According to an interview with ipl2, The Chocolate War was inspired by Cormier's son's decision not to sell the chocolates during his school's annual sale, and Cormier's true heroes included Graham Greene and J.D. Characters include Brother Leon, one of the creepiest teachers in fiction, Archie Costello, a delightful villain and a master at manufacturing consent, and the hero Jerry Renault, who I've taken three decades to recognize as myself. There are no woman characters - women are unattainable objects throughout. Part of what parents object to may be the pervasive atmosphere of unsatisfied teenage lust. The purpose of rules is to crush those who ignore them, and consumerism is a duty worth killing for – this book is a bleak portrayal of the fate of a conscientious objector under corporate Fascism. Amazingly, T he Chocolate War topped the American Library Association's Office for Intellectual Freedom's list of most challenged books as recently as 2004, which perhaps shows how few things changed between 19. The dodgy accounting, the unbuckable system - it's the America we think we know, immaculately mythologized. According to his “Guardian” obituary, Cormier was surprised when his agent told him The Chocolate War was a book for teenagers, but the agent had a point – adults are probably too impressionable to be allowed access to this sort of thing.įirst published in the year Nixon resigned – although a few hippie street people are the only explicitly topical reference - The Chocolate War is about the competitive pressure to meet sales targets, with corruption extending all the way to the top. I think it disturbed me more deeply than William Golding's Lord of the Flies, which I must have first read around the same time.

Nor does the book slow down much after that. How often do three words do that much work? The first sentence, “They murdered him,” is meant figuratively in the context of the opening scene, an American football try-out, but is simultaneously a close-to-literal plot synopsis. I still don't know if Catholic schools on the East Coast are actually like this. I was a pre-teen then, and I'd never been to America, so the whole American context of the book was strange to me. This book blew me away when I first read it in the late 1970s.

The chocolate war book