"Just because it's a long voyage, doesn't mean you're on it forever." - Neal Shusterman, Challenger Deep
TRIGGER WARNING: MENTAL ILLNESS
Disclaimer: This review is constructed upon my personal reaction to the book. All thoughts and opinions are my own.
There are two things in life that are almost impossible to explain: the inexorable infrequency of human emotions (AKA why I feel like shit when my life is practically perfect), and why you love a certain book. Keep this in mind when I say it's going to be really difficult for me to articulate why I love Neal Shusterman’s 2015 novel Challenger Deep so much, but I’m going to have a crack at it anyway, so bear with me. I’ve read many a book on mental health and mental illness, so I know it’s not a topic that’s easy to talk about. Not all mental illness books are good mental illness books. Challenger Deep, however, is a very good mental illness book. I’ve known since I read Unwind in Year 11 English class how talented a writer Neal Shusterman is, and Challenger Deep only further confirmed that for me. This novel is simply exquisite. Challenging the archetypal representation of mental illness in literature, Challenger Deep manages to do the impossible: it puts the ‘hope’ in ‘hopeless’.
Admittedly, it took me a while to get into the novel -- the first hundred pages or so are a little disorienting, which is, I realise, the point -- but once the two parallel storylines start to weave, magic starts to happen. Now, let me set the record straight. Calling it ‘magic’ may give the impression that Shusterman’s take on mental illness has a whimsical, fairytale quality to it. That’s not what I mean at all. What's magical about it is how Shusterman has taken whimsy and fairytales and dragged the romance out of them kicking and screaming. Because that’s the problem: all too often, mental illness books romanticise the hell out of mental illness. Fortunately, Challenger Deep isn’t guilty of this at all. It uses whimsy and fairytales, but it distorts them, drags them through the mud, makes a monster out of them, giving the mental illness at hand -- in this case, schizophrenia -- a dream-like, but also nightmarish, quality. Because that’s what schizophrenia is, right? It’s so often mischaracterised as a multiple personality disorder, but it’s far from that. Schizophrenia is characterised by difficulty in distinguishing between what is real and what is unreal (helpguide.org), and can cause hallucinations, paranoia, and psychotic episodes. It fills your head with dreams, but fills real life with nightmares. This is why I think Challenger Deep is so important: it gives a realistic depiction of the disorder without making it seem quirky or cute. The storytelling in general did a fantastic job of illustrating how difficult people with schizophrenia find it to differentiate between what is and isn’t real; there’s a section I really liked where the POV changed from first to second person, so that You, the reader, were the one suffering psychotic delusions, rather than the protagonist, an excellent technique. However, it was Shusterman’s initially confusing, but ultimately highly rewarding, use of parallel plotlines that did the best demonstration. Featuring the same main character but in two opposite-end-of-the-spectrum scenarios, this plot device left the reader to try and distinguish between what was and wasn’t real. It forced us to empathise. It forced us to understand.
Yet not all is bleak. With mental illness fiction, there’s always a fine line between a hopeful ending and a hopeless one, and regrettably, most don’t walk it well. Challenger Deep is, again, an exception to this rule. One can’t call it a particularly cheery read after also calling it monstrous, but it’s not all a downwards spiral. What Shusterman seems to understand -- and has thus translated beautifully into Challenger Deep -- is that mental illness is, in almost all cases, incurable. It’s not the same as a headache or a stomach bug or even the flu, eradicated if you take the right dose of the right antibiotics for the right amount of time. Mental illness lurks. It can recess and retreat and recuperate for indefinite amounts of time, but eventually, it always comes crawling back. Like the tide, it comes and goes in waves -- but that’s the thing: it comes, but it also goes. You can’t cure it, but you can always fight it. You can always hold it back. You can always hold out hope. Challenger Deep is refreshingly grim, but also hesitantly hopeful. Shusterman acknowledges that although people suffering from mental illnesses will always be susceptible to them, it’s also always possible to part the storm clouds, find the sunlight, reach out and touch the hope that it’s not always going to be this bad. Mental illness is “always waiting… [it] will never go away. No sense in denying that such things happen.” Storm clouds are inevitable -- but so, too, is the sun.
I could wax poetic about this book for pages, but part of what I so greatly enjoyed about it was figuring it out as I went along, so I’ll leave the rest to the imagination. In parting, I’ll leave you with this. I was deeply touched by Challenger Deep. It moved me, affected me, educated me, and above all, resonated with me long after I closed the final page. If I haven’t done a good enough job of praising it in the last 800 words, I’ll chalk it all up to the impossibility of explaining human emotions, or maybe describing why you love a good book. All you need to know is this: a book that can render a writer speechless is a very good book indeed -- but a book that fills a writer up with things to say is a gift among gods and men alike.
TL;DR: Just a quick trigger warning: this novel does contain discussion of mental illness, self-harm, and suicide. My full review only mentions the first of the trio. I began Challenger Deep with no idea what it was about. I knew only that it was a mental illness book; I didn’t even know which mental illness it was. I’m so glad I went in blind, because part of what I loved about Challenger Deep was feeling my way through the dark. Among other things, this novel is dark. It’s not a happy story, but it’s not a hopeless one, either. It’s whimsical, but not in a fun, Disney™ Princess way; it’s more of a I-think-this-is-what-an-acid-trip-looks-like feeling. Mostly, however, it’s honest. It does not sugarcoat and it does not romanticise; mental illness is a monster, and Challenger Deep sees no reason not to show it as such. This book does not mess around. This book is straight with you, and I simply can’t articulate how thankful I am to have chanced across it. It is, beyond the shadow of a doubt, a masterpiece.
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