Two Wolves: Language & Writing Style

Tristan is a filmmaker as well as an author, and he thinks very visually. For instance, look at the detail in this description: ‘The floor around him was littered with clothes, shoes, a game console, two controllers, a bike wheel with no tyre, a skateboard deck, school books, soccer boots, a jumbo-size packet of chips and plates from long-forgotten afternoon snacks. Ben’s favourite place. It was dark with the curtains closed, the only light coming from two lamps trained on the stop-motion set on his desk.’ (p. 2) Can you picture the scene in your head?

Two Wolves makes very little use of literary techniques such as backstory or flashbacks. Other than a few snippets from their past, the story has an immediacy to it, arising from the stream-of-consciousness mode and straightforward linear chronology: we are thrown into this adventure at this point of time, just as Ben is. The past is almost irrelevant and the present is reduced to a series of life-changing questions, the answers to which will shape Ben’s future: Who am I? Who are my parents? What should I do in this moment? 

Scenes from a script (e.g. on pp. 114–115) show how Ben thinks in terms of filmmaking techniques. He visualises scenes from his stop-motion movie ‘playing on the cinema screen at the back of his eyelids’ (p. 12) and, as the story progresses, he uses the movie he is creating to help him to process events in his own life, work out how to question his parents to get answers (e.g. see p. 108), and decide whether his movie offers any advice for his own situation (e.g. see p. 254). 

Two Wolves is written in what might be considered the most common narrative form for fiction: using a third-person narrator and writing in past tense. Despite being written in the third person, Tristan is able to make the voice sound distinctively Ben’s using a limited perspective – keeping the narrative focused in on what’s happening in Ben’s head and only showing us what Ben sees, hears and knows. 

Not only are the sentences kept sharp and to the point, but Tristan also uses omission of action and dialogue to great effect in keeping the reader on their toes. Sometimes the reader knows or suspects more than Ben does, but at other times Tristan deliberately cuts off the reader from a scene, particularly at the end of chapters, and these cliffhangers create suspense. For example, on p. 120 we know that Ben’s father has found and is reading Ben’s notebook. Ben is anxiously awaiting his father’s reaction: ‘Ben had no idea what his father would do once he had read the notebook, and he did not want to find out.’ But the chapter ends there, and the next chapter begins with Ben asleep and dreaming – the reader is forced to keep reading to find out what has happened in between, and what his father said and did.

Short, sharp sentence fragments at climactic moments increase the readers’ sense of urgency and excitement, as well as conveying Ben’s swirling emotions. For example: ‘Rush of water, dark of night, wink of lightning, ominous roar, tremble of body, whirling wind. And fear. Terrible fear.’ (p. 210) 

Lists in Ben’s notebook summarise the clues that Ben is writing down. Readers can read between the lines to see what Ben is not yet willing to admit – that his parents have committed a crime. 

An old man tells his grandson one evening that there is a raging inside him, inside all of us. A terrible battle between two wolves. One wolf is bad – pride, envy, jealousy, greed, guilt, self-pity. The other wolf is good – kindness, hope, love, service, truth, humility. The child asks, ‘Who will win?’ The grandfather answers simply, ‘The one you feed.’ The tale above, quoted as the epigraph, infuses the whole novel with an additional layer of meaning. Ben reads the story and so does the reader. How will the story of two wolves become relevant to Ben? 

You can find a cartoon depiction of the ‘two wolves’ tale at zenpencils.com/comic/94-the-two-wolves (note that the story is often attributed as being of Cherokee origin, but this is disputed).

In crafting the language of the novel, Tristan has made sure to imbue each word with as much power and meaning as possible, allowing the reader to see, hear, touch, taste and smell what Ben does. Rather than relying on adjectives, Tristan uses verbs and nouns to simply and powerfully tell us what is happening for Ben externally and internally. The words used are forceful: Ben doesn’t just put on his shoes, he ‘jammed his feet into a pair of sneakers’ (p. 8), clearly conveying his sense of urgency; and when he is trying to find his way out of the bush he ‘leapt from boulder to boulder, sloshed into the creek . . . stumble-ran’ (p. 221). Two Wolves also employs powerful metaphors and similes, again to convey the greatest meaning and emotion with the fewest possible words.