‘daily ‘and we feel lost and powerless,disabled creatures who seek always what they cannot find. So what can we look for in our darkest places? We look for rescue, we long for reanimation, being more than half dead ourselves. Little wonder that death makes the chapel ‘ruined’ and obscure!
Blue’s maleness impels him to protect his mother and sister, yet his own fragility makes his quest difficult. He needs help. He needs his own ‘knight’ to rescue him from the blight of his suffering. So he writes himself out a knight, a special ‘Savage’ knight who is both mentor and monster, a creature who like the tale of Gawain and the Green Knight lives in a secluded cave, close to a ruined chapel, where faith and faithlessness combine to test and prove the mettle of the hero, in this case Blue. Yet such a reading does not quite work in this tale. For just when Blue thinks he has written out The Savage, he finds that the Savage had written him ‘out’ before. They are both saviours, ‘knights’ to each other, each part of one another’s origins, an intimacy that liberates both from the singularity of the self, and offers a fluidity in terms of what is personal and private, what is possible and what can happen when faith in something is restored.