HOSTAGE THREE by Nick Lake: TEACHERS’ NOTES SYNOPSIS (PLOT) On the face of it, seventeen‐year‐old Amy Fields leads a charmed life. Her father is a charismatic, wealthy banker who can give her anything she wants – designer clothes, expensive holidays, the best education money can buy – and she’s a talented violinist too. But all this privilege means nothing in the face of the terrible tragedy that looms large over her life. Two years ago Amy’s severely clinically depressed mother committed suicide, leaving her bereft and consumed by anger, while her father – a workaholic who’s been largely absent from her life – has married Sarah, a woman Amy disparagingly refers to only as ‘the stepmother’. When Amy disqualifies herself from her last A‐level as a result of smoking during the exam, her father buys a luxury yacht to take the family on a round‐the‐world trip. But this once‐in‐a‐lifetime adventure turns out to be an unforgettable experience for all the wrong reasons, when a group of Somali pirates seize the boat and the family find themselves a valuable commodity in a highly sophisticated – and extremely dangerous ‐ transaction. The family are dehumanised through being known only by numbers – Amy’s dad is Hostage One, Sarah is Hostage Two and Amy is Hostage Three. But this attempt to depersonalise them fails when Amy forms a close bond with one of their captors, a young man called Farouz who, like Amy, has a talent for music. Her understanding of his world, and psyche, deepens when she learns that he became a pirate (or coastguard, as the captors refer to themselves) to obtain the money he needs to free his brother from prison. While this terrifying, uncertain ordeal continues, and the pirates negotiate the huge ransom for the family’s release, Amy and Farouz fall in love. But they must meet in secret, and there are times when his behaviour makes Amy wonder if she’s being deceived. And Amy also learns more about her family. Her dad has been sacked and isn’t as invincible as she’d thought, and she also begins to see ‘the stepmother’ in a very different light when Sarah puts herself in great danger, by volunteering to go to 1 www.bloomsbury.com/childrens land with the pirates during the critical exchange of money and hostages. But being freed is far from joyous for Amy. She fantasises about going to land in place of her stepmother and running away with Farouz. Then tragedy strikes when Farouz is killed after the exchange has been completed. Amy returns to London a changed person. She’s realised that ‘if you get broken, it’s possible to put yourself back together’, and she puts herself back together by re‐sitting the A‐level she messed up and being interviewed for a place at the Royal Academy of Music. Then Farouz’s brother comes to London and during their meeting Amy learns more about the young man she fell for, and the unfamiliar world he came from. Amy also has an awakening about both of her parents. THEMES Hostage Three explores a broad range of personal, moral and political themes, and the points at which the personal and the political intersect. On one level, it is an intense coming‐of‐age story, in which the reader experiences a seventeen‐year‐old girl’s emotional journey as she tries to cope with her mother’s suicide, her father’s absence, falling in love and the horrors of being taken captive. During the course of Amy’s journey, and through the wider cast of characters, the novel also explores global politics, with Amy’s father epitomising Western capitalism, and the pirates raising questions about what might drive people to engage in such activity. The author also explores themes of self‐preservation versus self‐sacrifice, and people’s capacity for resilience and humanity in the darkest of situations. WRITING STYLE The novel is told in the first person, from Amy’s point of view. Her language is imagery‐rich; she often speaks in metaphor and simile, which gives this gripping thriller an additional poetic element. The narrative is partly non‐linear, in that it slips from telling the story of what happened aboard the yacht to Amy’s recollections about her former life, and the book has no chapter headings. It is primarily told in the past tense, but the opening of the novel and critical moments around the exchange of the hostages for cash are told in the present tense, adding to the tension and sense of urgency at these peak points of action. AUTHOR NICK LAKE ON HIS MOTIVATION I dreamed more or less the entire plot, and woke my wife up saying OK, remember this. There’s a girl on a yacht, and she and her rich father get captured by Somali pirates . . .’ 