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| Eva | |
 2001 Macmillan paperback |
|
| Author | Peter Dickinson |
|---|---|
| Country | United Kingdom |
| Language | English |
| Genre(s) | Science fiction |
| Publisher | Gollancz |
| Publication date | 6 Oct 1988 |
| Media type | Print (Hardcover) |
| Pages | 224pp |
| ISBN | ISBN 0575043547 |
Eva is a young adult science-fiction novel by Peter Dickinson, published in 1988. One of his best-known books, it received the Phoenix Award in 2008.
Contents |
Plot introduction
When 13-year-old Eva is badly injured in an accident, her consciousness is transplanted into the body of a chimpanzee. The novel concerns her efforts to adjust to her unique situation. The setting is a future when urban civilization has spread across the globe, with disastrous effects on other species.
Plot summary
The novel opens as Eva wakes in a hospital bed, paralyzed. Her mother assures her she will be fine, that the doctors will gradually reduce the paralysis. Eva guesses that her face has been badly scarred, but when she looks in a mirror, she sees the face of a chimpanzee. An experimental procedure has been used to transplant Eva's "neurone memory" into Kelly, a young chimp from her father's research facility.
Eva learns to adapt to her new body, using a keyboard to simulate her voice. She has dreams of a forest she has never seen - that Kelly has never seen either - and imagines it comes from the chimpanzee unconscious. She realizes that she must accept the chimpanzee part of herself, which is easier for her as she has grown up with her father's chimps.
The cost of the procedure has been met by a media company in return for broadcast rights. Eva is a big hit with the public and her family has to cope with massive media interest. The power of the 'shaper' companies is immense in a world where many people spend all day at home. 'Shaper' technology is a cross between television and virtual reality.
Eva spends most of her time with humans, even going to school, but also spends time in the Reserve, where she learns to adapt to the chimpanzee social group. Her human understanding helps her to manipulate some of the situations and she becomes accepted by the others. One particularly intelligent chimp, Sniff, is intrigued by her.
With the introduction of enthusiastic animal rights advocate Grog Kennedy the novel takes another turn. He convinces Eva that for the sake of the species the chimpanzees must return to the wild. Not only do they belong there, but Grog believes the human race is running out of steam and will before long no longer bother to care for animals in captivity. At this stage there are only small pockets of wilderness left, and most species have died out.
Grog and Eva devise an ingenious plan to get the chimps to the island of St. Hilaire near Madagascar where Eva and Sniff lead the others in an escape. Her human knowledge is necessary to help the chimps learn the skills necessary to survive, which means that she must cut herself off from other humans. The novel ends twenty-four years later when Eva is near death, the human race is in decline and Eva imagines a future in which the descendants of her band of chimpanzees become the new dominant race.
Significance in the author's work
The novel returns to the ecological themes of the Changes Trilogy (1968-70) and Emma Tupper's Diary (1970). The former imagines a psychological change in the human race, and the second deals with the survival of a species. In one of his detective novels The Poison Oracle (1974), a chimpanzee who has learned to communicate becomes a witness in a murder case.
Concerning the writing of Eva, Peter Dickinson describes his original concept of a woman making contact with an early ancestress while in a coma.1 The book was much changed from the original concept, but the Adam and Eve cartoon which Eva watches is a remnant of it, and Eva herself becomes an ancestress of sorts. The author has since returned to the idea of our remote ancestors in A Bone from a Dry Sea (1992) and The Kin (1998).
Awards
Eva was highly commended for the Carnegie Medal in the year of its first publication.2 In the USA it was a Honor Book in the Boston Globe-Horn Book Awards of 1989, 3 and in 1992 won the Pacific Northwest Library Association's Young Reader's Choice Award.4 In 2008 it received the Phoenix Award, for an outstanding book published twenty years earlier which did not win a major award at the time. 5
Reception
Eva is one of Peter Dickinson's best-known books. The author says: "80% of my mail, almost all of it from the USA, is about this one book. This baffles me." 6 The novel is used in classroom study to stimulate discussion of medical ethics, animal rights and other issues. 7
Neil Philip in the Times Literary Supplement described Eva as "one of the better books of a first-rate writer. It is highly provocative, it has tenderness, humour and passion. It involves the reader from the very first page and will not quickly leave the mind." Ethel Heins in a Horn Book review described the novel as "a work of passion and eloquence, and its sobering significance increases in proportion to the reader's maturity." In a longer Horn Book essay Betty Carter cited Eva as a good illustration of Dickinson's place as a thought-provoking author for young adults. "The topics raised in Eva transcend the fleeting concerns of adolescence. Dickinson shows tremendous respect for his readers and their ability to grapple with hard issues that range from euthanasia to the influence of the media...."8 In an essay in The Lion and the Unicorn, "Exodus from the City: Peter Dickinson's Eva" by Kathryn V. Graham, Eva is placed in a tradition of British children's literature which elevates the rural setting above the urban.9
References
- ^ Peter Dickinson YA fiction - Eva
- ^ Peter Dickinson YA fiction
- ^ Boston Awards
- ^ Trinity College - Peter Dickinson awards
- ^ Phoenix Award
- ^ Peter Dickinson YA fiction - Eva
- ^ Maine School Libraries worksheet
- ^ Peter (Malcolm de Brissac) Dickinson at Answers.com
- ^ The Lion and the Unicorn, Volume 23, Number 1, January 1999, pp. 79-85
External links
- "Intra-active: The child/animal in Children's SF" by Naarah Sawers Deakin University 2006 – Considering the scientific dimension of Eva and Gillian Rubinstein's novel, Galax-Arena.
Wikipedia content modification information:
- This page was last modified on 23 December 2008, at 22:45.
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