2 www.bloomsbury.com/childrens That said, the ending in my dream was very different, and not at all right for the book or for the target audience – it was a happy ending of sorts, but a troubling one for a number of reasons, and so I changed it. As the book developed, of course, lots of themes came to the fore that hadn’t been present in my dream – about girls and their fathers, and the financial system, and piracy and grief and redemption. I think the one that most consciously fascinated me was to do with globalisation. Not in the usual sense of businesses and brands spreading around the world, but rather the way that certain groups, like Somali pirates, have assimilated the ideas and rules of global business and employed them almost like captured weaponry. They’re super‐organised: when they board ships, they use smartphones to video the deck, and then send these videos to the ship’s owners via the satellite link‐up as proof. You can see such videos on YouTube. They’re also heavily hierarchical, in a very business‐like and organised way: they have a self‐imposed system of fines for misbehavior, they split money according to established principles – x percent to the sponsor who funds the attack, x percent to the leader, etc. There’s even a stock exchange in the centre of Puntland, which is the region of Somalia where piracy is most prevalent, where you can buy ‘shares’ in a crew’s next mission, and then you get a cut of the profits from the ransom. It all operates like any other business in the globalised world. At the same time, though, the pirates are coming at life, and their business, from such a wholly different perspective. It’s endlessly interesting to me, and I think it’s going to be the dominant force in history going forwards: the world is going to get more and more the same, and at the same time more and more different. That is: capitalist economics and business and a certain philosophy of business has gone global, as have certain brands, but this has had unintended consequences; it has been to a certain extent and in certain places turned against the very people who developed those ideas, and I’m absolutely fascinated by that. AUTHOR BACKGROUND Nick Lake was born in Britain but grew up in Luxembourg, where his father worked for the European Parliament. Nick works in publishing and writes in every spare moment. His first novel, In Darkness, a powerful and moving book about the Haitian earthquake, was published for adults and older teenagers in 2012. The recipient of huge critical acclaim, In Darkness was shortlisted for the Carnegie Medal and won the Michael L. Printz Award in the US. Hostage Three was also published to rapturous reviews. ‘Complex, with unexpected political intelligence and emotional power’ said The Guardian. ‘A bold, ambitious and gripping thriller’, said Booktrust. The novel was also selected as The Times’ Children’s Book of the Week, and described as ‘a clever and gripping story.’ 3 www.bloomsbury.com/childrens Nick lives near Oxford with his wife and family. His long commute to work gives his imagination time to explore places he's never visited. STUDY NOTES 1) Why do you think the author chose to reveal future events in the novel’s opening? What impact did this have on your experience of the story? 2) What did you think of the alternate ending in which Amy goes to shore in place of Sarah? Did you ‘fall for it’? Why did the author do that? What does this imagining reveal about Amy’s character? 3) ‘I pulled back from the wall like it was a moth that had stung me’ (page 20). ‘I’m kind of a numb person. Empty, like a hollow chocolate bunny’ (page 68). ‘He moved like his body was a glove and his mind was the hand’ (page 82). What does Amy’s tendency to think in simile reveal about her character? 4) Re‐read page 347. What do Amy’s thoughts on how other people see her reveal about how Amy sees herself? 5) Do you think Amy was genuinely in love with Farouz? Do you think they would have fallen for one another if they’d met in different circumstances, as Amy wonders on page 275? Or do you think her feelings for Farouz were part of her ‘self‐
destructive’ streak (Sarah, page 19). Do you think Amy has a ‘death wish’ (page 177)? Do you think Farouz really loved her? 6) Did you feel any sympathy for the pirates? Could their actions be likened to redistributing wealth (page 299)? Do Western capitalism and the piracy explored in the novel have anything in common? What did you learn about global politics? 7) ‘Dad did literally nothing but work . . . what you saw when you looked at dad was something as much like a wolf as a person’ (page 24). Do you think Amy’s view of her father is overly harsh? How does their relationship change through the course of the novel? 8) ‘All our stories are about hunger’ says Farouz (page 109), referring to Somali stories. What does he mean by this? Do you think this could be applied to the story told in Hostage Three? 9) ‘For me, the word mother isn’t one that means anything safe’ (Amy, page 50). Why does Amy feel like this? How has her mother’s death affected her? Can you understand why Amy feels hatred for her mother (page 353)? 10) What role do stars play in the novel? Consider when stars are referred to. What do they symbolise? 4 www.bloomsbury.com/childrens 11) What role does music play in the novel? 12) Consider the following statements: a) The characters’ actions demonstrate the strength of humanity’s impulse to self‐
preserve. b) The characters’ actions demonstrate the strength of humanity’s capacity for self‐
sacrifice and love. Which of these statements do you most agree with and why? Refer to different characters in your answer. What is the novel’s overriding theme? Did you learn anything from this novel? FURTHER READING Non‐fiction about Somali pirates:  Kidnapped, Colin Freeman  Deadly Waters, Jay Bahadur  The World’s Most Deadly Place, James Fergusson Other novels you might enjoy:  In Darkness, Nick Lake  Out of Shadows, Jason Wallace  After Tomorrow, Gillian Cross  Bunker Diary, Kevin Brooks  The Breadwinner, Deborah Ellis  Refugee Boy, Benjamin Zephaniah 5 www.bloomsbury.com/childrens